Stockpile Grazing Mixes to Cut Winter Feed Costs

0:00 I do have it going on Facebook now and people are tuning in there as well. So welcome to part two of our stockpile grazing mix. As Dale and I were going through the slides last week, just kind of realized this is a bigger topic than what we can cover in 45 minutes. So thanks for joining us. We're going to pretty much just kick off right where we left off, I believe.

0:25 And so for those who are tuning in, you guys are all muted as always, but go ahead and ask your questions in the chat bar. And Keith is available there. He's gone dark, he's in the shadows, but he will answer any questions you guys have. And we'll also open it up to any questions at the last about 15 minutes. We'll go till about 6:15 and then allow you guys to ask your questions.

0:45 So Dale, I'm going to go ahead and change this so that you can share your screen.

1:17 I have to admit looking through your slides before we actually knew what was going on. I had so many questions. So I'm very curious to see how these tie into stockpile grazing.

1:30 Okay. Let's just get cranking then. My goal today and last week we talked pretty specifically about using stockpiled sorghums to cut the cost of wintering livestock. And today I want to talk about some things that's just going to expand your thought processes about why we do what we do and what are the drawbacks of doing what we do and why, what are some alternatives to what we ordinarily just do. And so my goal here is really we're going to touch on a lot of different things, but the main goal is just to stimulate your thought processes. And I just want to do some mind expansion, and when we get done, my goal is for your head to look like this.

2:24 And so I want to start with just this a story here. This is a mother and daughter, one of my cattle from, gosh, 15 years ago, I guess it's about when this was. And that calf had a 900 lb average weaning weight. Actually, there are four calves in my herd that had a 900 lb average weaning weight. And that seems really impressive and it sounds like I'm doing a bit of bragging, but in a minute you're going to hear the rest of the story.

3:09 Picking up where we left off last week and last week I talked about how 80% of total cost for running a reproductive pastured livestock operation revolve around providing feed and most of that feed is for winter feed. 80% of your total costs are feed. 80% of those feed costs are winter feed related. And so you look at all the expenses we have in providing feed for our livestock and what do you use that machinery for? Making hay and feeding hay. It seems like if you have pastured livestock you spend all summer making hay, you spend all winter feeding hay.

4:00 And one of the things that has really changed and has changed much faster than our mindset in agriculture is that it used to be the harder you worked the more successful you became. But now I'm not so sure that the harder you work, the less money you make because so much of our work now is done with machinery. And every hour you put on machinery costs you money. And sometimes the value of what we create with that hour of machinery time is less than the cost of operating that machinery. And that is very counterintuitive.

4:54 You can just keep working harder and work yourself out of a hole. Sometimes the harder you work, the deeper you dig that hole if you are burning up more machinery costs than what you are creating during that machinery time.

5:10 Let's take a look. What does it cost for you to produce hay? I just got these figures from the KState Extension custom rates books. These are custom rates and you can add them all up and you compare them to your own operation if you keep records. This is much much higher than what most people assume it costs them to make a bail of hay. You say, 'Well, it doesn't cost me that because I own all my own equipment.' Well, actually, you listen to any good economist, they will tell you that if the average number of bales made by the respondents, and this was about 2,000 bales per year, if you are producing and because your machinery costs are spread over your number of bales, if you're making less than 2,000 bales a year, your costs are probably much higher than what these are.

6:14 Most people do have somewhat of a grasp of what it costs to make hay, but where people don't figure is how much it cost them to feed the hay itself. And that's the value of the hay plus the depreciation, interest fuel repairs labor insurance involved in the feeding process. I went through this calculation one time, figured out the actual cost. A guy told me that he could dry lot cattle for $1.50 a day. I asked him, 'What all is in that?' And he said, 'The hay and the silage.' I said, 'Well, what about your machinery cost there?' He said it would cost something, but not that much. When we figured it out, after you figured in his machinery cost, his cost per day was $5.31 a day. He actually had more than twice as much expense involved in the feeding of the hay than he had in the hay and silage itself.

7:21 That's the invisible cost, the hole in the bucket that most people don't ever really realize. Every hour of run time on that machinery cost you money. You've got depreciation and I just figured on one of my tractors that I own that was $10 an hour. The interest, you know, whether you're buying machinery on a note or if you could have used that cash to pay off other loans or invest it and get a return off of it, it cost you money. Fuel, 5 gallons per hour of run time, that cost you money. Repairs, and I tell you what, you don't have to pay very many repair bills, parts and labor before you figure out that this is a huge hole in your pocket.

8:16 And then labor. I have people say, of course, you know, the cost of hired labor, you write the check, but what about your own labor? People say, 'Well, I don't charge myself labor. You know, I don't figure that in.' I said, 'Well, then come work for me. I'll pay you nothing.' 'Oh, I can't do that. I'm so busy and I'm so far behind.' Well, if you're not getting things done that you need to get done and it's costing you money, then your time is expensive. And so you have to figure that in. And then insurance on that machinery. And when you add all this stuff up, what did it really cost you to feed those two bales of hay?

9:01 Oftentimes, the cost of feeding the hay is equivalent to the cost of making the hay. And that's the hidden hole in the bucket a lot of people just really don't realize.

9:17 I told you I was going to tell you the rest of the story. Here's the rest of the story on this. That calf, I bought what I thought was what I was told were open heifers. And on New Year's Day, I drove out into my field and I saw four black dots curled up in a snow drift. This calf and three other ones all born the same day.

9:53 I don't ordinarily cave in January. I cave in May. And so what do you do? What do you do? I mean, you cannot treat a lactating first calf heifer like you can a cow that's being roughed along that's going to cave in May. So these four pairs were sorted off and I fed them alfalfa hay for 4 months.

10:20 And the rest of the herd they were roughed on stocks. They're on corn stalks, milo stocks, and dry grass during that four months. And they received no hay, no supplement of any kind. Ridiculously cheap wintering cost for those animals.

10:43 When I went to sell those animals, my May-born calves weaned at an average of 816 pound or their sale weight. I preconditioned for 3 weeks. Their sale weight was 816. On these older calves, it was 920. And when I sold them, the average of those four calves was $20 per head more than the ones born in May.

11:15 Tell me, can you buy four months worth of alfalfa hay for an animal for $20? No way. And it dawned me. It hit me right between the eyes. I said, 'Oh my gosh, this is the best argument I've ever heard for not caving because this caving in the middle of winter and feeding high-priced hay to an animal at its peak nutritional needs is exactly the status quo in the cow business. And we do it so we can get a bigger calf in the fall.'

11:51 But it really is not a profitable situation. I gained really very little weaning weight. You know, 104 pounds in four months of age. It's less than a pound a day of calf gain at a very high expense. And by not having a lactating cow in the wintertime, I saved an incredible amount of money on the rest of my herd.

12:23 I think we set ourselves up when we winter calve, we set ourselves up for a very high-cost situation. And a lot of the things we're going to talk about from this point on will be lower quality forages that are more suited to a dry cow than a lactating cow. And we can't take advantage of them if we're caving in the middle of winter. Some we can, some we can't. So moving right along. One of the absolute best overwintering forages that you can have in your system is tall fescue. And tall fescue is a grass that gets cussed all the time and for very good reason. It's one of the worst summer grasses there is available. And a lot of places people will graze it in the summer. It's not a summer grass.

13:14 And for more information about fescue, about a month ago we did a webinar conduct a rescue from fescue. We went into fescue just in depth so I won't spend a lot of time on it. But fescue, I took this photo on New Year's Eve this past winter and you can see that fescue is green as a gourd. This is when fescue is at its prime and the reason more people do not stockpile tall fescue for mid-winter grazing is because they've grazed it all up during the summer and fall. There's none left. It's gone.

13:58 And so the best way to utilize stockpiled fescue is to have it. And so if you're going to pull off a fescue pasture and stockpile it, you need to have alternate forage resources in late summer and fall so that you can use fescue in the winter time. So some of these things we'll talk about are not as good as fescue for the winter, but they might be great in the fall and it allows you to reserve your fescue so that you can have good quality pasture in January, February, March when there are very few sources of good quality pasture. And when I say good quality, if you look at the crude protein levels over there on the right hand column, it's from Virginia Tech. Those protein levels are really better.

14:49 Than probably 90% of what good quality grass hay runs. Stockpiled fescue is probably better quality than the hay you're feeding in in most cases, unless you're feeding just straight alfalfa hay, you're not seeing those kinds of protein levels in your hay. And the digestibility is also very good.

15:18 One management practice for increasing the yield of stockpiled fescue is when you stockpile fescue you pull off by no later than August 1st. Pull off complete removal until the time you need to use it in the winter time. And at that time you usually want to give it a shot of nitrogen fertilizer. Now, if you have a grass legume mixture, you might be able to withhold the nitrogen fertilizer, but there's no question that nitrogen fertility, whether it comes from legumes or fertilizer or shot of manure, poultry litter, whatever, will vastly increase your stockpile yield.

16:01 You look at this, two tons an acre of fall pasture. And this is data from Missouri. So, very similar to a lot of our customer base in eastern Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, two tons an acre of winter feed. That's pretty significant.

16:25 If you have fescue already, use it for winter pasture and find a different source of pasture for summer. If you are planting fescue and planting fescue is something I really promote, but if you're going to plant fescue, don't go down to the local store and buy Kentucky 31. One of the bigger mistakes you can make if you're planting fescue.

16:50 Plant a non-toxic endophyte fescue. We use Estancia. Really like it. Here's why we use Estancia. The base genetics on Estancia is high mag variety which is a high magnesium variety that has a very low tendency to cause grass tetany in the spring. Estancia is high mag with a non-toxic endophyte in it to make it heat and drought hardy makes it tough and you can see the difference in animal performance between Kentucky 31 and Estancia. And if I've seen any difference between the two in toughness, that additional toughness is in favor of the Estancia. It appears to me to be actually a tougher variety than Kentucky 31.

17:45 Another source of fall or winter grazing is crop residue. And a lot of people, I'm not telling anybody anything they don't already know here. Crop residue is widely used but it's used mainly because it's cheap. It's one of the cheapest sources of ruminant nutrition per day that you can find. But there's one little trick that can double the number of days that you can stay out on stalks and that is strip grazing.

18:21 If you strip graze, you can double the number of grazing days per acre that you get off those stalks. And there's hardly anything I can tell you in any agriculture endeavor where you can spend 10 minutes a day and double what you're able to accomplish off that acre. Strip grazing crop residue does exactly that. And then there's I've seen research from Purdue, UNL, Iowa State, I mean every corn belt university has studied this and they found the exact same thing. When you strip graze, give them one day of grazing at a time. You double the number of days you stay out on stalks.

19:08 And why is that? Well, when you turn cows out on stalks, let's say you take 40 cows, you dump them on 160 acres. What is the thing they eat on day one? What does their diet consist of the first day you turn them out? It's 100% corn. What happens when you give a ruminant that has been on a forage diet a diet of 100% grain on one day.

19:37 Basically, what you see in this center, I showed you this last week. For those of you that watched last week, we talked about what goes on inside a ruminant when they get too much grain. The inside, these are little cutout squares of the inside showing the inside of different rumens. One on the left is from an animal that's

20:00 Been eating forage as a healthy rin. The one in the middle, the dark one, the one that looks like it's been cooked, is from an animal that got acidosis from eating too much grain. When you let animals out on corn stalks unrestricted, that's what the inside of the rin looks like. And once it reaches that stage, it becomes acidic enough, it kills the bacteria that digest forage. You've made that animal incredibly inefficient.

20:33 For quite a long period of time. Now, when the corn runs out after seven days, now they have to digest forage and in many cases they can no longer do that very well. And so by restricting that grain intake just a little bit per day, you can ration that grain out a little bit per day enough that it gives them an energy boost but not so much that it makes them acidic and it can last the entire season and you can really really stretch it out.

21:05 Now another problem with crop residue, you can see the grain here. If you look at that percent crude protein on the average right there in the middle of that table, you notice the grains about 10% protein. Plenty good for a ruminant animal. But after they're done with the grain, then what do they eat? Well, they eat the leaves and the husks right there. Now, if you look at the average of leaves and husk, you can see you're really pretty deficient in protein. We need at least 7% for rumen microbes alive. You're below that and those animals are really going to struggle because the bacteria in the rins going to really struggle. So when you're out of grain, you need to start figuring out somehow to get some additional protein in those animals. And one very good way of doing it is to utilize cover crops.

22:00 Now, this is some turnips and radishes that were aerial seeded into corn at leaf drop or at maturity. We've talked some in the past. We'll talk some more about using wide row corn. And this is picture I took up in North Dakota of 60-in corn. And in between that, they have a cover crop blend. And that big, tall, impressive looking plant there is Bayou Kale. And I hope you're as impressed by that photo as I was impressed with the field when I was standing in that. I'm not very tall, but that stuff's chest high on me. And this is going into winter. I mean, there's a tremendous amount of feed available after that corn is picked. And we'll probably have a webinar on 60-in corn and some of the potential benefits of 60-inch corn. It's not to the corn itself. It's what the cover crop in between those 60 in can do for winter pasture and for soil health. And so make sure you tune in to that webinar. That'll be a great one.

23:18 Some other things you can do to provide fall grazing that can help you defer fescue or just delay digging into your hay pile is planting some things in August or maybe early September if you're far enough south. But this is a blend of fall-planted oats and nitro radish. And this provided about 80 grazing days per acre cow calf days per acre. And these were cows and big calfs. And you know that can really stretch out your winter feed supply. That can allow you to defer or to delay digging into your hay. It can allow some other forages to get grown up enough, allow your fescue to stockpile or some of these other options we'll talk about as well.

24:09 The radish of course, a lot of you are familiar with radishes. This is kind of the plant that made the whole cover crop industry get really started. And you can tell about half of that root sticks up above ground is available for grazing. Lot of feed there. And this of course we plant radishes to break up compaction. I thought I would stick this in here. This is a picture of smart radish root. And smart radish is actually a little bit different species than the nitro radish. And you can tell it's got a huge number.

24:48 Of lateral roots off that tap root. I think if you're if your goal is to break up compaction, I'd give the smart radish a look. It looks very impressive from the root digs we've done.

25:03 Some other things you can plant for winter grazing and we'll probably do another webinar as fall starts approaching and we start talking about winter annual. Of course, wheat is used a lot for winter pasture. Where wheat is grown kind of a dual purpose grazing and grain crop, especially as you move farther south. Rye provides more winter growth than any other crop. So if you're trying to get something as early as possible in spring, rye is probably your best choice. Triticale is probably next. And annual rye grass.

25:44 You can see from the picture that those are completely different plants. Rye grass comes on later in the spring and will regrow much faster after grazing than the cereal grains. Rye grass is not a cereal grain at all. It does not have a big grain like rye or wheat or barley. It has very light fluffy grassy type seed. Completely different. They both have use. Most of your winter cereals though produce most of their grazing in the spring and there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of times when you come out of winter your hay stocks are exhausted, your winter grazing resources are exhausted and having a plant a pasture resource that will green up early, provide that early bite can be just really valuable.

26:42 And then there's winter annual legumes. This is a blend of hairy vetch and crimson clover. Took this on the first of May in 2012. You can see there is not only a bunch of feed that's available there, but a bunch of nitrogen that's available. And this was a couple of weeks later and same field actually. But the hairy vetch there's crimson clover underneath that. Take my word for it. But the vetch just climbed over it, over topped it, and I mean there's an insane amount of both feed and nitrogen in that field right now.

27:28 Now, one unusual out of the box addition to winter annual mixes for grazing. This is a mixture of rye and radish that was planted in early September after a harvest of a short season corn variety. When you look at this, what is the highest dry matter producing plant in this field? It's not the rye. It's not the radish. It's the volunteer corn that's coming up. When you look at this, you say, 'Well, okay, but it's not uniform. This is just the volunteer.' How much feed could you have produced from this field if you had seeded corn on purpose along with the rye and the radish?

28:26 And we talked last week about sorghum regrowth providing a nutritional complement to the low dry matter, excess protein, inadequate fiber winter annuals. That corn provides dry matter and a low to moderate protein and high fiber but digestible fiber feed source that's a perfect complement to those winter annuals. And look at how much additional dry matter you got per acre. And if you look at it, it really didn't harm the yield of the cool season grass underneath it. Not at all. In fact, you can look around there in places it actually seems somewhat better around those corn plants.

29:14 And this is a cover crop field of mine from a few years back. And this is the BMR corn that I put in that mix. It was planted July 22nd and this photo was taken September 4th. So if you figure that's 42 days and that stuff is tasseling and essentially is planted in the summer but I mean if you planted in August you'd get the same results and some of those plants were 7 feet tall.

29:51 About how much additional feed you can generate off a fall planted mix just by throwing in some cheap BMR corn or popcorn.

30:01 And here's an out of the box idea. A lot of people will pasture alfalfa, the last growth of alfalfa. You know, you take your last cut around the 1st of September and then the fall growth comes up, freezes out, you might turn cattle into pastured off. The problem with that is that once that alfalfa goes through a hard freeze, the leaves start dropping off. You've really got about two weeks before all the leaves are dropped off of it and there's not much good to it.

30:37 But if you swath that alfalfa just before that hard freeze and strip graze this off to keep it from becoming bedding, those leaves stay on the stem. They don't shatter off like they do when the plant goes through a freeze standing up. And it's amazing how many more days you can get out of alfalfa stubble simply by doing this swath grazing. And of course you know that final growth of alfalfa is just rocket fuel as far as animal performance. And because it's dried, you really don't have bloat issues on it either. So I think this is a practice that a lot of people, if you're needing really good quality late summer or late fall forage, this could be an option for you.

31:39 Another option that a lot of people have never thought of is a plant called four-wing salt bush. This is a native shrub. And what's unusual about this shrub is that it keeps its leaves on all winter long. Those leaves run about 16% protein. They're very very palatable. Another characteristic of four-wing salt bush is that it's a desert shrub. This photo is in CRP in the middle of winter in southeast Colorado. We're talking 12 inches of annual rainfall here. And you can see how that shrub's about 4 feet tall. I mean, there is a lot of feed there. That's exceptional quality in the winter time. And it's not the only shrub that's like that.

32:29 This is another native shrub. This is one called winter fat. This is actually native to parts of western Kansas, as is the four-wing salt bush, even though they're both pretty rare because they tended to get grazed out very early during settlement.

32:49 And another one that behaves similarly, this is actually an imported shrub. There's two different varieties here. The big gray looking one is one called snowstorm and the one on the right is called immigrant. These are USDA releases and they're a plant called forage kochia. Now, don't let the name of it scare you. This is a very very distant relative to the weed kochia. This does not break off and tumble. It doesn't spread and is not invasive. It stays put and it's a perennial, not an annual, but it stays green all winter long. And I've seen some research where putting this shrub into some arid western rangelands has increased the winter grazing days 12-fold. Believe it or not, 12 times the grazing days in winter per acre. Pretty impressive.

33:55 Now I want to discuss native grass grazing—native grass when it's green in the summer versus grazing native grass when it's dormant in the winter. And if you look at the nutritional comparison, it appears there is no comparison. If you look at ungrazed native grass in July at time you cut prairie hay, it's about 6% protein, 55% digestible. You let it go to frost and it's half that. You know, we consider that worthless. You know, why would you graze that? And because we've considered that dormant grass to be worthless, we tend to eat 100% of our grass off in the summer and don't even use it in the.

39:48 Protein. That's six pounds of alfalfa per day. At distiller grains at 25% protein, that's four pounds of distillers per day. And research shows that if you only feed every third day, you feed three times as much protein but every third day, so that'd be 18 pounds of alfalfa hay every third day or 12 pounds of distiller grains every third day. The animals actually do better than when you feed them every day because instead of waiting at the gate for you to show up, they'll go out and graze. They will graze quite a bit more. If you supplement more but less frequently, also when you supplement more at one time, the boss cows don't bully the timid cows as much. Each cow tends to get more of their share.

40:48 Another means of supplementing that dry grass, and this is when I went to Africa, this was extremely common. Everybody did this. They used a mixture of molasses and urea and I would prefer biuret actually over the urea. It's much safer. But they used limited intake type tubs and they were everywhere when I was there because it was the beginning of the dormant season. Those herds in Africa and Australia live on molasses urea supplements with dry grass for six months out of the year, and it's hardly ever used around here. But my favorite source of winter protein is putting a high protein cool season plant into that grass. Now, if you've got pristine, never been sprayed, never been plowed grassland, I'm not sure I'd mess with that. I don't want to alter that.

41:54 But what I've got here is your typical been to, so to take out musk thistle for 20 years with sweet clover in it. And this is early October just as the grass goes dormant. And look at all that protein. That clover is supplemental protein to that dry grass, much better than bringing in alfalfa hay and it's fixing nitrogen to stimulate the grass growth the next year. If you strip graze this off, force them to eat a little bit of clover and a lot of dry grass, you can get a huge amount of grazing days off of this. I mean, this to me makes an awful lot of sense. You're going to graze dry grass in October, November. Boy, look at how slick a system this is. This is something you really ought to consider.

42:52 Now, we talked about if you're going to intensive early stock, rest that native range in July, August, September, so you have plenty of regrowth to graze in October, November, December. What do you graze other than native range? This is where grazing summer annuals can really come in. Very handy. You get all this summer annual growth out there and it's actually better quality than the native range and can provide some rest. Also you are doing your field a favor. You're doing your native range a favor by resting it during that critical time period. You're doing your field a favor by running ruminants and very productive summer annual crops across there.

43:42 So this is where you can go. And people say, 'Well, I don't need to do that. I've got plenty of grass in my pastures.' I'm sure that's what this guy said too. If your pastures look like this by the 1st of October, did you really have plenty of grass? Do you really have plenty of pasture? If you want to make a pasture that currently looks like this have belly high regrowth by the 1st of October that you can utilize as a grazing resource, pull those cattle off in the middle of summer, move them to a summer annual mix on your crop land, and your crop land and your pasture and your bank account will all three. Thank you.

44:30 So the other thing you can do, and I showed you this picture last week, but with those summer annuals, you don't have to just graze in the summer. You can see here, this was grazed off very low, September 1st, drilled cool season annuals right into the stand.

44:52 Without terminating the summer annuals. Let the regrowth come up. You can see the seed at the bottom of the screen. You can see all the little seedlings coming up. This was two weeks after planting. And this is after a killing frost.

45:11 Look at that dry, high fiber, low protein, high dry matter frosted off sorghum mixed in there with a very high protein, very low dry matter. And you can see how this just provides a perfect nutritional compliment and extra yield by doing that.

45:39 And so this can provide you while your animals are off grazing the your dormant native grass maybe with your sweet clover in it or whatever other cool season legume or cool season grass you want to put out there, be your protein source to supplement your dry grass while you're out there grazing that native in October, November. This can be growing and making some feed for even later. You pull off you run out of the native, you can go on to this and get another month or so and delay even further when you have to dig into your hay.

46:20 So as I wrap up here, I just want to advertise again that I do have some books for sale. If you're interested in the things I'm talking about here, just send me an email and I can have one or both of these books shipped to you. The managing pasture, I'm asking $30 for, drought resilient farm, I'm asking 25 for. And that's what I have for this evening. Please give us a call at Green Cover Seed and talk to one of our salesman if there's something we can help you with or even just questions you'd like answered. So, over to you, Noah.

47:05 Awesome. Thank you, Dale. That was very insightful. I learned a lot. As you were talking, I kept thinking of all the cattle guys. I was like, 'Oh, I need to send this to so and so.' I think they would really appreciate it. So as always, these are going to be recorded. So I will post this as well as the one from last week onto YouTube. So if there are people that you guys want to share this with, those links can be found either on our YouTube page or on our website, it's just greencoverseed.comwebinar.

47:37 I'm going to open it up here to questions. So if you guys have any, feel free to start typing them in in the chat. To start off, I've got one here from Andy Edwards. Says that we are growing a winter grazing mix compiled with grazing corn, sorghum sedan, and many others. At what point of which species would you swath it to swath graze?

48:02 Ordinarily, I like to swath about two weeks before your average first frost. The sorghums in particular will really drop both sugar and protein content. Sorghums are botanically a perennial and so they're going to try to survive the winter by translocating sugar and protein down to the roots. Now there are sorghum that winter kills. So that all that effort is really kind of in vain. But if you can swath when and I say that with a caveat and that's assuming you're not going to try and put a winter annual in there. If you're wanting to put a winter annual in, I'd look at four to six weeks prior to your first killing frost on average.

48:59 If you do that, that gives you the opportunity to drill a winter annual between the swaths and get some good growth on that winter annual. If you're not going to drill another crop in, you know, two weeks prior to your your average first frost, try to cut that off so that you prevent that translocating of protein and sugar down to the roots.

49:26 Okay. This question is, if planting a cool season mix into warm season grass, when is the best time to plant? 30 days before frost, 30 days after. I like about 30 days before your first frost. If you go too much

49:46 Earlier than that, there's just too much competition from your grass. If you go later, you're just really giving up too much growing season. So I think about 30 days prior to frost is usually pretty good. And it works best if you have, you know, I talked about the intensive early stocking thing. If you're wanting to seed cool season stuff into your grass.

50:17 The first time you do that, you probably ought to get it nipped down pretty good around that 1st of September, drill it in and then get off at that point. So now like with the sweet clover, it reseeds itself very well. So that's usually a one-time planting.

50:41 Even they're a cool season plant, best time to plant those really is in the middle of winter. And you can broadcast them. And they broadcast very easily, established very well as long as they're put where there's some freezing and thawing to kind of get some frost heaving on that soil surface to incorporate the seed. And that's one of the reasons that Sweet Clover works well on rangeland seedings is it does not need drilled. It can be broadcast in the middle of winter. And you can do that with ground equipment or you can even do it with a plane.

51:17 Okay. Again we I don't have any questions here. So if you guys have those feel free to type them out but I do have a question for you in regards to selecting species. And you did talk about this last week a little bit, but can you touch on like the male sterile photo period sensitive for sorghums? At what point is it too late to plant those where you start looking at cool season things in your stockpile mix?

51:46 I would say I think when you're six weeks prior to your first frost is it's too late to put them in. You know, which in my area that's September 1st. If I'm in August, I'll still throw them in, but I don't if I'm in August, I don't get real particular about what variety or what traits. They pretty much all, you know, they're all going to get about 2 feet tall at that point. And they all act and look the same pretty much. So, you know, once you're August 15th, you know, don't worry about which variety. They all pretty much work.

52:37 Then, it's when you're earlier than that, when you're more than two months prior to your first frost, that's when having the different traits, the photo period sensitive and stuff can really help you out. And if you're planting now, now is when having a photo period sensitive or a male sterile really makes a difference. As you get later, depending on what maturity, I mean, you're you want it to freeze out before it produces grain for a stockpiled feed. And as you get past the 1st of July, you can just start planting very long maturity forages, at least where I am. You get into Oklahoma and Texas, that might be August 1 because your frost is going to come that much later depending on where you are. But then you can just shift to longer maturity products. But right now you know male sterile photo period sensitives are my preference.

53:44 Okay this is from Lonnie. You mentioned acidosis last week on headed out sorghum Sudan. Will the daily strip grazing that you mentioned with corn work here as well? Yes. Yes. It definitely can if you got and I know of people in I know of someone in south southwest Missouri I believe it was who is wintering cattle on standing grain sorghum. Now to me that's too much grain. It's pretty hard to moderate the grain intake when you've got 50% of your total dry matter is grain. I mean, it's hard to

54:30 Keep below 5 pounds a day when you're only, you know, you'd have to feed them aluminum just 10 pounds a day. If that's the case, you can get sorghum ferments slower than corn. So it's a little more forgiving that way, but still that's more grain than I'd like. Now, if you're doing feeder steers, go for it. I have done that before with feeder steers. I've grazed feeder steers on mature grain sorghum, strip graze across there, and it works fantastic. It's very very cheap way of fattening calves.

55:11 Okay. If you plant winter stockpile sorghum now, can you graze it once and then take the cows off and get enough stockpiled for winter? Yes. Yeah. And if you do that, you don't need a male sterile or a photo period sensitive. I would still use a BMR and I would probably use a sorghum sudan, a BMR sorghum sudan. But if you want to do the one and a lot of people, it's very popular to take one hay cutting and then drill the winter annual in, graze the regrowth after frost and then feed the hay when all that's used up. That's very common practice. And again, you don't need a lot of bells and whistles on your sorghum there. I do prefer a BMR sorghum sudan, but it doesn't have to be a photo period sensitive or you know any of that. You can get by with a little cheaper variety if that's your plan, but I still would like a BMR.

56:10 So, you mentioned like taking a hay cut. Are there things that you would not want in a mix like that if they are going to take the first cutting for hay? Yeah, good question. A lot of times in these stockpile mixes, I'll put okra because it holds the plant, you know, holds everything up because of the stiff stem. Put sunflowers in for the same reason. Sun hemp for the same reason. When you're taking a hay cut, you don't want stiff stock plants in there. You know, they just don't cure well. They don't bail well. They're just, you know, they're sticks. They tear up equipment. If you're wanting to do one cut and then let the regrowth come and graze it, leave those species out. Good question.

57:05 So, of the species that you would leave out, you did talk about putting in like certain Brassica plants. Would you put any radishes, turnips, those things that you mentioned earlier, collards in a grazing mix? You know, if yeah, and those are fine. The if you are going to drill cool season annuals in after that hay cutting, my preference is to put your cool all your cool season stuff in at that time. If you're not going to make it a second drill pass to put in your cool seasons, yeah, having some of those brassicas in there in the initial planting can be pretty useful. And collards collards are probably my favorite among those because their growing point is much closer to the soil surface. One problem with having radishes or turnips in something you're going to hay is that you run the risk of getting big chunks of roots in your hay bale that don't dry out and you get a big rotten spot right around each chunk of root.

58:17 Well, with that, I think we'll probably wrap up here. Dale, thanks again for your time. If you guys do have any other questions, if you're watching this recorded, weeks from now, go ahead and give Dale a call or email. Dale greenoverced.com is shown on the screen and 7856142031.

58:39 Again, these webinars will be recorded and put on our website and on our YouTube page. Next week, we've got Ray Ward on. Ray is going to join us to talk about a number of different topics, going to talk about when and how to best soil sample. We're going to look at the Haney versus PLFA tests. A lot of questions we get about nitrogen contribution. We're going to talk about that as well as C to N ratios and fertilizing cover crops. So excited to have Ray with us next week. Thank you guys for tuning in this week and we look forward to seeing you then. Thanks again, Dale. We'll see you all soon.

59:15 Thank you, Noah.