Grasses and Grazing

In recent years, many in the Midwest U.S. have experienced wetter-than-normal conditions, causing headaches for many area farmers. Flood conditions bring more issues than just moisture; saturated situations can cause contaminants, alterations to the physical soil profile and a severe loss of nutrients.

Many things impact the performance of your grazing system. Pasture and range are very diverse ecosystems, and finding the sweet spot where the soil, plants and animals come together in the optimal way is the quest of the adaptive grazing manager.

In a wide array of agricultural publications, I’ve been reading about something called “Brix.” As in: We need “high Brix levels in our forages” to support good cattle growth.

The winter of 2018-19 in Virginia was the muddiest, sloppiest, wettest one anyone could remember. Heading into spring, many livestock producers were looking for a forage they could broadcast into their damaged pastures, travel lanes and feeding areas to provide some cover and compete with summer annual weeds.

Farmers in western Colorado are showing more interest in including cover crops in their cropping systems for soil benefits. Cereal rye (Secale cereale L.) is well known as a winter-hardy cover crop suitable for various climate and soil conditions.

This article discusses spring checkup recommendations for introduced and native pastures.