How to Take a Forage Sample

0:05 Hello everyone, I'm Nathan with Green Cover, and today we're going to go over how to take a proper forage sample. So to take a forage sample you'll come out to the field, you'll choose where you're going to take the sample from.

0:17 Want the area you take it from to be very representative of the entire field. You don't want to pick the best spot, you don't want to pick the worst spot. You want to pick a good representative area to sample from.

0:26 Next, you're going to need some sort of measuring square or

0:31 This is a one yard by one yard square. So when I lay this down in the field, what I'll do is I will cut and take a sample of everything within the square. So then I have a precise area that I know I take the forage sample from, which will allow me.

0:48 To do the math to scale it up to a full acre, so it doesn't have to be one yard by one yard. It can be 1 foot by one foot, 2 feet by 2 feet. You could use a hula hoop and just measure the area. You just need a very specific and defined border to take your sample from. Once you have it.

1:07 You come out to the field, you pick your spot and you really just want to drop it down. You want to see where it lands. You don't want to be biased. And then what we're going to do is we're going to clip everything that is rooted down inside of the square. So when I dropped it, maybe a

1:21 Few of the oat plants like laid to the side, we'll pull those in and take the sample. All the plants that are within the square are going to be cut, so I'll simply take a garden shears or some sort of scissors work, just whatever you have. We're going to cut these plants.

1:36 And put them in a bag and then we'll get to the next step. All right, so we're back inside we've got our Forge samples and we're ready to take a weight measurement so we'll walk you through it. So I've got my scale here currently I have a tub sitting on the scale to hold.

2:06 Sample here so this is the loaded sample that we took from the field so let it weigh up here so this sample which remember this was a one yard by one yard square so one yard by one yard so one square yard and it's weighing 2.6 lb so then the math to

2:27 Convert this to an acre if you're curious about what sort of biomass you have out in the field. There's 4,840 square yards per acre, so we simply take that 4,840 number times our pounds and that's how many pounds of forage we have out.

2:48 In the field in its current wet state. Now if then we took that total number and divided it by 2,000 you can convert it to tons. It's just what happens that this math would work out to be about 6 tons, a little more than 6 tons. Now that's the wet weight or the as-fed weight, so what.

3:04 You're going to want to do is you take this sample and you send it to a forage lab and they'll do their analysis on it. They'll dry it down, give you a dry weight, but then also give you all the nutrient values—how much nitrogen, how much carbon, how much phosphorus—all those good numbers in this sample. So we'll package it up, we'll ship it out or maybe drop it off if you're local to a lab and you'll get your whole analysis done on your forage.