Perennial Forage Varieties for Winter Grazing: What Works in Your Pasture

0:04 Hi, this is Dale Strickler with Green Cover Seed. It's a lovely May 22nd day here in Bladen, Nebraska. We're at our ford perennial forage plots here, and I just wanted to show you some of the characteristics of these if you're considering planting some perennial forages.

0:22 What we have here are two varieties of tall fescue. A fescue 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 them 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. 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 grass.

1:14 What we have here, this is Kentucky 31 fescue. This is an endophyte-free version called Kentucky 32. The difference between these two is the presence and absence of the toxic endophyte. So this plant name looks very similar. I see there is a slight difference between them: the Kentucky 32 is a little later to head out, not quite as systemic as the Kentucky 31. And because this one does not have the endophyte, it's going to be much better for its quality than the Kentucky 31.

2:01 So if you are planning a fescue for the purpose of pasture, I would either plant an endophyte-free or a novel endophyte. The novel endophyte has an endophyte in the plant, but it's an endophyte that does not produce toxins. They are more expensive, but the endophyte itself does confer heat and drought.

2:26 Tolerance to the plant. It's a benefit to the plant. So the novel and the fights really are the best of both worlds, but compared to the Kentucky 32, you do pay a higher price than just straight into fight free.

2:53 What we have here is we've got perennial ryegrass and then we have fescue. Rye 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.

3:23 Rye grasses are in the Great Plains region. At least here in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, the perennial ryegrass just lacks heat and drought tolerance. The physiology of the plant that makes it so high in forage quality also makes it very vulnerable to climatic extremes: heat, drought, and cold. It's not as tolerant of extreme drought and summer temperatures, nor as tolerant as winter cold as like the fescue, but it does have that exceptional forage quality.

4:03 So a lot of 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.

4:25 Now plant breeders have looked at these and they 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, and the cross between fescue and rye grass is called festial oleum. This is this plant here, spring green fest you lo lieh, and the idea was to combine the best quality of the rye grass with the toughness of the fescue, and it works extremely well.

5:04 Except the plants tend to be very short-lived they don't live very long. The festial Oleum really is about a two to three year lifespan on a product but it does establish very quickly. It's got good vigor that very first year so a lot of people will put festial Oleum in a perennial grass stand so they can get to that very first forage harvest a little quicker and it's great product for that purpose just don't plant it and expect it to live 5 10 20 years it'll be gone so either plant it as part of a short-term stand or in a mixture with longer lived compose this is timothy and we have a lot of people request timothy as a plant and there's reason for that it's very softly very palatable very high forage quality for a grass not quite ripe type production but it is very good quality but I'm not a big fan of Timothy.

6:24 Timothy has no heat tolerance. Timothy has no drought tolerance. Timothy has also very poor grazing tolerance. Most of 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. One thing that Timothy does have in its favor it establishes quickly the seed is very small so you get 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 and get more profit out of the mix and it does give you fairly quick results and so a lot of people will do that. I'm not a fan of the grass or the practice myself.

7:35 What we have here are a pair of wheat grasses and wheat grasses tend to be more drought tolerant than your other cool.

7:44 Season grasses, a lot of them are adapted 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. Do you want a drought tolerant cool season grass? Drought tolerant does not necessarily mean throughout productive. These will survive drought, but they may not produce in a drought.

8:11 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.

8:37 Now, some of the advantages of western wheatgrass or zar: that it does spread, but it tends to form a very open saw, 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 rai that came up in the Western wheatgrass that really didn't come up in the other forage species. So it does let a lot of sunlight through. If you don't have it mixed with something, that sunlight that goes to waste just hits the ground. So I like Western wheatgrass. It's a tough, it's a survivor. It does mix well. Even though it forms a asad, it does mix well and play well with other forage species.

9:31 This other wheatgrass here, this is pubescent wheatgrass. You can see the pubescent wheatgrass is just a bigger, more robust, more productive wheatgrass than the Western. It is fairly drought tolerance, very similar to intermediate wheatgrass, very closely related species. And like the intermediates, very productive grass this.

9:58 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. So you can see it's that the forage quality, you know, see how leafy this is compared to the relatively stemming Western wheatgrass. So kind of a fan of the pubescent wheatgrass. I think it fits a lot of situations where other cool season grasses don't.

10:33 Here we have a couple of brome's. To my right here is smooth brome, which just about everybody in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, most of the eastern Prairie and Plains states are very familiar with. Smooth brome. 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.

11:08 The smooth brome is phrase amitis. 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 that smooth brome is going to fill in gaps in the stand. If you have a thin stand, wait a couple of years, you'll have a thick stand of smooth brome. Very palatable, very drought-tolerant. One of the drawbacks of smooth brome, though, is that it's kind of a one and done. 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, but smooth brome just does not tolerate close grazing or haying, and it just doesn't regrow very well.

11:55 Meadow brome, on the other hand, is much higher regrowth, will grow throughout the summer. It, however, is a bunch grass. It does not.

12:09 Form dense sods like the smooth bro. That's a positive in that it will coexist with legumes and other grass species other forms much much better than smooth but it does not fill in and make a very dense sod if that is your goal and for erosion control I like the smooth bro waterways high-traffic areas the smooth broom I think is a better choice for pasture especially irrigated pasture where you want to get multiple growths multiple grazing. The meadow grooms are really nice choice another broom grass.

12:58 That finds some use is Matua broom grass and that's what this species is right here that's very unique for its grass it very fast establishing very responsive to nitrogen. It's behaves really unlike your other brown grasses it's a 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 a grass.

13:51 It is very fast establishing like I said but it's also very short-lived so we kind of tend to use it like we do fescue low Liam as part of it to boost the early production in a mixture with other longer live species or is just part of a two or three year forage stand you know mixed with red clover or some other short-term forages just give you some quick upfront production also is surprisingly drought tolerant more drought tolerant than the fistula liam.

14:38 Okay this is worker grass and you can see orchard grass really looks pretty good if if orchard grass has plenty of nitrogen it's one of the highest.

14:52 Yielding cool season grasses. It establishes really well. It is a bunch grass but the seed has really good seedling vigor. You can see now it's really well here compared to the other grasses. It does tend to lose its quality after it heads out a little worse than some of the other grasses, but if it's hayed or grazed on a frequent basis, the regrowth is exceptional. The summer regrowth is better than rye or fescue, especially if you have plenty of water.

15:29 It is a little more susceptible to drought than some of your other cool season grasses. Depending on variety, I've noticed that each new generation of orchard grass varieties that come out has better and better drought tolerance. I would stay away from some of your older orchard grass varieties, especially out here in the plains. They just don't have the drought tolerance that the new stuff has. So this is Persist, one of my favorite varieties. I would stay away from older varieties like Pennlate or especially Potomac. A lot of the orchard grass on the market is Potomac. Has no disease resistance, not very good drought tolerance as well.

16:18 I'm a big word for grass fan. 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 your forbs. And I've got a couple of forbs here. This is chicory and this is plantain. And these two plants have some very unique properties I think really deserve some merit for including into a perennial pasture mix. 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

19:40 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 plant 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 parasites of livestock.

20:12 The plantain has an antimicrobial effect. In fact they've done research in Europe and found out that the urine of animals that have been pastured on plantain is in effect—actually the urine is an effective antibiotic. There's not much antimicrobial activity in this plant, but of course that helps promote animal health, help some ward off infections.

20:42 It also has an effect within the rumen similar to an ionophore like Rumensin or Bovatec. It shifts the microbial rumen population away from the microbes that produce methane, which is energetically very inefficient, and towards the ones that don't produce methane. That gives you about a 10 percent boost in feed efficiency and since methane is a greenhouse gas, this is a boon to the environment.

21:16 There's a lot of research done in Australia on how much environmental benefit there is to producing, to incorporating plantain in the pasture. Results I think it's very, very, very interesting. Animals like it. It's very nutritious, tends to grow back. To me these are two must-include plants in any perennial pasture species.

21:51 Plantain will live quite a little while. Chicory about five years, but it recedes itself below so you can, if you don't raise it there, you'll get volunteer you. Let it go to seed once okay. Next legume I want to talk about is alfalfa and I.

22:16 Think you can see guys if you can kind of pan look at the alfalfa and then look at the other pasture. The games over here you can see the office just so much more productive than the other live. And if we were to take, if we were to mow this off and take this same footage in the end of July, the alfalfa probably 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 the game away.

23:01 You think wow this out pop is great stuff, 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 hear 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, brings it down, let it rest until it blooms again and graze it down.

23:36 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 20 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 that as a crop? Go to our website and look up our article on grazing alfalfa. I think this is a pasture planet that definitely merits inclusion in a lot more situations than what's been used. People are scared to float, they're scared to 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. The varieties of alfalfa that we have here, this first one is a common alfalfa that we contract production on it.

24:33 Actually looks pretty good when you buy a common alpha, it's sometimes you don't know what you get. It's whatever alfalfa seeds someone 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.

25:03 Looking at comparing it to some of our other alfalfas, this next one is what we call nitro grades, which is a recessed crown alfalfa. Now, when a recessed crown does, most alfalfa crowns have an elevated crown up above the soil surface. And tell you what, we need to break here. We need to get a shovel and we'll come back and do this after we have a shovel, because I want to be able to look at this. We'll kind of pre-dig. Yeah, I should have thought about in advance because we got a branch degree we want to dig that up, take a look at it. We want to examine the crown difference between these sounds good. Okay, I'm sorry, I should wear. Can we? I need to look at some bird's foot trefoil. I just pan right. Yeah, this is the small stuff right there, yeah.

26:15 Yes, one little thing again that I'd like to include in pasture mixtures is this bird's foot trefoil. A bird's foot trefoil finds a lot of merit because it is a non-bloating legume. It contains condensed tannins that will complex with the bloat-causing proteins. Not only is this non-bloating, but they've done research that shows that if about 10 percent or more of the diet is bird's foot trefoil, the other 90% can be pre-bloom alfalfa and the animals will not bloat. The condensed tannin in it is that effective. The condensed tannins also will complex with the protein and turn into bypass protein, or instead of being broken down.

27:06 By microbes in the rumen will go directly and get digested in the small intestine which is much more efficient for the animal. They will gain better on trefoil or a mixture of trefoil and alfalfa than they will on alfalfa alone. And so a very nutritious plant, it does reseed itself. You can tell it's not as productive as alfalfa, so even though it's very safe, if you go straight trefoil you give up a lot of production. That's one reason I like to have diversity out there—a little trefoil, little alfalfa. You get the best of both worlds: the safety plus the alfalfa production.

27:51 So it does reseed itself, so it can live for a long time in a pasture setting. Even though the individual plants usually over the last 2 or 3 years, this stand can last a long time if your grazing pressure is low enough that you allow it to reseed.

28:38 This is alsike clover, and we find the best utility for alsike clover in wet soils and acid soils. We're good. Okay, this is alsike clover, and the best use for alsike clover is in places that are too acid or too wet for other legumes. Alfalfa, for example, requires a very well-drained neutral soil for best productivity. Alsike will tolerate soil acidity and will tolerate very wet feet. Under cool, wet conditions it's very productive. It's also very nutritious. The drawback of alsike clover is that it does not take heat and drought well. Also, it tends to be fairly short-lived, not as productive as alfalfa under good conditions.

29:25 One other drawback is that alsike clover is toxic to horses. I would not include this in any blend that may be grazed to horses. It's not 100 percent kill—every horse that touches it—but it has enough hazard that we try not to have it in mix designs for horses.