Perennial Forage Grasses and Legumes: A Field Tour

0:03 This Dale Strickler with green cover seed and it's a lovely May 22nd day here in Bladen Nebraska. We're at our fourth perennial forage plots here and I just wanted to show you some of the characteristics of these if you're considering plants some perennial forages. What we have here are two varieties of tall fescue and fescue.

0:30 One person told me that tall fescue is the best forage grass wherever it was except for a couple things: cows don't like it and it makes me sick. A lot of that reputation, poor reputation of tall fescue, is because of the presence of an endophyte fungus, a fungus that lives inside the plant that creates toxins. In the absence of that, tall fescue is a wonderful forage and it has the ability to stay green almost all winter long where it's well adapted, which makes it particularly valuable for winter grazing, much better winter grazing resources than really any other perennial forage grasses.

1:11 What we have here, this is Kentucky 31 fescue. This is an endophyte-free version called Kentucky 32. And the difference between these two is the presence and absence of the toxic endophyte. So this plant may look very similar. I see there is a slight difference between them. The Kentucky 32 there's a little later to head out, not quite as stemmy as the Kentucky 31. And because this one does not have the endophyte, it's going to be much better for forage quality than.

1:56 The old Kentucky 31. So if you are planning a fescue or the purpose and pasture, I would either plant an in-fight 3 or a novel in the fight. The novel in-fight has an in-fight in the plan but it's magnified that does not reduce toxins. They are more expensive but me and if I can sell those confer heat and drought tolerance to the plant, it's a benefit to the plane. So the novel end of fights really are the best about that compared to the Kentucky 32. You pay a higher price than just straight into my screen.

2:49 What we have here is we've got perennial ryegrass and then we have fescue lowly. My grasses are really the standard for forage quality in a grass. Rye grasses have a higher sugar content, higher palatability, exceptional forage quality, very digestible. But as you can see, the rye grass compared to the fescue is just not as productive. Rye grasses are in the Great Plains region, at least here in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma. The perennial ryegrass just lacks heat and drought tolerance.

3:39 The physiology of the plant that makes it so high in forage quality also makes it very vulnerable to climatic extremes, drought and cold. It's not as tolerant of extreme drought and summer temperatures, dors taller and is winter cold as like the fescue, but it does have that exceptional forage quality.

4:04 People I know will just plant five pounds a perennial or intermediate rye grass every winter just to boost the forage quality on their perennial grass stands and they know it's going to die out after two or three years but that's okay.

4:23 Now plant breeders have looked at these and say these are very similar plants, they're closely related, the intermediate or the ryegrass and the tall fescue, and they've actually crossed the two. The cross between fescue and rye grass is called festulolium. This is this plant here, spring green festulolium. And the idea was to combine the best—the quality of the rye grass with the toughness of the fescue—and it works extremely well except the plants tend to be very short-lived. They don't live very long. The festulolium really is about a two to three year lifespan on a product, but it does establish very quickly. It's got good vigor in that very first year. So a lot of people will put festulolium in a perennial grass stand so they can get to that very first four-inch harvest a little quicker, and it's a great product for that purpose. Just don't plan it, expect to live five, ten, twenty years. It'll be gone. So either plant it as part of a short-term stand or in a mixture with longer-lived components.

5:55 This is timothy, and we have a lot of people request timothy as a plant.

6:04 There's reason for that. It's very softly, very palatable, very high forage quality for a grass, not quite ripe as type production, but it is very good quality. But I'm not a big fan of Timothy. Timothy has no heat tolerance. Timothy has no drought tolerance. Timothy has also very poor grazing tolerance. Most the people that want Timothy are horse people, people who have horses. Timothy absolutely does not tolerate the close grazing pressure that horses will put on a grass. So this is just something I hardly ever recommend.

6:50 One thing that Timothy does have in its favor, it establishes quickly. The seed is very small. You know, a lot of seeds in the pound. One reason that a lot of seed companies will put a fair amount of Timothy in a grass mix, because it cheapens the mix. They can get more profit out of the mix, and it does give you fairly quick results. So a lot of people do that. I'm not a fan of the grass or the practice myself.

7:32 What we have here are a pair of wheat grasses, and wheat grasses tend to be more drought tolerant than your other cool season grasses. A lot of rapid to arid Western rangelands, these are kind of products of choice when we're going below 20 inches of rainfall. We really kind of gravitate towards the wheat grasses if you want a drought tolerant cool season grass. Now drought tolerant does not necessarily mean drought.

8:05 Productive, these will survive droughts that they may not produce in a drought. This one is Western wheat grass. Western wheat grass is a native grass, it did grow naturally, does grow naturally over Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, etc., the western plains. It likes heavy clay soils and it does spread through rhizomes.

8:32 Some of the advantages of western wheatgrass are that it does spread but it tends to form a very open sod. If you saw it and you can see there's a lot of gaps in here, that's one reason I really like Western wheatgrass in a mixture, not by itself. These open spaces do allow legumes to grow well with it. You can see if you look down here we've got a lot of volunteer dry that came up in the Western nor wheatgrass that really didn't come up and the other forage species doesn't have a big something that's something goes to waste, just hits the ground.

9:12 So I like more productive we grasp than the Western. In his early brown color, it's very similar to intermediate grass, very closely related species. And like the intermediates, very productive grasp. This is kind of a species that is tough enough to go on dry land but also productive enough to take advantage of any irrigation or favorable rainfall that you might get during the growing season. You can see it's that the forage quality, you know, see how leafy this is compared to that relatively stemmy Western wheatgrass. So I'm kind of a fan of the pubescent.

10:20 Wheatgrass I think it fits a lot of situations where other cool season grasses don't.

10:31 Here we have a couple of rows to my right. Air is smooth, from which just about everybody in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, most of the eastern Prairie and Plains states are very familiar with. Over here we have meadow brome. And if these two plants were separate from each other, it'd be very hard to tell one from the other. The meadow brome does tend to head out a little bit earlier, but in other respects, very similar looking plants. But they do behave quite a bit differently.

11:05 The smooth brome is cries ominous. It spreads and forms a dense sod, tends to form monocultures, which is one reason a lot of people don't like smooth brome. But it also means with the brome, it's going to fill in gaps in the stand. If you haven't then stand, wait a couple years, you'll have a thick stand of sweet for a very palatable, very drought taller.

11:31 One of the drawbacks of smooth brome though is that it's kind of a one-time. It grows tremendously well in April and May and then it stops, and it's pretty much done for the year. You'll get a little bit of fall growth rate. Close grazing or hang and just doesn't regrow very well.

11:53 Meadow brome on the other hand is much higher in however it is a bunch grass. It does not form dense sod like the smooth brome, that's a positive in that it will coexist with legumes and other grass species.

12:18 Much much better than sweet, but it does not fill in and make it a very dense sod if that is your goal. And for erosion control, I like the smooth brome. We have waterways, high-traffic areas—this please brome I think is a better choice for pasture, especially irrigated pasture where you want to get multiple growths, multiple grazing. The meadow bromes are really nice.

12:53 Another brome grass that finds some years is Matua prone grass, and that's what this species is right here. That's a very unique forage grass. It's very fast and establishing, very responsive to nitrogen. It behaves really unlike your other brome grasses. It's a relative of rescue grass, that's a kind of a wild grass that grows in Oklahoma, Texas—very, very high forage quality even after it heads out. This has exceptional forage quality. You light up all these cool season grasses, head out, turn animals in here, this will be one of the very first ones they'll graze. It maintains quality after heading, very unusual for grass. It is very fast establishing, like I said, but it's also very short-lived.

13:54 So we kind of tend to use it like we do fescue lolium, as part of it to daluz early production in a mixture with other longer live species, or as just part of a two or three year forage stand and mixed with red clover, some other short-term.

16:15 I'm a big works of grass fan. Hey, when most people plant pastures they think about grasses primarily. Also they may think about legumes, but one very overlooked component of pastures that I think brings a lot to the table are forbs. And I've got a couple forbs here. This is chicory and this is plantain. And these two plants have some very deep properties, but I think really deserves some merit for including into a perennial pasture mix.

16:58 Number one, they're very deep-rooted plants. There's been some research done on including a high percentage of chicory in a pasture blend. They found out that the chicory roots, because they are so good at penetrating deep into the soil, this will bring up water from very deep in the soil and releases it at night right below the soil surface. They found out now, this was done in a more rain-fed area than here, but if about 30 to 40 percent of the pasture biomass was chicory, that pasture did not suffer from drought stress. And that's kind of a big deal. It's just this plant is just able to access water, but all the grass species can't. We just don't have deep enough roots and tends to be very generous with that water, share it with the rest of the composition. Plantain has a similar ability. Both of these plants tend to grow very well on compacted areas. My pasture, my the tire, the wheel tracks where I drive in and out is solid.

18:08 Planting it's the only thing that Paulo rates that compacted soil I've been driving for years. Other advantages of this, the mineral content of these two plants, it's really amazing.

18:25 The recommended percentage of phosphorous, for example, in the diet of beef cows is about 0.3%. Most forages, grasses and legumes, probably 0.2 to 0.25. They're slightly deficient even when they're actively growing. In nutritious chicory I've seen analysis where it's up over 2.6, double what the animals need. So if you include a fair amount of chicory and plantain in your pasture mix, that provides a much higher level of mineral nutrition. And of course mineral supplement is a very expensive part of raising livestock.

19:11 The other advantage of these plants is the presence of bioactive compounds. Chicory not only are these plants very digestible, very high in fibre, but chicory contains some compounds similar to tannin that helps control legume bloat if it's mixed with alfalfa or clover. The same compounds also are toxic to internal parasites. So there are some companies that actually sell a deworming blend pasture blend with the idea that you plan a paddock of this and once a month you rotate through that paddock, get rid of your internal parasites. And it's an idea that has merit. This is research proven to expel forms, not earthworms of course, but internal.

20:07 Parasites of livestock, the plantain has an antimicrobial effect. They've done research in Europe and found out that the urine of animals that have been pasture on plantain is, in effect, actually the urine is an effective antibiotic. There's that much antimicrobial activity in this plant. In the vet course, it helps the animal health, helps ward off infections, and also has an effect within the rumen similar to an ionophore. Likely monensin or both attack it, shifts the microbial rumen population away from the microbes that produce methane, which is energetically very inefficient, towards the ones that don't produce methane. It gives you about a 10 percent boost in beneficial, and since methane is a greenhouse gas, this is a boon to the environment. There's a lot of research done in Australia on how much environmental benefit there is to producing or incorporating plantain in pastures, and I think it's a very, very, very interesting. Animals like it, it's nutritious.

22:09 The next legume I want to talk about is alfalfa. And if we were to take footage at the end of July, the alfalfa probably would be this tall again, and all those other legumes might be brown and crispy because alfalfa produces more tonnage, more nitrogen, and has deeper tap roots than any other legume that we can grow around here. It just blows every other perennial out of the game.

22:58 You think, 'Wow, this alfalfa is great. Why aren't we using it all the time?' Well, it's the greatest pasture plant there is except for two things. If you don't do it right, alfalfa will cure it, kill your cattle, and your cattle will kill the alfalfa. Alfalfa needs rotational grazing management to thrive. You want to let it grow, bloom, raise it down, let it rest until it blooms again, and graze it down.

23:32 That management method—and we have an article on our website that goes much more into depth on grazing alfalfa. I've grazed alfalfa for twenty years myself. I love it as a pasture plant, but it is very definitely a high management intensive plant. Want to learn more about grazing alfalfa instead of just using it as a hay crop? Go to our website and look up an article on grazing alfalfa. This is a pasture plant that definitely merits inclusion in a lot more situations than what people are scared of. Bloat—they're scared of the level of management. It's really not that difficult. An idiot like me can pull it off. I'm sure most of you can.

24:17 The varieties of alfalfa that we have here—this first one is a common alfalfa that we contract production on. It actually looks pretty good. When you buy a common alfalfa, sometimes you don't know what you get. It's whatever alfalfa seeds have combined and brought in. We are very confident of the seed source on this. It's a very good, appears to be very good genetics. It seems to move south pretty well. The price on it is right. It seems to be a good product.