Winter Annual Monocultures vs. Perennial Pasture Mixes: What Works for Livestock

0:00 Anything else with grout, I urge you to somewhat reconsider. That number one reason is because a productive pasture receives the same amount of rainfall and sunlight as corn, soybeans, or any other grain crop. If you have the right mix of plants and the right management, you can produce just as much biomass and just as much revenue, if not more, from pasture than you can from grain crops.

0:52 The other thing I want you to reconsider is the incorporation of perennial sods into a crop rotation. So when we started with this cover cropping thing, we'd look at something like all that trampled rye back behind you here and say, 'Man, look at all that mulch. Boy, when that rots, that's going to make a lot of organic matter.' And we found that it did, but not nearly to the degree that we expected.

1:23 Because what we've discovered, and as you listen to Christine this afternoon, the big driving force behind soil organic matter increase is not from crop residue rotting down. It comes from soil microbes that live off root exudates. Annual crops have itty-bitty root systems that only live a short period of time. An annual plant survives by producing seeds, so a lot of that carbohydrate in an annual plant goes up. Annuals produce a lot of top growth that's what we observe would say band that annual is really productive. That's going to make a lot of soil organic matter. Not the case.

2:13 The perennial with the smaller top but the monstrous root system has a root system that lives 12 months out of the year instead of five and has a huge amount of root exudates. So I want you to think about the potential of putting a perennial sod into your crop rotation. There are a few people doing that. Is anybody doing that now?

2:42 Small scale. I have a market. Okay, small-scale living mulch. Oh, okay, green manure. Sure, yeah, I last year I did my first crop out of a sod and I like what I see. I really, really like it. But the other thing about the perennial sod is if you have the right species, the right diversity, the right management, it can be extremely profitable. And so we're going to take a look through the species and kind of figure out okay, what are the species that are going to make the most sense for you.

3:26 This first one in Sand Point and the Sand Point is this stuff here. One drawback of Sand Point is a legume. It's non-bloating because it has a content of condensed tannin. And I'll talk about some secondary compounds, tannin being one of the primary ones that confers some animal benefits. The tannin will complex with like these clovers over here, which will cause bloat in an animal. The tannin in Sandpoint.

4:01 Will bind with the bloat causing protein in alfalfa and clovers and turned into bypass protein that actually increases animal performance. Tannin also is toxic to internal parasites like brown stomach worms, very effective at reducing intestinal parasite loads. Sandpoint is very very tolerant of dry calcareous high limestone gravel soils, very drought tolerant.

4:38 Unfortunately it does not compete very well with other vegetation, so I don't ever recommend planting it alone. Always plant it too mixed with some other things to help keep the weeds down. It's also not very grazing tolerant.

4:53 It can be very productive, but once it's grazed in the spring, it might get this tall in the spring, but that's the last you really see it. It might just regrow about that much the entire rest of the summer. So it's a neat plant, works well in a mix. I would not go whole hog on every once a while a magazine article comes out that just promotes Sandpoint as you know this is going to replace alfalfa, and it won't, not in this part of the world. But it is a valuable component of a mixture.

5:33 Next legume, strawberry clover. You can tell a strawberry clover looks a lot like the white clovers here, very similar characteristics and quality. The difference of strawberry clover versus the white clovers is that it's very salt tolerant, and if any of you deal with salty spots, you know it's hard to get anything to grow in those areas, and strawberry clover is one of those. It's used extensively in the California river valleys where they have salt issues. It's used in Australia where they have salt issues. This seed is something we did get from Australia, so very excited about the potential of strawberry clover to help remediate some of those areas where we just can't get anything else to grow.

6:23 White clover. White clover is kind of the standard among legumes for quality, higher protein, higher digestibility than really any of these other legumes. Drawback of white clover is that it has very shallow roots, has no drought tolerance, no heat tolerance, and so it's been kind of iffy out here in the plains. We're trying to say not we, but plant breeders are trying to remedy that situation by through breeding, and they're making some really good strides.

7:05 Now here you can't see a lot of difference between these three varieties where white clover has water. They'll all the varieties work. But luckily, and the reason we put this perennial plot where we did, and so each entry could be in the irrigated portion and have some out there in the dry land corner where the sprinkler didn't hit. Where the sprinkler did not hit, that variety died. This variety died. This variety lived and did quite well.

7:42 The renovation came out of the Nobel Research Institute in southern Oklahoma. It was developed to live through hot dry summers, which we have basically all over the plains. So I think if you want a white clover in your system, this is definitely one to keep your eye on. Another potential clover that I think has some real merit is one that's called everlasting. We didn't get seed in time to get it into this plot, but everlasting is a hybrid between white clover and Kuroko clover. Kuroko clover is extremely deep-rooted and drought tolerant, and in all other respects is like white clover, except it takes about three years to establish. White clover establishes very quickly, but is shallow-rooted and drought susceptible. When you hybridize the two, you get the best of both worlds. I'm very, very excited about the everlasting. I think it's going to be a home run product for us. Everything I've seen so far out of it is very positive.

8:53 Anytime anyone has a question or comment, chime in please. I can listen to myself talk all day long, but I'm sure you guys would like a break from that. I've got a couple of red clover varieties. The main benefit of them—we've got the medium red, which is just the common stuff on the market, and the Southern Belle. The difference between an improved variety of red clover and the medium red is disease tolerance. You can see this is year two of the stand. There's not a lot of difference between these two—looks pretty much the same. Next year when you come here, there will be a very distinct advantage to the improved variety because typically red clover plants are short-lived because they are killed out by root-attacking diseases, primarily anthracnose. The improved varieties will have better tolerant stand persistence, so the individual plants instead of living two years might live three or four. In a long-term pasture situation, that's important. If you do this, you're reseeding every other year. With this, you can reseed half that often. That's a very distinct advantage to the better varieties of red clover. You pay an extra quarter per pound upfront, but you only have to seed that half as often. That's big.

10:48 I typically see that one of the biggest limiting factors to clover establishment, believe it or not, is crickets, slugs. I mean, compared to grass, this is just a nutritional powerhouse for every insect. And clover seedlings are so much more attractive than the surrounding grasses. I had a pasture that I seeded red clover into—a smooth brome pasture—four years in a row. Four years ago I had failures. And then the summer of the fourth year, I had a grasshopper issue. I spread some bait to control the grasshoppers the next spring.

11:37 I said I'm tired of wasting my money on clovers it's too dry around here to grow clover. I didn't put a pound of seed out there and I got a stand the red clover looked about like this four years worth of seed just that survived that. But when I read the bait to kill the grasshoppers I also killed the crickets and ever since then I whenever I have a clover seeding failure I that's the first thing I look at is crickets.

12:11 Soil pH can have a big problem as well. Yes, okay what obviously if you look at this clover and starting to turn brown so it's ripening see if you give red clover about a sixty day rest in between grazing it will produce ripe seed you won't do it on a thirty day rotation but sixteen ninety day I typically try to give my stands at least a sixty day if not 75 day rest sometime in the summer and let that seed ripen and you turn cattle in once all these seed pods are brown they'll scatter it through their manure and trample it into the ground and you can maintain a red clover stand indefinitely through receding so good question thank you you don't have to buy new seed you can manage for easier.

13:24 I'll cite clover this is not else I clue this is yellow blossom sweet clover and we don't have it in the plot because it's not a perennial it's a biennial but it is a very beneficial plant because of this big temper this is a great soil improver it will tolerate extremely poor soil it is a biennial instead of a perennial so it actually you know fits better into a crop rotation than a perennial but I think this is really an underutilized cover crop plant a lot of the barriers to use in this though are finding where it fits in the modern crop rotations and but as far as a plant wanted top growth want pollen nectar great root system a lot of nitrogen so it has some benefits the alcide clover this stuff here with the little kind of whitish pink flowers its claim to fame is its flood tolerance it is a very wet feet taller clover it's usually used in wet areas where other clovers do not thrive.

14:54 And it excels for that purpose very good forage quality with one drawback and that is that it has some toxic properties to horses if you are pastoring horses do not use outside clippers and that's about all I know about the toxic properties about it but horses do not like next looking birdsfoot trefoil and you can see trefoil is not very competitive against weeds it's a slow-growing and it is fairly long-lived and receives itself very well but like the Sand Point it contains the condense tannins that help reduce blow there's been research in Canada where they were.

15:43 As little as 10% of the diet being birdsfoot trefoil or Sandpoint the other 90% being pre bloom alfalfa they were able to eliminate bloat. So it is in my experience it works extremely well except for that one knothead cow that insists on eating nothing but alfalfa so it's not a hundred percent if you do manage grazing where you force animals to eat everything in the paddock or try everything in the paddock before moving on it works better yet but very very effective at reducing bloat also improves animal performance and it is pretty taller in a wet feet and salt and most plants are not tolerant of both those conditions the trefoil is we've got several alfalfas.

16:49 The different alfalfa types they are starting to differentiate a little bit here in alfalfa in general I think has really overlooked as a pasture plant people are so scared of bloat that they refuse to use alfalfa as a pasture plant I think they're really missing the boat if you manage alfalfa it'll produce more protein more nitrogen per acre than any other pasture plant we can grow and meat and milk are both proteins you don't get protein without having nitrogen and nothing makes more nitrogen per acre in a perennial system than alfalfa so this has a huge amount of potential and if you can manage the alfalfa is perfect pasture plan except for two things animals kill alfalfa and alfalfa kills animals other than that it's great but there are ways of managing around that rotational grazing more rapidly you moved the lesser risk becomes pasturing after bloat combining with tannin containing plants there's a number of feed supplements like laments and blow guards both pet all help reduce flow potential mixing with grasses plant diversity those can all give you a measure of safety when pasturing alfalfa I've been pasture now alpha for about 20 years now at my place as far as alfalfa varieties this is common alfalfa.

18:37 This is something that is produced for us in South Dakota we know its origin we're very comfortable with it Tom and alfalfa when you buy calm and alfalfa it's like going to the bar on Saturday night everybody puts their spouses name in a hat and everybody at the end of the night draws a name out and that's who you go home with for the rest of your life you may get an upgrade chances are you won't that's calm and alfalfa because calm and alfalfa is whatever someone combine and decided to sell as alfalfa see you may get a very good variety chances are you won't we're very confident in this because we know the source so I don't have a problem with us marketing this as.

19:27 You can see it's pretty good as far as the named varieties that we have. We've got the low leg which is a low lignin and it's not a GMO and is natural breeding designed to maintain higher forage quality at bloom. So if you're producing hay market hay, this is a variety. Styria to the Nitro graze is a recessed crown variety. The crown is down below ground where it's protected from hoof traffic, wheel traffic, makes the plant a lot more persistent, especially under grazing. If you are in a grazing situation, I kind of steer you towards the Nitro graze.

20:15 The branch root alfalfa—foothold, yes. The branch treat alfalfa in wet low-lying areas. Alfalfa roots tend to rot off and the only thing you have is a tap root that plant's going to have a hard time surviving. The branch treat alfalfa, if the bottom of the plant root rots off, it will shoot roots off to the side that enable it to survive in those wet areas. Probably not as good a wetland plant as some of the clovers or other options, but if you want pure alfalfa in a wet area, this is going to give you some options there.

21:04 This one, take a look at this stuff. This I am very excited about. This is an alfalfa we got from Australia. It's a fall seven dormancy. Now, usually if you understand how fall dormancy works in alfalfa, the higher the dormancy score, essentially the higher yielding it is, everything else equal, because it will grow, put more into top growth in between cuttings. The drawback of that is if it is putting above ground growth, especially in the fall, you lose winter hardiness.

21:49 This is a fold or mat 7. This is a 2. These are fours. That's the extra yield you get out of that higher dormancy score. Problem is that comes at the sacrifice of winter hardiness. But this is also a recessed crown, so instead of that crown being above ground where it's exposed to the weather, it's down below ground where it's protected. So my theory was that by combining a recessed crown and a high dormancy, we can get high production without winter kill. We had a very severe winter here. It survived just fine.

22:27 Now we do have a lot of rye grass in it. We did not get seed from Australia in time. We got some from a guy in Texas that had some, and this stuff came in with his seed. Unfortunately, all the ryegrass, but it does appear to be a very productive plant. If you think there's a difference now, come back in October. It's about 4 to 1 in favor of the Australian alfalfa. Very excited about the potential of this. If it continues to survive winters, that's a home run. And you're headed—I mean grades at the baler, yeah.

23:07 Yeah it'll bail fine. It does seem to be coarser stemmed. I think it's going to take a hit in relative feed value compared to especially the low leg. Seems to have a bigger stem but as far as Cal, I think it's just fine. It'll bloom.

23:29 It does bloom on a different schedule though. It actually seems to bloom a little bit quicker, which is good in a rotation. The low leg alfalfa also seems to not stand as direct.

23:49 Your low lignin alfalfas in general tend to launch worse because the role of lignin in that stem is to hold it upright, so you don't want to leave it sitting out in the field very long. But that's one of those selling points. You don't want to leave it out there. I mean, of course the people who were wanting to produce quality hay, they're usually cutting it early bloom. It shouldn't sit out there that long if that's what your goal is.

24:23 Now usually when people plant pastures they think about grass first because when we think about pasture, I mean grass and pasture are kind of used interchangeably as a term. Turning cattle out to grass—well, there's more than grass in that pasture. There are legumes too, and we like grass for yield, we like legumes for the nitrogen, but there are other plants out there that have benefit and some of those benefits are the secondary plant compounds.

24:54 This chicory here, you look up and down here. What's the most productive species that we've got in this plot right here? This is not a grass and it's not a legume. It's a forb and it's got roots to go halfway to China. Extremely deep tap roots. These leaves are extremely digestible, up and close to 90% digestibility over 20 percent protein.

25:28 And if you buy it, if you look at the tag on a bag of cattle mineral in this area in particular, it will be very high in copper, zinc, and phosphorus because those are the three minerals that grazing livestock tend to be deficient in. And this will have—if you look at the NRC National Research Council recommendations for percent copper or percent phosphorus in livestock diet—it will be about 0.3. Everything we've talked about so far on good soil will be about 0.25. They're all deficient. This way around 0.6 to 0.7. It will have double the phosphorus content then animal needs in the diet. It'll be about double the copper, double the zinc of what an animal needs. Everything else is deficient in those, so sticking these in can give you a very bioavailable mineral package. Also, this contains the tannins like the trefoil in the Sandpoint that help reduce bloat.

30:51 Considered kind of a humid area grass, the older varieties. That's very true. The newer varieties of orchard grass have much better drought tolerance, much better rust resistance than the older varieties. So I've gone from saying orchard grass doesn't belong out here to saying yeah, orchard grass, it's a good component of a mixture. It really does confer some benefits.

31:26 Orchard grass will regrow better during the summer than most of your cool season grasses. You get continual regrowth instead of just a spring flush and then you're done. So it's a nice species to include in a mix. It is a bunch grass and does not spread, so it competes less with legumes than something like smooth brome that tends to take over. So nice in a mixture. I don't know if I would try to use it as a solo species.

31:59 Now what we've got here are three different varieties of a species called prairie brome. Prairie brome is a short-lived perennial, it's a bunch grass, it is extremely easy to establish, it is extremely high-quality. It does like nitrogen. Does not have nitrogen, you get this not very impressive growth, but when it gets some groceries, it really takes off.

32:36 One of the real benefits of prairie brome and Matua over here is, kind of the first one that was introduced into the U.S., is these seed heads. Most grass varieties, once grass heads out, becomes very unpalatable. These seed heads, actually livestock like them. They will eat the seed, they'll eat the seed heads, and that's a real benefit for something like this where you want a cool season grass. If you're not going to be able to graze until this time of year and still have some quality.

33:15 A couple of bromes here we've got meadow brome and smooth brome. If you look at them, they both look very similar, it's hard to tell one from the other, but they behave completely differently. Smooth brome is a sod former, spreads by rhizomes. It really grows well in the spring and then doesn't do anything the rest of the summer, which is why a lot of people don't like smooth brome. It is a great conservation grass because it does spread and form a good sod.

33:52 Meadow brome behaves very much like orchard grass. It's a bunch grass that regrows very well after grazing, but smooth brome does not. So the meadow brome, I use meadow brome and orchard grass in a lot of mixtures because of that good regrowth and good seasonal distribution. I usually put one pound of smooth brome in my mixtures per acre, and that's to fill in gaps when the other grasses don't get a good stand, because it will thicken up the orchard grass and the meadow brome don't very well.

34:29 Appearance, this one over here is Western wheatgrass, it's our native wheatgrass. It is very tough, for drought-tolerant, and does spread through rhizomes, so it will thicken up. The pubescent wheatgrass here, as you can see, is quite a bit more productive. This is like the Western wheatgrass—is very drought tolerant, and this is recommended down to about 12 inches of annual rainfall, which is about half of what we average here. And even though we've had a fairly dry year, it's performed very well, very similar to intermediate wheatgrass—easy to establish. This one does tend to spread better than intermediate wheatgrass, so great product. I think this has some real American in dryland pasture mixes, so keep an eye out for this.

35:36 It's pretty much indistinguishable for many, many years for part of how it feeds hot pastures, just spreads a little bit better, and it's slightly more drought tolerant. You get a little bit better utilization on it because it spreads more.

35:57 Then get quite Salaam pia. No Timothy. Timothy here—Timothy is used extensively back east, and in my opinion, that's where it ought to stay. Has no heat tolerance to the drought tolerance, no grazing colors. It is pretty decent as a hay grass under irrigation for the horse market because for some people, for some reason, someone started a river a long time ago that Timothy is good horse hay. It's really no better than broom or any other cool season grass, but it has a reputation, so there's a market for Timothy hay in horse circles. Far as I'm concerned, it really has no value out here, so I encourage people not to use timothy.

36:49 Rye grasses and rye grass derivatives. Perennial ryegrass is a fantastic quality grass in places like New Zealand, Ireland, where they have moderate temperatures and frequent rainfall. Perennial ryegrass is the standard for grasses for quality, tolerates grazing very well. A lot of the quality of ryegrass comes because it maintains the first product at photosynthesis is glucose, and glucose is very, very good growth-promoting sugar in plants as far as livestock forage quality. Most cool-season grasses take that glucose, convert it as soon as possible in the fructose, which increases the heat, drought, and winter survivability of those grasses. That's why those grasses tolerate heat, drought, and winter better than rye grasses. The ryegrass has much better forage quality, promotes animal gains and fattening much better than these other grasses. How do you get the best of both worlds? One attempt was with this Festulolium. Festulolium is a hybrid between meadow fescue and perennial ryegrass, trying to get the toughness of fescue with the quality of ryegrass, and they

38:31 Succeeded. The only problem is that fistula liam usually will only live about two years and then it dies out. So the way we use the festial Oh liam and the prairie brooms is either if you want a short term stand for two, three years and no longer than that, good grasses. If you want to add it to a mixture of slow developing species so you get more first year production, use this, but it is a great quality boost. One guy I know just broadcast five pounds an acre a rye grass every year just like you would with red clover or white clover just to get a good quality boost in your perennial grass pastures, and he's very happy with how that's performed.

39:22 For fescues, there's three types of fescue on the market. One that's been around forever, Kentucky 31. 31 stands for 1931. This is closing in on a hundred-year-old genetics here, and this is still the number one selling pasture grass in the United States, which is really, really sad. It's kind of like that would be like saying that the Model T is still the number one selling vehicle in the United States. Do not plant this stuff. It contained the into fight, produces a toxin that just really hammers animal performers. However, it also improves the heat and drought tolerance of the grass, so it does have some benefits to the plant but not to the grazing animal. So once they discovered that in the 70s, they developed into fight free varieties. They studied it, they figured out how to get the fescue without the in to fight, and so we got into fight free varieties like this Kentucky 32.

40:42 If you turn around, you'll see that this plant got eaten, this plant got trampled, and so it is really a big difference in palatability, big difference in animal performance. But they found out that when you take the in to fight out, the plant loses its heat and drought tolerance. So what they've done since is they've developed novel into fights plants with into fights that do not produce toxins.

41:17 If you are planting fescue, if you're in an area where cool season grass orchard grass does well, where conditions are mild, you don't have a lot of heat and drought, and to fight free works very well. If you are out here where we are, marginal in rainfall and we have eaten drought, I would plant and not win to fight. They do cost more, but that expense is well worth it because you shouldn't have to replant it every so often like you do with and then to fight free.

41:56 No, what we've got over here essentially, this is a pasture blend that I put together that contains most of those species. We did leave some out. We left out the end to fight fescue and we left out a couple others. But how's the productivity of this compared to anything over there?

42:27 I love the looks of this pasture. This is kind of the pasture mix I try to grow on my place, and when it gets to this stage, not very well. When it's in this stage, extremely well. One of the first things they'll come in there and eat this. I mean, this should have been grazed earlier than this, but one really intriguing thing—if you turn around, look behind you—what would you say the consumption was there when they had a choice? Now, part of that is because this is the south end and they walk into the wind and call it a night, you know, and kind of shoo flies and stuff, but they're only in here six hours.

43:13 A lot of that is because when you blend plants together, there's a phenomenon called form sensing that goes on below ground where plants will actually share microbial metabolites. The root exudates from this, the bacteria will digest that, they'll produce compounds they get taken up by the plant next to it. You just get a whole underground economy where plants share resources that are mediated by microbes, and each of these plants becomes healthier. In order for that to happen, you have to have multiple plant families, and we are just scratching the surface on understanding that. The only thing I know about that process is that it happens. That's the level of my understanding right there.

44:10 One of the neat things about this is not just the diversity, and you won't be able to see it here because it got grazed off—these plots we inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi. Right now, looking at here, you can't see a lot of difference between it. About the only difference I noticed is that the weed biomass is greater over here like with the kochia than over here, and the kochia's stunted and yellow here and dark green over here. Mycorrhizae are not benefited by mycorrhizal fungi. So over here the plant roots of the perennials are more competitive, and so the kochia cannot get what it needs over here and it can't over here, but not other than that, not a big difference.

45:01 Here where we got irrigation last summer, over there where the sprinkler didn't hit, the biomass probably double here what it was over there. The guys that were here, if you want to see that difference in a couple days, we're going to post up the videos we took from a couple of weeks ago in this plot prior to that being grazed, and you'll see a pretty distinct advantage to where we inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi.

45:41 Mycorrhizal fungi help with drought tolerance and nutrient uptake, and they make a huge difference, especially on perennials. Another benefit of the perennial and mycorrhizal fungi—I mean, not only do you have the establishment, the better drought tolerance, nutrient uptake, but the mycorrhizal fungi on a perennial will produce spores they can carry over into the next crops in the rotation and confer drought tolerance and fertilizer efficiency to those crops later on.