What to do about no hay or not enough hay to get through the winter? If hay is costing $30 a roll and it takes 5 rolls to get the cow through the winter that is $150 worth of hay. Now add two pounds of cubes per day times 180 days equals 360 lbs of cubes times twelve cents a pound and your cube cost are $43.20 for a total cost of $193 per cow. The other option is spread 50 lbs of Bob oats and disk them in, or if you prefer you may disk first then no till the oats in. Then seed the following .75 lbs of Seven Top Turnips, 45 lbs of TAM TBO, 20 lbs of Crimson Clover with 200 lbs of 20-5-21 per acre. After spreading the seed and fertilizer, it would be good to pull a light drag to make sure that the seed made good contact with the soil. Then budget for coming back later with 300 lbs of 25-0-15 per acre. All of this at today’s cost is $157.85 per acre. With some good moisture, one acre should handle 3 cows with a back up of three rolls of $30 hay for a total of $90 worth of hay plus $157 and the total cost for 3 cows would be $247 or $82.33 per cow. That would be around $110 less cost then feeding straight hay all winter. If you only got 2 cows per acre you would still save $193 - $123.5 = $69.50 per cow savings. However, if I were planning on 2 cows per acre I would not plant the oats. I would plant this early between Labor day and the 15^th of September. For the turnips to work we need them to germinate in very warm soil. What about armyworms? Be ready to treat. Check twice each day, and have Silencer on hands to spray with. At worst you may have to spray twice, but the results far out weigh the cost. Silencer costs less then $3.00 per acre per application. We have it on hands. Some may ask why Turnips? Turnips are cheap to plant plus they provide the earliest grazing of any forage that is available. Some times your cattle may need to learn to eat turnips, once they figure them out they will really like them.

Texas A&M at Overton did some work on what is the best way to plant ryegrass. The study showed two very interesting discoveries. First, by lightly disking the ground increased the forage yield on the first harvest by about 50% more forage. They planted four different ways, first they just broadcasted the seed and dragged it in which gave the poorest results. Secondly they no tilled the seed in, this gave a little better results over broadcasting and dragging the seed in. Thirdly they lightly disked then they no tilled and the other they broadcasted and dragged. There was basically no difference in yield between no tilling and broadcasting on lightly disked soil. So whether you plan on no tilling or broadcasting followed by dragging, it really pays to lightly disk ahead of time. Be sure not to disk too deep, this will make the seed bed too soft and the seed will sink too deep in the soil and a poor stand will result. The second interesting thing about this study, they planted from 15 lbs to 45 lbs of ryegrass per acre. The increased seeding rate nearly increased the first harvest by another 50%. The study also showed that by doing both you could almost double your first harvest yield by disking firsts, and then increase the planting rate to 45 lbs. per acre.

Why are we so high on TAM TBO? If TAM TBO is not the top yielding ryegrass it is always up near the top. Most other ryegrasses will have a good year and than they come up with a really bad year. TAM TBO is always in the top 25% of all the ryegrasses at Overton and on a three-year average it is the top producing ryegrass. Next, to everyone’s surprise, TAM TBO can compete with Maton rye, wheat, triticale and barley for fast and early forage production. Last fall we asked Overton to run a side by side comparison, here are the results on the first harvest; TAM TBO yielded 1169, Maton rye was 539, Pennbar 66 barley was 364, tricticale was 174, and NF 96131 wheat was 746. The other factor to throw in this was that TAM TBO also yielded longer in the spring than the rest. Now as Paul Harvey says, here is the rest of the story; If your are trying to put gain on cattle or increase milk production on winter pasture, ryegrass has more digestible nutrients including energy than rye or wheat. With the high price of corn purchasing feed for energy is pretty costly. A good winter pasture as outlined at the first of this article will provide more energy for the money. Plus the fertilizer program will provide the nitrogen needed for having a good protein level as well. All that is left to do is to feed a good mineral and provide some dry hay if the ryegrass gets too lush.

We are short of hay this year again, but if feeding hay is your thing, then you need to consider making hay out of ryegrass in place of coastal Bermuda grass. Then what would you do with the Bermuda grass? Graze it. Here is the reason for this, first we get most of our moisture in the spring when ryegrass is ready to grow. Therefore ryegrass offers a better guarantee for hay than Coastal. In the two drought years we had, we had a producer who does this every year, he never had to sell cattle for lack of hay. The problem of putting up hay early in the spring is getting it to dry down. To help solve this problem, it is best to plant a late maturing ryegrass such as TAM TBO, Prine, or even Marshall. These will allow you to cut a couple of weeks later with out hurting quality. For this, I would recommend planting 25 lbs of ryegrass, adding clover would be a good idea, it will add value to your hay. Clovers I would recommend for this would be with my first choice first, Crimson Clover, Apache, and Ball Clover. I would rate Crimson with four stars, Apache with two stars and Ball Clover with one star.

What about clovers in pastures? First make sure you get your pH up above 6.2 to 6.7. The top perennial clover in grazing situations would be either Durana or Resolute clovers. If you are on very tight soils you may want to use Patriot clover. Plant these clovers after a good hard killing frost. Get as much of the thatch and top growth off as possible. Do not disk or loosen the soil too much if any at all. Put down only three lbs of seed per acre, drag to make good soil seed contact, then turn the cattle in to keep any growth of ryegrass from getting to big. Take the cattle off if it gets too wet and they start to track up the pasture. You will normally not see clover till about April, or May. I did not see any clover till late June and that was three years ago and I have an excellent stand today. Next fall you may plant ryegrass in the clover and your cattle are going to like you a lot. Why I like these clovers? Once you have them going, in the fall when it rains, they do not have to germinate, they just start growing when they get the moisture, which gives you much quicker grazing. Also these clovers will put down around 150 lbs of nitrogen per acre, and that will probably be all the nitrogen you will ever need in a grazing situation. After they are established, they will need to be controlled in the spring as they will really grow fast. So heavy grazing in the spring, cut for hay, or spray about a pint of 2–4 D per acre to slow it down. A second choice for pastures would be Ball clover. Ball clover is an annual clover, but it is a very good reseeder. Ball clover will put down around 80 lbs of nitrogen per acre. I have found that ball clover will do well in the sand. Like all clovers keep the pH up above 6.2 and keep the phosphate levels high. Which, if you are on a chicken litter program you need to be planting clovers. Why? Chicken litter helps bring the pH up plus it provides a lot of phosphorus which clover like very much. After the first cutting of hay from chicken litter most of the nitrogen will be used up from the litter. The clover will then provide extra nitrogen for a better second crop of hay.