How to Feed Livestock During Drought: Practical Solutions from Dale Strickler

0:13 Okay, should I go ahead and take off? No, let everybody get in and then I'll introduce you. People may not know who you are without an introduction, Dale.

0:38 Well, good afternoon everybody. Thank you for joining us for our noon webinar series. We're excited to have you back with us.

0:47 If you're not familiar with these webinars, everybody's video is disabled and audio. You're watching as a participant. At the end of the webinar we will have time to interact with Dale with questions, so please put them in the question answer box at the bottom of your screen. You can also use the chat box if you'd like to do that as well, but we do want you to be able to interact with us here.

1:15 We will also have another webinar next week, a very exciting one. We will have Tim Rod with the Iowa Tribe of Native Americans, and they're in the southwest southeast corner of Nebraska and northeast Kansas doing some really cool things. Sophie will probably share a little bit more at the end of this webinar about that, so I would really encourage you to log in and check out what they're doing.

1:40 So today's topic, very timely: surviving the drought. I know many of our customer base are in the middle of a drought, in some stage of a drought. If you haven't been, you probably will be soon. It's just the nature of farming.

1:58 Our guest speaker today is our very own Dale Strickler. Dale has been a sales agronomist with us now for CASH. Dale, what's it been, six, seven years now? Probably six years. So many of you know Dale already. He really doesn't need much introduction, but I was going to introduce him anyway because I can sometimes make him sweat a little bit, because he's never exactly sure what I'm going to say about him. But the only thing I will say about Dale is he is an expert on the subject, so much an expert that he has written the book on the drought resilient farm. And I'm sure that much of what he's going to be sharing today is laid out in much more detail in the book, so he can talk about that a little bit more later. But it's a very timely topic, so thank you for joining us. At this point, Dale, I'm going to turn it over to you to tell us all how we can survive the drought.

2:54 Well, this is a huge topic. I mean, I could have easily four to six hours worth of material here, but not going to use that all up obviously. I'm primarily going to focus, and one reason I wanted to do this, this was a little bit impromptu, but there are a lot of people who are really scrambling on livestock operations now because they're out of feed, their pastors are shot, they have no hay. It's like, what can we do?

3:30 There'll be something even if you don't have livestock. There'll be stuff in here that'll be really useful to you. But my probably 75, 80 percent of this is going to be directed towards livestock producers who are really in a pinch right now. I'm not saying that if you have crops that aren't going to yield anything that's not a bad deal, but livestock people who are sure to feed are faced with some really difficult decisions about how they're going to get those animals fed.

4:10 In 2012, which was the last time we had a major drought, I went to a number of drought management seminars, and basically what they told you if you were a rancher and you're in a drought: you could reduce your stocking rate, get rid of cows, or you could wean early. That's it. That's all the advice that they could give you.

4:40 So if you reduce your stocking rate, essentially you get rid of cows. You're reducing your future income. Or if you wean early, you're reducing your present income. Make less money now and make less money going forward. Or if you want to restore your herd, you have to sell on a drought market, which means they're basically worthless, so nobody else has feed. And then you buy them back when everybody has feed and they're sky high. There's got to be more than this, and so that's one reason why I started writing the drought resilient farm, because I thought there's got to be better advice than this. There's a number of things that I wish they were telling us.

5:32 I'm going to start with a situation that a lot of people are in right now. Here's your situation: you have a pasture that's 50 percent grazed off. Now obviously we're six weeks after this target date, but it's bone dry, no rain forecast. Is anybody in that situation? I'm guessing a lot of you are. No rain in the forecast, it's dry. You have enough hay to feed for six months. What do you do?

6:07 You have two options. Well, you can continue—you can leave the animals out on pasture until the grass is gone, then you start feeding hay. Or start feeding hay immediately and run out of hay before winter's over. What's your choice? 50 grazed off and you know that the grass isn't growing. It's going to be grazed 100 percent off by the time you would typically remove. What do you do?

6:35 Okay, let's revisit this after a little bit. So the most important step in managing a ranch for livestock is to properly manage pastures and reliable water. So we'll start there. Plan B is to know of emergency grazing sources. What's emergency feed that you can obtain? And then plan C is emergency stored feed. Now we're talking about hay, silage, et cetera, and we're not going to really delve into that because essentially there's one piece of advice there: have a barn full of hay for when you need it.

7:16 And that seems very counter to what I typically suggest. I say try to raise animals without feeding them hay. Doesn't mean have no hay on hand. Hay is like insurance. Now, if you make a living by cashing insurance checks, you're probably not going to stay in business long. So the idea is to have that insurance, but set yourself up so that you seldom have to use it. If you have to buy hay, a drought year is the worst year to be trying to buy hay. So buy hay when it's in surplus and keep it on hand. And when hay is cheap, stock up, and then tap into it. Have it stored in a manner, in a barn where it's not going to deteriorate. So we're going to focus on plan A and plan B here.

8:13 So the biggest deal on drought management is to never overgraze. And this seems so simple, so simple, but it's so important. How hard are your animals having to work for their feed? Why do I say never overgraze, and especially don't overgraze during a drought? Well, don't overgraze is simple, but how do you avoid it in a drought? So that's what we're going to talk about here. You can see from this photo here that when you leave some leaf area out there, that plant can tolerate drought better. It can obtain moisture because what you see above ground is reflective of what's happening below ground.

8:56 When you remove too much leaf area, it takes leaves to feed roots and it takes roots to feed leaves. They're mutually interdependent. A plant can take quite a bit of defoliation before you start sacrificing root growth. How much is that? Well, we'll show that, but I took this picture from out in western Kansas in 2012. Seven inches of rainfall in this location in 2012 annual rainfall. During that year, did you get enough rain here to grow grass?

9:43 Look at the ditch. Now obviously this ditch gets a little bit of runoff from the road, but the north side of the ditch, which was sloped—this is the south side of the ditch—but the north side of the ditch that was sloped towards the road had grass every bit this tall. But look out in the pasture. Let's take a close-up of this pasture. How? What percent defoliation is this? You say 90? I mean it's been used close to 100 percent of the leaf area has been removed.

10:19 So here's questions for you: what kind of root system does this grass have? When it rains, how much of the rain is going to run in versus runoff? How much evaporation are you going to have here after that rain? So those are very real questions.

10:42 So how much runs off when it does rain? Well, look at this from University of Nebraska. It's old data, but the conditions have not changed. But look at this: where they had less than 50 percent—where they had 50 percent ground cover—70 percent of a three-inch rain ran off. Seventy percent. Of that three-inch rain, only nine-tenths of an inch went in the ground. Is there a difference between nine-tenths and three inches?

11:11 Absolutely, now where they had 95 percent ground cover, 2.7 inches of that went in the ground. Big difference between 2.7 and 0.9 inches as far as the grass he can grow.

11:26 So when I talk about grazing management leaving adequate cover on the ground, if you see bare soil you've taken too much. And I understand that in a drought you're short on feed and you don't have alternatives, and the problem is you don't have alternatives, so we're going to talk about creating alternatives. What can you do now during the drought to avoid this poor pasture situation for years to come? They say droughts have long tails because during this type of situation you're going to create—if you're in this poor pasture category, you're setting yourself up for a drought next year no matter how much it rains.

12:17 And look at this: when you remove leaves, what happens below ground? What happens to the roots? We got Rhodes grass which is a warm season grass, smooth brome which is a cool season grass, Kentucky bluegrass—cool season grass. They all respond pretty much the same. When you remove more than half the leaves, half the leaves or more, you start killing roots. You start killing roots. And so we want to avoid this.

12:49 Can you graze hard? Yes, at times you can and get away with it. You can graze hard if you have long rest periods, but it's not the rest period, it's the recovery of the grass. If you are bone dry and the grass isn't growing, the grass isn't photosynthesizing, that you may have a rest period, but you don't have recovery. It's very, very important to have that recovery—not just rest.

13:19 So back to this: why? Why, why, why do we overgraze? Because everybody knows this, right? Overgrazing is bad. Why do we do it? If overgrazing is so bad, why is this almost so universal, particularly in a drought when we know that this is going to happen to the root systems? Well, I think one thing is number one we don't have a plan B, so we're going to talk about plan B. The other thing is we think that we make more money by overgrazing, okay? And that's actually not the case.

14:06 So here's a graph of a summary of stocking rate studies versus profit. And so you can see the blue dotted line there—that is the gain per animal. And as you stock heavier and heavier, that gain goes down. Now, as your gain goes down, look what happens: now as you stock more and more animals, you get more and more money, but only to a point. That's the point where that gain per animal really starts tanking. How do you know this?

14:46 Now, what's a light stocking rate? What's a moderate stocking rate? What's a heavy stocking rate? It's going to be different no matter, depending on where you are in the country. You know, if you're in New Mexico, it's going to be different than if you're in Kentucky or Tennessee or Iowa or Indiana.

15:05 What is considered—how do you know what a heavy stocking rate is? Look at the pasture. You know, it's not hard to tell. If it looks overgrazed, that's probably because it is. You know, if there is not vegetation out there, it's not hard to tell. You can eyeball it and tell what an overgrazed pasture is.

15:29 So your maximum net return occurs at this yellow area, this lit yellow arrow. So why does everybody tend to graze here? We keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and that amount might be okay in some years, but in a drought, this curve just shifts. Shifts over. Why is there this relationship? It's like you make more money by grazing lighter than grazing heavier because one reason is your grass yield goes up. And this is almost oxymoronic here—it's like you can graze more by grazing less.

16:13 If you look at this—hey, look at this curve here, and this is from the University of Nebraska. Look at the smooth brome. Smooth brome, very common grass. Look at that: if you left it three inch stubble height versus a six inch stubble height. Now, this was clipping rather than grazing, which is—but look at this.

16:39 You doubled almost exactly double your yield over the course of the year by leaving a little taller stubble. Now say well, I told the cows, you know, only graze down to six inches but they grazed down to three. You know, nothing I could do. If you're letting the cows would you send your cow to town with checkbook? Don't let cows make this decision. That's not her job. You make the decision for her through your grazing management, and the only way you can really do this well is with rotational grazing.

17:18 I used to be a big doubter of rotational grazing. This is all smoke and mirrors but it took being around people actually putting it into practice and demonstrating the utility of it to convince me, and now I'm a big believer. It does work.

17:42 Just putting some actual numbers to this stocking rate deal. This from Hayes, Kansas, Kansas State University has an experiment station out there, and if you look at the far right here, your dollars per acre when you stocked heavy, you made less money. You made less money. So don't do it. People say well people overgraze because they're greedy. No, they overgraze because they're not greedy enough apparently, because you make more money by grazing lighter. And they graze hard because they're ignorant of this relationship.

18:28 Another thing that happens when you overgraze is what we're looking at here. This is a droplet of dew and all those little things squirming around in there are the larva of ostertegia, brown stomach worm, very bad parasite of cattle. And these worms basically crawl up from the ground and get about four inches above the soil surface, and then they basically die out. They dry out. Once they dry out, they're done. And so you can't, they can't survive when they dry out. So the farther they get from the soil surface, the more likely they are to die. And so don't ever graze below four to six inches and you will get very, very little parasite infestations. Very important.

19:27 So if you look at it why not overgraze? Well, if you leave more residual forage, you get all these benefits. You get better animal performance. You get higher yield at the next grazing period. You got cooler soil in summer, warmer in the late fall so you can extend your grazing season. Get more microbes going in your soil. We know how you get more organic matter. Now that there's a, people think that you graze hard, you kill the roots and then the roots turn into organic matter. That's not how organic matter is made. Organic matter is made from root exudates. So the more that plant is photosynthesizing, the more exudates it has, the more carbon you're going to get. You're going to get better water infiltration. I just showed you that data. And you get deeper root development and you get less soil around it. You maintain more topsoil on your property.

20:22 And so the problem with all this is, how do you arrive at a proper stocking rate? Obviously there is no table that you can look at nationwide. So what I've got here, this is a soil map. And so you can go to your local NRCS. One thing that NRCS grazing scientists are just excellent at, phenomenal at, as you can go to, they can determine the vegetation in your pasture, your soil types, your average rainfall over the long term, and come up with a stocking rate that's pretty close to accurate. It's a lot better than guessing, and it's a service you've already paid for. People are very good at it. I would use that free resource to your advantage if you are a novice. The other way is just eyeballing your pasture. If you've had control of a pasture for a long time or you're just taking it over, you know what's been the stocking rate in the past? Has it obviously been too high? It's been just right, or can you add a few? Here's another strategy. It pays to be flexible. And there's things to be learned from people who have been in the business for a long time.

21:43 One of the wisest cattlemen I've ever met told me that he had something called he said I run stalkers along with my cowherd.

21:59 I said why do you do that? Most people have one or the other but they don't have both. Now they're either cow-calf or they're stalkers or they have them in separate pastures. I have them in the same pasture. So why do you do that? Said I think that'd be more management. He said it allows me an easily disposable class of livestock. If things get tough, if grass runs short, I just take the stalkers to town early. You know, I'll have half my carrying capacity in cows, all cows and calves. I'll have half of it in stalker count. And when the drought hits, the stalkers go to town. And I don't cry. If you have to liquidate your cow herd because of drought, that's devastating. Nobody cries when they sell stalkers. You celebrate because that's why you have them. You have them to sell.

22:58 If a hundred percent of your grazing capacity is in reproductive animals, you don't have a lot of destocking options that aren't painful. So maintain a destocking option that is relatively painless. Yeah, maybe you run the stalkers for 60 days instead of 90 or, you know, 45 days instead of 90, but you've got a class of animals that you can readily market without severe emotional damage or severe economic damage.

23:28 And now a new realization is that I'm going to talk about your emergency forages and the growing season. Here we're getting to plan B. Growing season does not equal your grazing season. Think about this. You know, you look at pasture leases, you know, May to October, you know, why do we have pasture leases that run May to October? Buffalo didn't get off the pastures and stand in a lot six months out of the year. Why do we do that with our cattle?

24:09 So take a look at this, and I want to start prepping you for a mindset here. What's the value of this grass? I mean, it's obviously dormant. So green grass, I'm talking about native warm-season grass, is like predominant in the plains here, 12% protein, 65% digestible. And that same grass in the dead of winter is going to be, you know, a quarter of the protein, two-thirds of the digestibility. Which of these is worth more?

24:48 Okay, so before you answer, let's think a little bit here. So if you, what's that acre of 12% protein, 65% digestible grass worth standing out in the field? Maybe $20 an acre, $30 an acre. But if you swath it, let it mature a bit, swath it and bail it, you have to pay a lot more, maybe three to five times as much for poor quality forage because it's in a bale. What's why is that bale more valuable than a more nutritious pasture? When do you eat the bale? You eat it in the winter.

25:39 So if you can use, if you can effectively utilize dormant forage in your program, remember the number one rule of range management: take half and leave half. Well, what do you do with the half you leave? Most people look at that. Well, that's wasted grass. So they try to take more than half. They push it, and they, that leads to overgrazing. That leads to susceptibility to drought. What if you could effectively use that dormant season forage? And I'll show you, so the quick test I gave you earlier, you know, you had enough hay to feed six months. You've only got three months of grazing. You've got nine months to go before it passes your greens up again. What do you do? Option A or option B? What do 95 to 99% of people do? Which option do they pick? Obviously, option A is what we see. They leave them out there until it's just rubbed out.

26:47 Another big mistake they make, which may be even worse, is they start feeding them hay out on the pasture. And you say, well, isn't that better? I mean, the cows aren't starving. True, the cows aren't starving, but the pasture is still cattle will go and lick up every single blade of grass, completely 100% defoliate that pasture while you're feeding them hay on the pasture. Is a horrible, horrible practice for the pasture. Obviously, it keeps the cattle alive, but do not leave animals on a pasture after the ability of that pasture to sustain them has been exhausted. Do not.

27:30 Remove the animals from the pasture and if you can't transport them, you can't move them anywhere, you don't have any place to put them, just make a hot wire pin and create a sacrifice area. And then when the rains start the next year, keep them out of that so it can recover a little bit. Feed your hay on that sacrifice area, not out on the entire pasture, or find someplace where it can handle abuse, you know, place with weeds or something that you want to get rid of.

28:02 So what's the difference between option A and option B here? You choose what happens with option A. Well, had enough feed to last the summer, barely. But you ate 100 percent of the grass. What happens to your root system when you eat 100 percent of the grass? And your cows went into winter in bad shape because look what, remember what happened to animal performance when you started overgrazing. Cows get skinny, and skinny cows don't rebreed. And so now you've got cold cows. And so your pastures, your pasture is in bad shape, your cow herd's in bad shape, your reproductive efficiency crashes.

28:46 Or option B: you feed half your hay in the summer, you remove the animals from the summer. But you say well, I don't have enough hay to last. Well, starting at frost you can start putting animals out on that dormant grass because grazing during dormancy does not harm warm season grasses. Now, cool season grasses, there's it's somewhat similar. You don't want to take it down to the nub, but you can graze down to, you know, two inches or so without harming that grass.

29:22 So all you're doing here, you're feeding the same six months of hay. You're just shifting when you feed it in order to protect the pasture. So now your cows go in the winter in good shape and they re-breed after calving because they had plenty to eat. Pastures had a full root system and a good mulch, so they captured rain.

29:47 So let's talk emergency forages. So one very common forage is still places with irrigated corn that are going to have good corn stalks. And one problem with corn, I'm going to tell you a way. Corn stalks are still a bargain. Corn stalks, sorghum stalks, still a bargain. There just never seems to be enough of them to go around and they don't seem to last very long. Well, I'm going to show you a way to double the number of days that you can stay out on an acre of corn stalks with the same number of animals.

30:27 And the reason lies in understanding how the rumen works. So when you put cattle out on corn stalks and you give them the whole field, what do they eat? What's 100 percent of their diet on day one? It's grain. They eat the grain. They pick all the grain out and they're on basically 100 grain diet. And what that happens inside their rumen is what you see in the center of this. This is basically they cut a little section of the inside of a rumen, and out, and the one over to the left here is an animal that's been on grass. This one in the middle is one that had acidosis from being transitioned to grain too quickly.

31:14 And look at the difference there. There's fingers, you see there, those are the papillae that absorb the volatile fatty acids in the rumen. This is how the cow is able to utilize forage. Over here in the middle one with acidosis does not have those. It cannot live without much, much he required. She's not absorbing nutrients out of her diet. She's going to lose condition, she's going to need to eat more to get the same amount of groceries.

31:44 So how do you prevent? How do you keep the rumen looking like the one at the left and prevent the one in the middle when they're out on corn stalks? It's real simple. You strip graze. You ration it off. You give them one day's worth of feed at a time. You use a portable poly reel and just give them one day's worth out of feed at a time. 160 cows on 160 acres, which would ordinarily last a month, you know, one cow per acre for a month, it's kind of standard now on high yielding corn. You can get two months out of that same amount of feed and have your cows in much better condition. They don't get acidosis, and guess what, they'll live longer. They'll live longer. They'll stay in your herd longer if they don't get acidosis every single winter.

32:38 Calculated the amount of time that it took to move that fence and then calculated the value of the feed that you save and in a normal year it was almost 500 an hour returned to your labor removing that fence. So even on frozen ground you can be pretty creative places to stick those fence posts. If you're going to feed some hay why not feed it right out on the field where the organic matter can benefit the next crop.

33:10 People say well I don't want cows on my field that cause compaction. Here's from University of Nebraska. Look at that, 17 trial summary. University of Nebraska alone has done 121, at last time I saw, 121 comparisons that was across no-till conventional till, corn soybean continuous corn, fall grazing spring grazing. They did not find that grazing stocks reduced yield under any of these situations. In fact in continuous corn they found it increased yield.

33:53 I have people tell me different but that's what the university data says. And if you want to enhance corn stalk stock grazing, you, there are things you can do to enhance that. Of course we're a cover crop seed company and so right now it's prime time to be getting some cover crops out there. If you want grazing the day you harvest you can put cover crops aerial seed. This is aerial seeded turnips radishes out into a corn field. You can put in cereal rye annual rye grass. Contact us, we've got all different kinds of options for putting into standing crops in and standing soybeans standing corn. There's all kinds of options. I'm not going to dwell on it because if you're interested in those options give us a call and we can help you out.

34:44 But another option is droughted out crops. This corn field obviously is not going to make any grain and but it could make feed. Now unfortunately the only thing that people think of when they see a cornfield that's droughted out as far as utilizing it is putting it up for silage and I've never understood the logic. People say well you get it all, there's no waste. I disagree because first of all when you put up silage you're committing yourself to roughly 200 an acre harvest cost, put in a product that's two-thirds water and put all that water weight on your trucks and your tractor everything. You're hauling a bunch of water around. You put it in the pit, 20 percent of your energy ferments away, it's under perfect conditions and then you lose that rotten layer all along the edges and in the winter if you don't feed it up every single day that face it starts to rot. I just don't see this is a very efficient way of transferring nutrients from the field into the animal. I much much prefer direct grazing and people are scared to death direct graze droughted out corn because of nitrate toxicity but I'm going to show you something here. This is a study I did in Texas and we were intentionally trying to make high nitrate feed. So we put sorghum sudan 300 pounds of nitrogen under a pivot and we cut it to a two inch stubble and it was hot. 900 parts per million, lab says do not feed this, it's toxic. But I scissor cut this so I took the first foot and then went down to the next foot out of the same row. 2900. When I cut it six inches, when I cut it 12 inches, 1500. 2900 says you can blend this feed in but at 1500 it's completely safe, feed all you want.

36:56 When you chop or bail that forage, which of these stubble heights is probably more realistic as to what you're doing when you're chopping or haying? You're probably taken down to two inches. Now you might raise it up to six but you've still got some toxic feed but when you graze, what's the part of the plant they don't choose to eat? It's the lower stock, that's where all your nitrate is. Now another thing you can do, let's say you've got something already in a bale and I know a lot of you are in that situation, what can you do to make that feed safer? There is a supplement you can feed animal as a bolus. Just get them in the chute, poke this down the fruits of live bacteria and it basically eats nitrate and spits out non-toxic product. So this can basically cut your nitrate. This study showed 43 percent reduction in nitrate in the rumen that can take some marginal feed and make it safe or make some toxic feed make it marginal where you can blend it.

43:28 The drought of the 1950s, the only green thing left on the farm was mulberry trees and the pastures, and so he just went out there with a chainsaw and cut down a tree for every cow. I started doing this when my first year I had my cattle herd. We ran into a drought, I was out of feed. I had a pasture I was renting that was covered in brush, which was why nobody else wanted it, and I went out with the chainsaw and I cut down trees basically the entire month of September, all through frost, and I was able to feed my cow herd completely on tree leaves because there wasn't a green thing in the pasture other than the trees.

44:27 And then I went out there and chopped up the trees, sold it for firewood, fence post, whatever, so I got paid both ways for that. Most tree leaves are quite nutritious. Here's some of my cows that she's eating a hackberry tree there. Here's another hackberry tree that they're eating on, and you can see they're going right after it. And this is what it looks like afterwards, and most of those tree leaves are amazing the number of tree species they will eat. But you got to get it down to where they can eat it, and if you're in a situation where you got a little extra brush, more brush than what you'd like in your pasture, instead of waiting for winter maybe you can fell those trees. You can always chop them up later, but you can fell those trees now.

45:17 Another emergency grazing resource, and I apologize I omitted the slide, but I have a picture of a calf just snarfing down a cattail plant. And I found that you can, there's a lot of wetland species that cattle will eat if you use managed grazing to concentrate them on an acreage. I've fenced off dried up ponds, not ponds that were still muddy, but cattail holes where everything had completely dried out. They weren't going to get stuck, but cattails, wetland plants can be an emergency grazing resource.

45:59 So one of the things I wanted to talk here, and I know we're running short on time, I want to talk about utilizing dormant grass. Because if you take half and leave half, what can you do with the half you leave? Dormant native grass has three percent protein. It's not good quality feed, but it is feed. So how do you utilize that dormant native range? We're talking basically from the western corn belt clear into the Rocky Mountains. So because it is low in protein, you want to supplement protein. Basically what you want to do is about a pound of protein per day, and get that from alfalfa, distillers grains, a number of other protein sources, but you want about one pound of protein per day.

46:49 And the protein source should be one that has no starch. You don't want corn grain, you don't want milo grain, because starch creates that acid condition in the rumen which lowers digestibility of forage. And you don't want to feed the entire amount. It's better to feed every second day or every third day versus every single day. Animals will graze more and do better if you feed three times as much protein every third day as if you feed one amount every day or a double amount every other day. Less frequent and heavier amounts is better than small amounts daily.

47:43 And another thing is, it is possible, especially with something like soybean meal or distillers grains or cotton seed, you can blend it with salt. And University of Nebraska has a very nice extension bulletin that explains how to make self-limited rations where you don't have to be there to hand feed them at all. And it eliminates a lot of the fighting and jostling where animals fight over a limited amount of feed. You just blend it with salt, put it in a self-feeder, run down the pasture.

48:12 And the economics of this, if you compare the cost of a full feed of 30 pounds of grass hay per day to the cost of just feeding the protein out on that dormant native range, you're talking some significant savings per head per day by doing this. And so if you can make money from the half you leave, then the half that you take every year can get bigger and bigger.

48:45 So another way of doing this is to grow your protein right in the pasture. Grow your protein right in the pasture. This is from southeast.

48:56 Colorado, you know, like 10 inch rainfall area and this is cereal rye that was drilled into native grass in the spring. And this was not grazed but look at the feed out there, look at the protein. This was some high quality winter grazing. Now it doesn't look like this every year out there. Don't make that mistake. This was a very good year, a wet winter.

49:20 But so how much does it take to make this a success? Well, it only takes you to have 10 percent of the material out there be green to make the rest of it digestible. So even a low seeding rate, even a dry year, you can still make this work. You don't need four foot forage to get your money back because it's not the entire feed source. You need just enough to make the rest of the dry grass digestible.

49:50 Another thing you can do is eliminate the competition. Grasshoppers take a huge toll on our range resource and there are some baits, some biological based baits that have very few off-target effects that can target grasshoppers and eliminate that competition for a pasture resource.

50:15 I was going to go into how do we make it rain, but since I'm running out of time here I think we'll talk about how do you make it rain for another webinar later on down the line. But I think I'm closing in on my time so I think we'll stop and take questions now or address questions.

50:40 All right, thank you Dale. You covered a very wide range of topics in a short amount of time, so props to you for getting to so many different things. We actually don't have that many questions which we definitely have people here, so if anybody wants to ask any more questions before we wrap things up at 1 PM, otherwise here's the first question. One of our sales reps Dylan is asking: can you plant winter annuals into native range in the fall? Is it better to plant into a perennial cool season or warm season perennial?

51:15 You can plant winter annuals in both, but probably the bigger—I've planted cereal rye into fescue, orchard grass, had really good results. I was surprised at how much additional grazing I was able to generate, especially, you know, a cool season grass pasture that was drought damaged. I've also know people who have drilled into native warm season grasses. Of course it's real common in Bermuda grass areas to do that. That's standard practice in many areas is to drill winter cereals or annual rye grass in the Bermuda grass. But it's pretty rare on native range and I think we assume that well, we're too dry to make it work, but not too dry every year to make it work. You do need rain after you plant to bring it up. But more importantly you need nitrogen to make that work. Native grasses are so efficient, it's sucking up every little bit of nitrogen. You almost need an additional source of nitrogen, whether that's, you know, fertilizer or manure or something.

52:30 First time that I ever saw this practice tried, put wheat actually into native range hay meadow to use for winter grazing and it was a complete flop except for every cow pie in every urine spot and then the wheat just grew up great. And said well there's your answer. Why didn't this work? Didn't have enough nitrogen. There's almost zero available nitrogen in native range. And cool season grasses need available nitrogen, so it may take some additional fertilizer.

53:09 When timing on that? Usually about a month prior to dormancy. I mean, you got less competition if you wait until it's dormant versus going earlier. But if you wait until that point in time you don't get much growth on your cereal, so there's a compromise there. You kind of have to start while you still have some competition out there, but you get more feet that way. About a month before your average first frost.

53:41 Larger amount of protein supplement every three days better than daily. Excess protein in the diet of a ruminant is converted into urea in the liver and it's broken down, it's used for energy. The additional nitrogen is converted into urea in the liver and then put into the bloodstream and then comes back in the.

54:10 Animals are getting a trickle of urea, natural urea in their saliva going down into their rumen for about three days after they eat a heavy protein meal. And if you feed them every day, there's some behavior involved in here. If you feed them every day, they stand at the gate and wait for you instead of grazing. They just simply don't graze as much, their intake goes down. So by only showing up every third day or every other day, you know, after one day of standing at the gate and they say dang, he's not showing up, I guess I better go eat. So there's some behavioral issues there, but that protein can cycle in their system for about three days after a heavy protein meal.

55:02 Someone said something about kosha. Yeah, kosher, it's very nutritious. Pigweeds are very nutritious now. Utilizing them as hay, they tend not to dry down very well for hay, you know. They tend to be stemmy. The leaves tend to fall off. They're not well suited. Silage is a fairly good way of using a lot of weeds, but grazing is the lowest cost. Some weeds do have nitrate potential, but again, the nitrate is in the stock. So if the weeds have a little size to them to where the animals are not eating the lower part of the stock, nitrate's not usually a problem in a big grazing situation.

55:52 I've heard a lot of nitrate issues when animals eat weeds in a lot or something where there's a big manure accumulation. There's a lot of nitrate available there, and animals are locked up and have absolutely nothing else to eat and they just eat down to nothing, eat the entire stock. And I've heard a lot of nitrate poisoning issues of weeds growing in lots with a lot of manure accumulation, but not out in field type situations. Now under drought, obviously under drought you have more nitrate potential than during good growing conditions.

56:41 Somebody's asking, does taller grass dry out quicker in hot, windy conditions? And they're saying that obviously leaving things taller is better as you said, but is there a point when things start to dry out quicker because they're more above ground? Yes, there is some. You know, excess vegetation is not. There is an optimum height there, you know, and there's a range. Can grass get too tall? Absolutely. And more biomass, more leaf area, means more transpiration, usually means. So you want to reduce that canopy down to the point, but where you reduce transpiration, but you're not exposing the soil to more evaporation by letting sunlight hit bare soil. And you don't want to be sacrificing your root growth because that's going to harm you. You know, the goal is not to store soil moisture. It's to convert moisture into feed. You want the most feed you can get out there on a sustained basis.

57:52 Where is that? Well, you probably don't want to go, depending on the grass species. You probably don't want to go below about six inches. That's much higher than a lot of people would ever suspect. But the research I see, six inches really is probably the minimum height that you want to have grass. And how tall is too tall? Again, it depends on the species. You know, some of these taller growing like a switch grass, I mean two feet. Anything above two feet on some of your cool season grasses don't get quite so tall. A foot is probably as tall as you'd ever want to let it get. As far as moisture use, so somewhere between that. It's different for every species, but they are correct. Complete ungrazed situation that will use more moisture than a moderate level of grazing.

58:51 Yes, and someone asked about native grasses, oats, triticale, rye. Someone asked about cool season annual legumes. Yes, I think there's tremendous potential for something like winter peas. I try to stay away from hairy vetch because there's some potential toxicities there. It's rare, but it can happen. Never heard of a toxicity issue of any kind with peas. Lentils, I think have some potential. I think chickpeas may have some. Chickpeas have an ability to germinate at lower soil moisture and a lot of other legumes. So I think there's some potential there. But yeah, cool season annual legumes, I think.

59:42 Because they don't have that nitrogen requirement. One thing that they do have though, I know peas have a very high phosphorus requirement, and a lot of times there's virtually no available phosphorus out in the native range land. Might take some supplemental phosphorus to get that going.

1:00:00 I think I'm doing some playing around on a personal level with some of these concepts of drilling into native range, try to extend that growing season, that period of photosynthesis, get more carbon below ground, more feed above the ground. And the concept makes complete sense, but the practical application is it's a lot tougher. And nitrogen availability, phosphorus availability, these are some things that we really need to get sorted out. But I encourage people to give it a try.

1:00:35 I did have one customer that drilled rye in the native range. They did apply quite a little bit of fertilizer to it, and that rye just exploded, really took off in the spring. It was the only feed resource they had. They were able to utilize the rye and the dormant native grass together, and it completely saved them. So there is potential there. There are things we can do.

1:01:12 We'll take one last question because I think we are over time already. This person's asking if ragweed is something that cattle will eat. Ragweed, yes, but at certain stages, under certain grazing management systems. It is absolutely amazing when you move to daily movement, daily or more frequent movement in rotational grazing. You would be shocked and amazed at the things cattle will eat.

1:01:44 Another thing about ragweed, depend on the species of ragweed, but a lot of times animals will avoid it during the growing season, but after dormancy, the ragweed seed is super nutritious. It is one of the highest energy value seeds there is. In fact, there's evidence that native Americans actually grew giant ragweed as a crop. Their archaeological digs uncovered pottery jars full of giant ragweed seed that was as big as marbles, indicating they had selected large seeded ragweed. And it's like, why did this never become a crop? Well, I can tell you—my allergies, my nose will tell you why it never became a crop about this time every fall. But intense energy density, cattle will selectively eat those seeds off in the fall from a plant they ignore during the growing season.

1:02:45 Prussic acid, we do have a very good article on prussic acid on our website, so I won't get into that in the interest of time. Yeah, so a lot of the questions that you guys have asked, we have tons and tons of articles, a lot of which were written by Dale. They are all on our website. Just go to greencover.com and then go to our resources. We have a huge resource library that we've recently revamped and compiled all of the educational resources that we have, and they are living there, including the recordings of any webinars that we've ever done. Those live on our webinars page and then also on our YouTube channel, so you can always go back and re-watch them.

1:03:25 As far as this webinar series, we are closing it up next week with our last episode. It is going to be a panel discussion on the future of regenerative agriculture. We are having Timothy Rod, who is from the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. He's going to be speaking, and then Graham Christensen of Regenerate Nebraska. So I think we're going to have a really robust discussion, and there's going to be lots of really interesting topics covered on that webinar. So you can go and register for that on our webinars page.

1:04:00 Dale, do you have anything else? Yeah, I would like to just put in a plug for my books. I would like to put in a plug for my books—all my books, I guess—but 'Drought Resilient Farm: Managing Pasture Restoring Your Soil.' I do have a website, dalestrickler.guru. There you go.

1:04:32 I'll leave you with a thought. Don't pray for rain. I mean, I believe in prayer, prayer works. Don't pray for rain. Pray for the wisdom to use the rain you have. So pray for a copy of the Drought Resilient Farm to show up in your mailbox. Dalestrickler.guru. And if you have any questions about any kind of emergency feed, cover crops, what can I grow to generate feed, just give us a call.

1:05:06 All right, thank you everyone, and we will look forward to seeing you all next week. Thanks.