This presentation was given as part of the Forages at KCA session entitled “Harnessing the Power of Soil Life” that was held at the Kentucky Cattlemen’s Association’s Annual Meeting on January 12, 2024 in Lexington, KY.
Um as I mentioned you’ve got the proceedings we’ve also got a copy of the proceedings from our grazing conference um back in the fall those are in the back um so take a look at these we’ve already mentioned the KY forages YouTube channel all of our conferences that
We’ve done over the last seven years I think Chris um are on that YouTube channel so KY Forge is YouTube If you go to that and hit playlist then you can see it conference by conference by conference um and and go back and look at that historically you can also sign
Up to get a a notification for every time Chris post a a new recording of of one of our meetings or or one of our special events Ian if you haven’t picked up a copy of the our UK Forge grazing Calendar please do that um now you may
Say I don’t need a calendar I use the one on my phone but one of the things that we’re proud of and that we focused on with this calendar is we put in there every month of the year the kinds of things that you should be doing or at
Least thinking about on your farm that are going to help your operation uh particularly related to um forage management um and just while I’m thinking um we do appreciate if you fill out this evaluation that helps us a whole lot not only in planning this program but in planning other programs
So whenever I want to go to our UK forages web page I just Google KY forages or UK forages and we’ve got Resources with Publications and individual videos under each of these categories we’ve got our Forge news a monthly publication that comes to you and gives you updates and and and
Research things that are happening um you can subscribe to it and get in your email if you want to get a paper copy of it um the easiest way is to just email me Chris I think probably going to people here would be the easiest way to
Get our um email address or contact information um if you go to events on that web page it gives the upcoming events um and I put a copy with more detail of our Kentucky alphaalpha stored Forge conference so you can go to that and click on it and register or get or
Or see the full details the of America grazing conference is going to be just across the river in Cincinnati uh coming up February 19th and 20th we’ve got a tall fescue renovation Workshop we don’t have one in Kentucky this year um focused with cattle there’s one focused
With for equin in end of September I mean end of January but there’s one just down in Tennessee so that that would be a workshop um now we were talking about young people getting into um getting into agriculture ulture or being successful in agriculture and that’s how we focus the alal stored Forge
Conference it’s getting into the hay business how can you make money in Hay sometimes we talk about um if you’re not selling hay for enough value you’re actually losing money making hay um but there’s a number of producers in Kentucky that are making money in the hay business and we’ll have some of
Those talk in fact the late morning and afternoon we’ll have people that are Mar that that do a lot of marketing with hay and straw um toward the end of the day we’ll have a number of people talk about how I got started in the hay business The Good the
Bad and the Ugly people that are successful now that started small and built their way up and in and in fact one of our producers is going to talk about um I think it’s in the morning um how to find and evaluate used equipment you know you can go buy that fancy John
Deere autonomous um combine or tractor um or you can you can buy an an old tractor and and know what to look for and fix it up or hay bill or Etc so good conference coming up in Bowling Green February 8th and any of these meetings you know
If you say oh I really want to know that information but I just can’t make that day or I can’t take off work that day then Chris will be recording this as well that you can go back and listen to um we’ve got a couple of fencing
Schools coming up Chris the week of April 22nd week of April 22nd um we’ve got a grazing School coming up in Princeton um again I think that is um early May Chris I’ll have to look at that but both of those events we’ll have on the website probably have those dates
Just within a couple of weeks this is example of the forge news that that I was talking about okay I want to highlight just a couple things that are very useful in your operation then I want to talk a little bit about things that you can do come up like frost
Seating so with with your pasture management if you’re thinking about well what can I do that’s going to make a big difference you know do I need to go buy more fertilizer I do I need to go buy um you know this or that if you can just
Think about one thing is if you can rest your pastures in fact for most of us we’re probably not resting them enough so if you can rest them a bit more than you’re doing that probably is going to make more difference than herbicide and fertilizer Etc and when I talk about
Resting it might be rotational grazing it might be um dividing things up a little bit more Seth made the comment that the best thing he did was that first subdivision he made in a pasture so don’t think about the fact that you need to split your farm up into 20
Little paddocks even just a few subdivisions can make a big difference maybe you’re on rented land um or You’ got several leases even even one subdivision can make a difference and in just one bit of data that I’ll show you from Carl huband University of Georgia he looked at the gain per acre
Gain per animal and the hay required um for winter and a beef cow using different grazing methods and just changing to rotational grazing given those rest periods over continuous grazing stocking rate improved by 38% calf gain per acre by 37% the hay fed per cow dropped by 32%
And and this really is saying we’re starting to give rest periods now that rest period you know it may be a month that you’re resting a pasture and you’re grazing a week but it could be if you just make one division in a pasture and
You can graze it for two or three weeks and then you can move it to the other side and rest two or three weeks that’s going to make a difference that’s going to give a benefit another way to think about resting is just giving those pastures as
We in the fall of the year and move into the winter I’m going to give you an example of two different pastures so we dug up a bit of soil soil and grass from two different pastures this one was rested all winter long this pasture was
Grazed all winter long so we we dug them up in kind of early March and we looked at what happened over a period of a couple of weeks with how they grew back so think about this you obviously want quick regrowth from your pastures in the
Spring so you can get the animals out there sooner okay here’s six days of growth so both are coming back but obviously the one that was rested over the winter I’m not grazing to the ground is coming back quicker day 15 you know they they both have some
Height to it but you got much more forged material there from that one that was rested over winter because it was it had carbohydrates stored in the base of the stems and down in the roots that was able to give a lot more growth coming
Back now let me back up here a minute now if I wanted to frost seed clover in mid-February and I’ll talk about that a bit more in a minute and I wanted to see which of these two pastures am I going to get my Clover to establish better it
Would be in that one that maybe not grazed all winter but had been grazed down close because the Clover seeds going to hit the soil the Frost action is going to cause some heaving we’ll get a better Clover establishment over here but we’re not going to get as much
Production so if some of your pastures you graze down hard you put Clover into you get that added nitrogen fixation and added quality um you’ve got a benefit if other pastures you can rest um then you get that kind of growth in the spring so so resting is not only grazing and
Resting through the spring and summer and fall it’s also having at least some of your pastur that you’ve rested over winter now you might look at this and say well those horsee they had terrible weeds um I I never never um going to get weeds like that but some of us even our
Cattle pastors are seeing things like Buttercup and and real issues with those so I’m showing this for two reasons um one to well um Seth made the comment he does use you just as use of herbicides he’s not saying that you should never do that sometimes we get
Our pasture land or haand and and in such we get it into a situation by our management our mother nature gets into a situation um that we have some weed issues and how do we deal with those the best way to deal with them is if we can
Keep a good cover on that land it reduces those weeds germinating like that rest over winter um gives a a thicker stand in the spring but when we do have issues sometimes we do have to go and try to knock those out so go to that UK Forge website or actually even
Just Googled this title um broadleaf weeds of Kentucky pastures and you got a great publication showing weeds and then showing the products that will control those Weeds on the other side so that one that you saw on that photo Buttercup there’s a bunch of herbicides that will
Control Buttercup if you look here a lot of them will control it and even just 24d um one of our cheapest herbicides what does a good job of controlling Buttercup but notice when it says to spray says to spray in February or March so we’re looking for a few days 2 3 days
That are 50° it’s it’s not much below freezing or not below freezing at night it’s going to be sufficient temperatures to be able to spray um if you can knock out Buttercup when it’s little then you can do a really good job of killing it if
You wait till it have has flowers on it by the time Buttercup has flowers it’s already producing seed so you’re already kind of behind so buttercup’s one that’s pretty easy to control if you do the right timing and then making sure that same pasture in the fall if it’s got a
Lot of bare ground if you haven’t been able to get regeneration through um through the resting then you may have to do some over overseeding of of grass um you get into other um things like tall Ironweed or um horse nettle then you probably will have to go to
Some of the more longer lasting um residual herbicides like duracore gr on next but you don’t need that um for Buttercup so just a reminder judicious use of herbicides is sometimes needed making sure you get the right timing and that you choose the right herbicide um for your
Issue now I wanted to remind you because the time of the year and because of how coste effective it is of the value of frost seeding Clover so right now we’re mid January um mid-February is a good time to be thinking about getting clovers into those pastures um in fact almost
Any time of the winter we can put Clover seed out the the problem is if you wait and you wait and you wait and it gets to middle of March and we don’t really have much more Frost action then you’re going to need to get a notil drill to be able
To effectively get clovers in there um Chris took the lead along with Jimmy and I in in updating a a publication really it’s a brand new publication Frost seeding Clover a recipe for Success um we had some of these up at the kfg booth just simple
Steps to get Clover into pasture and and frost seeding is no more than putting seed on top of the ground where there’s some bare soil showing you grazed it down and letting Mother Nature bury the seed um and then getting an establishment and just a couple of tips
With that the seeds needs to reach bare soil you need adequate freeze Thal cycle so that’s one we talk about mid-February control competition after seating um that would mean once the Clover gets started and the grass gets started the grass gets ahead of the Clover I’m grazing that grass off with a
Quick grazing um to keep the canopy open so the Clover has a chance to get started use high quality seed use the collect correct seating rate get good even seed distribution um Chris has done a a fair bit of work on just simple units um simple GPS units that you can
Put on a a tractor a four four-wheel um or ATV um can help with seed distribution so you’re not overlapping yourself now I’m not quite sure why we turned out all the lights I don’t want you guys to go to sleep but I don’t have but a few more
Slides um a rule of thumb we’ve used for years in Kentucky is 6 to eight pounds of red clover one to two pounds of a larger type white clover L Dino type white clover um does an excellent job in most of our pastures as long as we’ve
Got our pH above six we’ve got um just even medium phosphorus and potassium um if the poor if we got poor soils we may not feel like we can afford to fertilize it to the levels that we need to to get the red and white clover red and Lino
Clover um that annual esped is an option now all three of these the the red clover the Lino Clover and the annual aseda seed has been very tight the last few years on leeda but it’s very tight this year on all of these um the improved varieties of red and
White clover um are probably going to run out probably in mid-February and you go to the seed store you may not be able to buy the ones that are going to be best adapted for Kentucky so go ahead and get those lined up now and you may B
At the seed price um it has continued to go up but if you want to get the free nitrogen that you get from Clover the added quality you get from Clover um the benefits of red clover and alleviating fescue toxicosis um you know you will need to pay a price
And paying for the better varieties is going to give you better longevity twice the length um a improved variety of rad Clover typically lives twice as long um so going three years for an improved variety over just a year and a half from the the cheap seed um the common red
Clover so Frost seeding as we talked about grazing down close I’ve mentioned that a couple of times um here’s a simple demo that we did in quicksand so right here we we actually used a mower we mowed and removed the clippings the same as you do with
Grazing and then seated Clover back in February um this strip right here we just mowed it so there was a bunch of residue on top of the surface and the strip right here these were each 5 ft wide 20 ft long we just left the U
Stubble about 4 in tall and put the Clover in and we had much better success this is a photo in June um from just doing that clover in mid-February okay choosing a good variety we’ve talked a lot over time about variety testing in the testing we
Do in the back of your proceedings we’ve got a copy of a um our Forge variety summary um you go to the website and click under variety reports and this is what it will show you so you’ve got all of these reports you can look at we’ve
Got all the 2023 data up there um if you click on the red and white clover and leeda Report then it will give you some charts you can go to um if you click on the long-term summary report it’s going to give you a summary of all of the
Variety tests that we do and you’ll see there we’ve got 28 listed so we do a huge matter of variety test in K in Kentucky and it’s too small to see but the point I want to make is just look at that last column on these summary reports and you’ll see down there
There’s one variety that was 116% of average and the when we do the summary reports we want things that are better than 100 so better than average this is all based on averages um another variety is just 71% of average so way below average so just choose the ones that are above
Average um here’s a blow up of of part of the red clover report if you just buy the cheapest seed the common seed then in this case the one we bought a bag of and planted several different years with 78% of average where you get down to a variety like
Freedom or you get down even to kinland as long as you buy certified seed both way above average um not just on yield but on longevity so it’s worth spending a bit more money to buy and improve variety I’m going to end with that um and ask if there’s any questions for
Chris or I about what I said or anything else yes ma’am very good question so the question was I’m talking about spraying at kind of the same time I’m talking about adding Clover uh what do you do uh the long and the short it’s almost impossible to do both of those things
The same year so we’re talking about taking out Buttercup and then the following year would be when we’re I mean in the fall you could go ahead and over drill in some grass I you could put clover in there but it’s really easy to
Get in in the spring um so it’s kind of like a two-step process um and if you think about your whole Farm in areas that have a lot of issues then maybe this year I’m going to focus on taking out the weeds um next year going to get
Clover in there um yes Chris so so one option for areas that have been drastically Disturbed we have a fation on that on reclaiming those areas just search uh reclaiming drastically disturb feeding areas or something like that is to use the summer anual grass so you can straight through to control the
Buttercut and then come back with something that’s a little bit more tolerant to that herbicide after a little bit of a period you have to wait about one week the sound right more like two weeks per Pine of 24d so Chris is thinking about you knock
Out the Buttercup you you come in there after Frost and do a a sorum sedan grass through the summer months um then you could go in um with your you know improved tall fescue or something like that in the fall that’d be one way to stretch things out yeah
Any any other questions for us thank for his presentation