Stockpile Grazing Mixes for Winter Feed: Summer Annuals That Cut Hay Costs

0:00 Well obviously if you're in the livestock production business you're selling into the commodity market. People selling directly are doing okay now if they're selling any volume direct to consumer.

0:30 Commodity price beef and other animal products right now are not very good, largely because of the pandemic. That makes it more imperative than ever that if we cannot control the price we receive for a product, the one thing we can control is how much we spend to produce it. In a pastured livestock operation, the majority of our costs are involved in providing feed during the winter, during the time when we traditionally do not have pasture, at least not green growing pasture.

1:12 One of the biggest paradigms that I've had to overcome in my life was that I grew up thinking that the grazing season was the same as the growing season. Now I've discovered that the grazing season, if you manage correctly, can be 365 and one-quarter days out of the year.

1:41 Some of the things we're going to look at is stockpiling. Part one of this presentation, this evening's talk, is going to be about stockpiled summer annual crops for winter pasture. This seems somewhat counterintuitive. When this was first brought up to me, stockpiled summer annuals, I thought why would anyone do that? Why don't we look at winter annuals for pasture? We'll do that, and then part two is one of the things we'll talk about. But I'll talk about some of the advantages of this approach.

2:35 Stockpiled winter feed. Why are we looking at summer annuals in particular? We're going to focus on sorghum as a stockpiled summer annual for winter feeding. Why would we do that? What's the advantage of this? Well, one obvious advantage is just yield. The biomass. Sorghum will just produce more tonnage per acre than just about anything we can grow in the temperate areas, even over much of the tropics. As far as annual plants, it just outproduces everything.

3:17 Some of these winter stockpile mixes, some of the reports I've heard back, I would say on the low end people are looking at wintering a cow on one acre for three or four months. There's hardly any pasture resources other than sorghum that can accomplish that.

3:40 Here in the Great Plains, water is always a concern. When people have me describe my climate when I travel around the country, I say I live in a desert that floods all the time. We'll have about 360 days of drought punctuated by 5 days of flood. So moisture deficiency is always a fear. If you look at the water use efficiency of sorghum compared to cool season grasses, sorghum will produce about twice as much plant material as what cool season grasses will.

4:32 Another advantage sorghum has is that because it is very heat tolerant, and you look at this blue curve here, this is from a solar power company. That blue line shows the amount of solar energy that's available throughout the year. Obviously it peaks around the summer solstice in June. Because sorghum grows during the summer, it just has more hours and more photons available to photosynthesize. A summer productive crop is always going to be more productive than a winter productive crop.

5:15 In our environment and another thing about sorghum is that it gets very tall. The picture here is from my farm and those are my cattle and that is stockpiled sorghum. The cattle are grazing. We just had an 18-inch snow and it was minus 20 degrees and ordinarily when it's minus 20 degrees I don't like to go outside but these cattle didn't seem to mind. They were just quite happy to be grazing way at this stockpiled sorghum through a pretty deep snow.

5:58 Sorghum also, because it has a waxy cuticle on the outside of the leaf, has an ability to shed moisture. It does not deteriorate and drop in quality like most other plants. That waxy layer on the surface of the leaf slows the deterioration down and keeps some quality when other plants don't maintain quality. Now that doesn't mean that sorghum is a perfect winter feed. It's not, it's far from perfect. It does have some drawbacks and one is that it tends to be very low in protein, especially in the dormant stage.

6:56 I've got 8.34% on this one but that's actually much higher than typical. Typically a sorghum forage that's dormant will run anywhere from 3 to 6% protein and microbes need a minimum of 7% protein in order to function. So we need to get that animal's diet up and we'll talk about some strategies for doing that with some of our mixtures here in a bit.

7:26 Another problem with sorghum and some of this is due to some of the genetics we use, but sorghum because it gets tall can be prone to lodge in the winter. It may stand better than some plants but the taller things get the more likely they are to fall over and that's the same with sorghum. So keeping it standing during the winter, the entire winter can be a challenge.

7:58 Now when do you plant sorghum? There are two primary windows for planting sorghum. The first window starts when soil temperatures climb above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and depending on where you are within the world, around here that usually occurs sometime in late May, early June. This is the planting window that's going to be most productive the vast majority of the time because our most productive months most of the time are May and June because we're typically getting rainfall, we have favorable temperatures, warm enough but not too hot, and we have long days of sunlight centered around that summer solstice. So if we can get that sorghum up and growing at the earliest opportunity after it hits 60-degree soil temperature in the spring, that's going to give us the most production per acre.

9:11 Now the second window, this is basically a window of opportunity rather than optimum. It's an opportunity because after small grain harvest out here on the plains, when you look at our double crop option, what can you plant after that small grain harvest? We're usually into the heat of July, late June July early August and moisture is short. It's hot and we don't have a lot of time. So a lot of our cropping options are very risky. You know, double crop soybeans or some sort of double crop option might be pretty risky. But using sorghum because of its drought tolerance, its productivity, its ability—if you get soybeans grown up to the reproductive stage the water shuts off and they die, you've got nothing. If you get sorghum up to the forage stage, sorghum up to the reproductive stage, you run out of water, it dies, you've got feed, you've got a crop that you can utilize. So the ability of sorghum to not only provide—

10:31 Survive unlimited amount of moisture in a short growing period but also produce something you can market or convert into a marketable product is really big and so I think it's an ideal double crop for the farmers that have livestock.

10:51 Now criteria for a double crop, a sorghum variety to be used for winter stockpiling, I highly prefer a variety that does not produce grain. The slides I'm showing here are basically sections taken out of slaughtered beef animals—the inside of the rumen. So what you're looking at is three chunks, approximately the same size three chunks of rumen wall. The one on the left is what that's supposed to look like. That is a healthy rumen wall. You see all those fingers coming out. Those are called papilli, and those fingers increase the absorptive area of the rumen wall for absorbing volatile fatty acids and other products of rumen fermentation that the animal depends on for nourishment.

12:01 The one on the right is from a bottle calf that just did not receive enough energy, never developed properly. The one in the middle, the one that looks like it was put on a skillet and cooked, that is a rumen wall from a calf that developed acidosis. When an animal receives too much grain without a period of adaptation, that's what happens to the inside of the rumen.

12:38 When that happens, the animal loses its ability to absorb volatile fatty acids. Also, because that rumen becomes acid, the microbes that digest cellulose—the main component in forages—they die off. They can't persist in an acidic environment. So essentially, when you feed too much grain to a ruminant, that's what happens. It becomes a nonfunctional ruminant. If you do this to a brood cow, she's going to really struggle when she goes back, when the grain shuts off.

13:20 It's okay as long as they continue to receive grain, but when the grain shuts off, then they're in trouble. It might take six weeks in order for them to heal up from this type of internal injury. They just can't get energy out of forage anymore until all that heals. So I prefer a sorghum package that does not produce grain, and there's several ways to do that—provide forage without grain.

13:53 One is to simply plant like in this one. This is a 120-day forage sorghum hybrid that was planted in mid-July after a harvest of spring peas, and because it froze in mid-October, about 90 days later, it never produced grain. Just ran out of time.

14:22 Now another means of preventing grain production is this is a photoperiod-sensitive hybrid, and you can see it's about 12 feet tall. Photoperiod-sensitive hybrids are probably the most drought-tolerant and most productive genetic package among the sorghum in terms of total biomass. This hybrid was planted June 20th, and you can see the heads have emerged, but they don't have any grain on them. This photo was taken October 4th. The heads just now popped out, and it's about 10 days away from frost. This is not going to produce grain.

15:12 Photoperiod-sensitive plants only flower and initiate a head when the day length drops below 12 hours and 20 minutes in the fall. So the plant just keeps growing vegetatively, and that's the reason they're so productive. They keep growing leaves. They keep growing roots. They keep accessing moisture, and they never hit that high water demand stage that grain production requires.

15:43 Production just takes more water than forage production, so that's why they're so water efficient. Another genetic package that does not produce grain is male sterility. The plant, the pollen is infertile in a male sterile, so unless there's another sorghum to act as a pollen donor, it won't produce grain.

16:09 Because it produces a head and then the head doesn't ever fill with grain, it's an empty head. The plant is still photosynthesizing but there's no place for that photosynthesis to go. The sugar has no berries of grain to fill, so it just builds up in the stem. What you get with a male sterile is a very sweet, palatable stock. If you want the highest quality of stockpiled sorghum, I would use a male sterile.

16:49 Another criteria that I look for is the ability to stand. This is a photo I took several years back, probably a dozen years ago at a plot that you can tell was after frost, but a tornado had just gone over this plot and every other hybrid in this plot was flat except for the one I'm looking at here. This is a dwarf forage sorghum and you can tell it's just standing like a rock even under that. Of course, something that's short is going to have less torque on it than a tall hybrid.

17:38 People say, well, I don't want a dwarf, I want something that yields. Take a look at this picture that I took of a dwarf hybrid from a plot I put in several years back. Look at the number of leaves on that, look at how dense all those leaves are packed together. Dwarf BMC, dwarf hybrids—which are BMC means that it has the same number of leaves or more, usually it's 50% more leaves, but the inter nodes are shortened. So you get a very high yield of leaves, a low yield of stem, and this is a very nice package for winter stockpile grazing.

18:29 Another feature I look for in stockpiled sorghums is brown midrib. Brown midrib makes the plant genetically less able to produce lignin. Lignin is the indigestible component of plant cell walls. The cell contents inside the cell is where all the protein and a lot of the sugar, the fat—that's where all the goodies are located—is inside the cell. The cell wall contains cellulose and lignin, and cellulose is digestible by a ruminant. Lignin is not. So if you take the lignin out of a plant genetically, all of a sudden everything in that plant becomes digestible.

19:28 The degree of lignin in the plant basically is inversely proportional to its digestibility. Brown midribs just have far more energy value. It doesn't really change the protein, but it does change the digestibility of the protein. You can see this man is holding up a brown midrib to the right of the screen and a normal hybrid to the left of the screen. You see that dark coloration of the midribs where it gets its name.

20:04 Just to show you a little difference here in how animals prefer these, this is a grazing trial where the paddock is split between a conventional and a BMR hybrid, and they're isolines, so these are the same hybrid with and without the BMR gene. You can see they have the tops completely grazed off of the BMR within a short period of time. Ten days later, most of the animals are eating the stems of the BMR in preference to the leaves of the conventional hybrid. That's pretty significant, and there's a 30 to 50% improvement in animal performance by going to a brown midrib hybrid.

20:52 Now, there is no perfect sorghum variety for stockpiling. This photo period sensitive is very.

21:01 Productive, it's very drought tolerant, but it gets tall and it tends to lodge. The dwarf varieties that are out on the market, they're very short, they stand very well, but they're grain producers and the only way you keep them from producing grain is to plant them late, which means late planting reduces your yield potential. If you're in a double crop situation, that's okay, might be your best option at that point, but we don't have the photoperiod sensitive dwarf or the male sterile dwarf genetics that also have a BMR. There's just too many recessive genes that all have to align in multiple back crosses. It takes years and years to create a hybrid like that and there just aren't any on the market, at least not that I'm aware of.

21:59 Now another weakness of sorghum in general is that sorghum is very susceptible to iron chlorosis, so it does not grow well on very high soils that are very high in calcium carbonate. One plant that does stockpile very well, and that's also very productive, not sorghum productive but good, is brown top millet. That's pictured here and we have been using more and more brown top millet in our stockpile mixtures. It's been a popular plant in the southeast United States for a long time and the southeast United States has wet soils that tend to be acidic, so I always assumed that brown top millet fits wet acidic soils. We've been using it, and once we started trying it on dry soils and calcareous soils, we found it works pretty well there too. And it really keeps its quality very well in a stockpile mix and it's also really cheap to grow, so I always throw in a few pounds of brown top millet per acre when I do a stockpile mix.

23:21 Some other plants that I'll put into a stockpile mix to make up for the deficiencies of sorghum—one of the deficiencies is protein, as I mentioned—so having something that's really green and high in protein there in the fall and winter can really help out a lot. This is a picture of our impact forage collards, and this leaf here is probably 25% protein or so. It doesn't take a lot of pounds of this leaf material per acre to really boost the nutritional value of that stockpile mix. Usually I'll throw a pound an acre of forage collards into my stockpile mixes.

24:11 Another plant is a legume—this is guar. This is the source of commercial gum. We found it's also a pretty good stockpile grazer. Those pods are full of high protein beans that are encased in kind of a sugary, sticky substance that's very high in sugar, tasty, and high in protein, and animals really go for those pods in the winter time. Plus, since it's a legume, it fixes a little nitrogen. I like to throw some guar in my winter stockpile mixes.

24:53 Mung beans are a very cheap legume to grow and they tend to hold their beans in the pod pretty well as well, so that's another addition I'll throw in there. Sunflowers—sunflowers, of course, people don't think of sunflowers as a winter grazing resource because the leaves all drop off and in the winter time this beautiful plant here will be nothing but a head and a stick. But at the end of that stick is a very high protein head and cattle absolutely love the heads off of oilseed sunflowers in the winter time, and they're full of protein, so that helps boost the protein in the mix.

25:44 Another thing that sunflowers do is they have a very stiff stock that helps hold the mix up. It prevents that sorghum from lodging. Another stiff-stocked plant that can help hold things up is okra, and that's the plant I have here. Okra, like the sunflower, all the leaves are going to drop off at frost.

26:11 And you're left with a stiff stock and then those green pods will become full of high protein seed. Now those pods are not as palatable as the sunflower heads, but once animals dig into them they are very high in protein and they're usually a bit more persistent than the sunflower heads.

26:37 Another plant or plant type I should say that I like to include in a stockpile mix is if you've got the sorghum and you've got the stiff stock plants growing together, it's nice to have a plant that will vine around like this. Cow pea is vining around that sorghum that'll, you know, when you stake up a newly planted tree you put the stake the tree and then you tie them together. What this cow pea is doing is tying the sorghum plant to a stiff stocked plant next to it. Having a cow pea or other vining plant in there to do that can be very beneficial. There are some varieties of cow peas like cat jang. Most cow pea varieties shatter their beans out on the ground pretty readily. Cat jang is a variety that is renowned for keeping its peas in the pod longer than other varieties. We're exploring some other bean varieties that we think will have even more persistence in keeping those beans on the pod.

27:55 Another thing that we found we have climbing vines and we also have sprawling vines. This man is holding up a pumpkin that's not yet ripe. We found a lot of utilities with pumpkins and other cucurbits for including in these stockpile mixes. The squashes, pumpkins, gourds—gourds are something we're using now and they're able to vine around, find the places in the canopy where sunlight is getting through, and turn it into edible fruit that keeps its quality into the winter. We're out of pumpkins right now, but we are experimenting with some gourds and they're showing some promise. Gourds, unlike pumpkins, will also climb up into the canopy and put the gourds to serve that function of tying everything together to the stiff stock plants.

29:07 Now when you graze a stockpiled mixture, this is really critical and I can't stress this enough: strip graze your stockpiled mixtures. You can see in the diagram here you start at the water source, have a couple of temporary fences set up, and each day you leapfrog the fence and let animals into the next strip. If you fail to do this, I have seen an instance—won't mention the name of who did it—who had 80 acres of stockpile mix, turned a large herd of animals in there, and it happened to rain that night. The next day the entire stockpiled field—we're talking probably 500 tons of standing forage—was all stomped into the mud and useless. 500 tons of forage gone overnight. The main goal of strip grazing is to limit access and stop that trampling. This is a far more efficient way to use this than just letting them have at it. For your sake, please strip graze your stockpiled forage. Be much more successful.

30:39 Not saying that you're going to have an event like that, but don't take a chance. It's just too expensive. Strip grazing is really easy, it's fast, it does not take much work at all. You just simply start at the water source. I like having the water source at the south end of the field so that the standing crop is always to the north of the animals to act as a windbreak, at least if you're in the northern hemisphere. That is as a windbreak for the animals.

31:12 A twist on stockpiling is swath grazing. The advantage of swath grazing is that when sorghums freeze naturally, they will move all of their soluble protein and sugars in most cases down to the

31:35 Roots sorghum is botanically a perennial that winter kills, so it behaves like a perennial in that it tries to translocate material down to the roots for the winter. By swathing that material you can stop that translocation, keep that protein, keep the sugars up in the forage and it opens up an opportunity to do — you can see here the green drill marks that is rye that was drilled in between the swaths. Now you could also rake that swath over and drill underneath where the swath laid before if you wanted to add some operations.

32:33 In this situation, and this was my first attempt at swath grazing on my farm, you can see the fence in the upper left corner. The fence is running parallel to the swath. I have had better luck running the fence perpendicular to the swaths before because what I found is that the animals would grab a hold of the material, shake it and get it all wrapped up in the fence, knock it down and then be all over. It is very important with swath grazing to limit access to just one day or preferably a half day material at a time. Anything they don't eat on their first grazing they will lay on and when they get up they'll defecate on it and it'll become expensive bedding. So it's much more efficient to make them defecate where they've already eaten, not where you want them to eat.

33:45 A follow-up crop to stockpile grazing usually you will have the stockpile used up by February, March and then what to do with that ground afterwards depends a lot on what the next crop is. If the next crop is going to be a legume like soybeans, you might want to do a grass crop like oats to suck up all that nitrogen in the manure and urine spots and there will be a lot of manure and a lot of urine spots after stockpile grazing. The manure density out there is just really amazing. If you want to improve a poor quality soil in one year's time, set it aside for stockpiled sorghum grazing, it really is amazing.

34:46 If your next crop is a nitrogen demanding crop, you might want to look at spring pulse crops, spring legumes like this — spring field peas. These are forage peas that were planted on March 20th, picture taken on May 20th and you can see there's a lot of nitrogen and also a lot of feed out there. This can set up another sorghum crop and that's what happened in this field. This field was followed 10 days later with a sorghum crop. You can do this perpetually if you have a field that's set up with good winter shelter. You can do this double crop of peas, sorghum, peas, sorghum, peas, sorghum for a long period of time and the peas can fix some nitrogen for the sorghum crop. You can also either with oats, peas, some combination of spring cereal and spring legume, you can bail those up and use the bailed feed as a supplement to the sorghum, the stockpiled sorghum.

35:57 One way of doing this is to essentially set up bail grazing and when you bail graze you can use the bail grazing either as a standalone. It's a very economical way to feed animals. The advantage of this is that you don't have to fire up a tractor every single day of the winter to feed. You can fire up a tractor once and if you only have to fire up a tractor once you don't even have to own the tractor. You can borrow or lease one for a weekend, stake out all your hay bales you need for winter feeding on a grid like in the photo here and simply move an electric fence to allow one day worth of

41:37 Does work and so it's something I really encourage now and of course you save the cost of the herbicide burndown. And after frost this is what you end up with: those winter annuals all tend to be washy, they are often excess protein, low dry matter, low fiber. Well, the frosted sorghum regrowth that you see here is high in fiber. Now it's digestible fiber because it's a brown mid rib, so it's digestible fiber, but it's still fiber makes the rumen work. It's low in protein, which it's, and it's high in dry matter. It's all dried out, so it's a perfect nutritional complex to those high protein, low dry matter, relatively low energy compared to their protein content winter annual grasses. So it really works well and you just wait for a hard freeze, for the plants to dry after that hard freeze, so any prussic acid dissipates. And in my area that's usually early November when we get that really hard freeze. And you know that sorghum is done for, and that's usually when everything else is kind of played out. Turn them into this very high quality grazing in November and December. It really really works well. And so that sorghum regrowth, not just the summer growth but the regrowth of it can be used for winter grazing as well, especially combined with some winter annuals that are just drilled right in.

43:28 So that's all the material I have prepared for this evening. Next week I'll be talking about some other options for grazing in the wintertime that don't involve summer annual forages. And just a reminder: if you like this stuff, if this is stuff you're interested in, I do have my books for sale. If you're interested in those books or if you're interested in ordering seed or learning more about what we're talking about, contact us at Green Cover Seed. That's my contact information there. Any of the other people here at Green Cover Seed, we're happy to help you out.

44:21 Very good, thank you Dale. I'm going to just dive right in here to some questions. I did get a couple here, like I said before the webinar, so some of these you kind of touched on. But first, Riley Shay said: why do some people swath graze instead of stockpile graze, and which is better in your opinion? And if you want to share your video now you can too.

44:48 How do I do that? Okay, there we go. Are you sure? I doubt really get much of a charge out of viewing me if you're female and do get a charge out of seeing me, I'd like to know that. I'll filter all those. How's that sound? Okay, yes please. That would be nice. I don't hear those sort of things very often. Almost looks like you're blushing a little there Dale, just thinking about that. I am.

45:28 Stockpile versus swath grazing. The stockpile is usually a bit more accessible in the snow. The biggest advantage of stockpiling is that you are eliminating a machinery trip and you're reducing your cost. The advantage of the swath grazing is that the swath material is usually better nutritionally because you do it before you get that translocation of nutrients down into the roots. It gives you the opportunity to plant another crop into that swath material in between the swaths, so you can start another crop growing where you swath. And where you stockpile, that's an individual.

46:24 In general, if you have fall moisture, you can have the ability to get something green and going and add to your total yield. You'll get more total yield out of the swath grazing than you will the stockpile grazing, but you do have that extra cost of the swathing itself to contend with.

46:58 That's kind of my thoughts on swath grazing versus stockpile. Hey Dale, would you say it's also accurate that in areas where they get a lot of snow it's easier for the cattle to pull that forage up out of a swath than it is with standing grazing that all just goes flat across the whole field?

47:14 Yeah, depending on the standability of the forage, yes, absolutely. If it all goes flat, yeah, it's much more accessible to them out of the swath. And there are people that claim that once cattle are trained to the swath grazing, they'll dig down through three feet of snow, find that swath. And that's another reason the fence perpendicular to the swaths—because they can find that swath easier if they're starting, you know, if they don't have to walk back and forth to find it. If they know where it is from the previous days grazing, and so they'll kind of just make a tunnel and follow it from one into the other. And they look like big black ducks bobbing under the surface of the snow.

48:13 Got questions here that are somewhat related. One person was asking if you'll be talking about grazing corn. I don't know if you'll be talking about that next week. And then also, someone said just an observation wondering why sun hemp was not included.

48:28 I almost put sun hemp in here. In fact, I forgot. Actually, the value of sun hemp is that it is very stiff stocked, provides some wind protection. And it, because of the really stiff stocks and also it can kind of tie everything together, or it can provide that same support that sunflowers or okra might. And of course it's a legume, so it fixes some nitrogen. That's good.

49:01 The drawback to sun hemp, of course, is that there in the winter time there's just absolutely nothing edible on it. So it's, I'll throw a little bit in a stockpile mix. It's not something I spend a lot of money on, but I know people that do stockpile mixes and they'll always routinely throw in there for those purposes.

49:30 And I'm assuming are you going to talk about grazing corn next week? Grazing corn, yes, I will. Actually, and talk about it in a couple of different aspects. Grazing corn as a stockpile. Corn does not have the waxy cuticle that protects it from weathering like the sorghum does. It's not quite as drought tolerant, but there are some niches in which corn is superior to sorghum. We'll talk about those next week.

50:10 Question here from Jake Conner. Said that he's in North Central Kansas. He's got two stockpile mixes that he'll plant around June 20th. In both those mixes he's got turnips. He said, just curious about if they will bolt, planted in that heat. So maybe just kind of, cover brassicas in general. Are they okay?

50:34 Yeah, brassicas in stockpile mixes. Some brassicas planted early before the summer solstice will bolt. If you spring plant, you know, your typical daikon radish, instead of great big edible roots that go deep into the ground, you'll get a whole mass of pretty white flowers that butterflies love and roots the size of a pencil. The daikon radishes, the nitro radish, when you plant.

51:16 In April or May looks completely different than when you plant it in August. Now usually the brassicas, if I'm planning after about July 15th, they become a bigger and bigger player in the mix. The turnips planted in June 20th, my bigger concern at that time—not bolting, turnips aren't known for doing much bolting like the radishes are—is just the amount of heat they have to go through, just making it through the summer live without desiccating.

52:01 That's why my go-to Brassica during the summer is collards. Now graza radish is a very, very heat tolerant Brassica, maybe even a little better than the collards, but it's also very expensive, and so a lot of people don't use the graza radish because of the expense. I mentioned on the chat thread that the Georgia Impact 4AGE collard, one of the parents of that is a Georgia Southern collard that's where it gets its high protein, but it also gives it really good heat tolerance. But it's crossed out with a kale of some sort and that gives it very good cold tolerance as well.

52:48 You're right, it's got the best heat tolerance of any of the brassicas in my opinion. Yeah, and it's right up there among the handful of most cold tolerant as well. So it both handles the summer heat and grows a ways into the winter, and so yeah, it's beneficial on both ends. That's one of the reasons why we use so much of it in winter stockpile mixes.

53:15 Craig Alman says, what animal health issues need to be managed when grazing frost-killed sorghum? The biggest concern, of course, I'd say there's two concerns with grazing sorghum. One is prussic acid. Stockpiled mixes, because they're grazed in the winter, prussic acid is an issue of growing sorghum, but you hardly ever see a prussic acid poisoning from grazing sorghum sudangrass or even forage sorghum during the growing season. It is by far most hazardous at the time of frost.

54:11 Prussic acid is a compound that is released when two different plant compounds become mixed. One of those compounds is in the epidermis cells of the plant, which is the very outside layer of cells on the leaf. The other compound is in the middle of the leaf. Normally they don't come in contact. The only way they really come in contact a little bit is during the chewing process, but not much. The other time they come into contact is when you have a freeze and the cells all burst and liquefy. You can see, like after a freeze, when the leaves are wilted, they're black. That's when those two compounds come together, and at that point it can be very dangerous.

55:01 When you're grazing the stockpiled sorghum, wait until it is thoroughly frozen and dried. You want it to freeze and then dry. When the plants are all tan colored, no green—that's when they're safe. So usually around here, that's usually November. The other problem is typically nitrate, and the nice thing about stockpiled sorghum is that you know all plants accumulate nitrate when there's an abundance in the soil. It's not unique to sorghum, but nitrate is natural, necessary for the plant. It's what the plant uses to convert into protein.

55:51 If you allow sufficient time, the nitrate just basically gets turned into protein by the plant. With a stockpile mix, when you're given the entire growing season for that plant to metabolize that nitrate into protein, it's really not much of a risk. Really, stockpiled sorghum is a pretty safe option.

56:10 Low risk way of utilizing sorghum. It's really lower risk than bailing that sorghum, which is usually and often done when the plant is still high in nitrate. The other thing is in a stockpile setting, the lower stem is the very last thing that's consumed and that's part of the plant that is highest in nitrate. So I suppose it's possible to get nitrate poisoning on stockpile sorghum, especially if a severe drought just completely stunted the growth. I've never really seen it but it's common in bailed hay.

56:52 I've got a question here from Jeff Barnett. He said what time of year is best to drill in a winter mix? He's in Texas but what would be more related to this—what would be kind of your cutoff time for planning stockpile mixes versus going ahead and just planning a, yeah. That's going to vary by location but usually the prime time for planning winter mixes is probably about 60 days prior to your first frost. I think your cool season plants—somewhere I'd say your cutoff for summer annuals versus winter annuals, somewhere in that 75 to 90 days prior to your first frost. And then you—I'd say 75 is probably when you want to completely make the switch. Now if you're in that 60 to 90 range, that's a good time to plant a blend of summer annuals and winter annuals. That's when it really works. That's when your brassicas and sorghum blend or your brassicas and corn blend work really well.

58:12 Someone asked about grazing corn and I can guess we can jump ahead to that a little bit. You know, where corn really shines for winter grazing is when it's getting too late to plant sorghum because corn has more cold tolerance than sorghum. Corn will grow at 50, sorghum needs 60, and in the fall there's a lot of days that are between those temperature ranges. I'll show some photos next week of where we fall plant corn. You don't think about planting corn in the fall, well, for winter grazing it actually works really well. And if you're in that somewhere between 90 and 60 days before your first frost, that's where corn can really dominate and really make an extreme contribution to winter grazing. It doesn't persist as well into the winter as what sorghum does though.

59:16 Last question here from Lonnie in Ohio. He used to push planting oats in July for stockpile. Is that something you'll be talking about next week? Yes. Absolutely. I think there's actually better choices similar to oats. Among the spring cereals, there's some oats that are good but there's some other spring cereals that I think are better. And that's why we don't—that's why we carry more than just oats. Still a good choice but we've got some better, I think. That diversity aspect is really important. Absolutely. Well, we're going to wrap up here. I haven't mentioned this for a few weeks but we do have our soil health resource guide. You can get that for free on our website where you can go request a copy. We actually have an article in there about stockpile grazing. So just wanted to throw that out there. That's free—we cover the shipping and everything. So if you guys want that, you can go to our website. In the meantime, we will leave you hanging for part two next week. Like I said, I'll register all of you guys so that you'll get an email for that. Dale, thank you so much for your time. Keith, thanks for answering questions in the chat, and we'll see you guys next week to conclude our stockpile grazing mix webinar. Thanks for joining everybody.

1:00:48 Thanks for everybody for listening. All right, we'll see you guys next week.