Content tagged with forage

  • Spring Oats- Forage, Fast! Paige Smart, Southeast AgriSeeds

    Between frigid winter weather and the dry fall, winter annual forages have taken a hit this year. If you have evaluated your fields and confirmed that the majority of the plants are dead or have decayed, your best chance at a ready-to-harvest forage in 45-55 days is a spring oat. These wide-leafed winter annuals have prolific growth, are highly…

  • Spring Oats, the Missing Piece Southeast AgriSeeds

    A great challenge in cattle operations is needing forage…fast. In Bermudagrass based systems, the lack of growth between when Bermuda growth slows and cereal rye or ryegrass growth begins is an incredible challenge. A similar issue is found in fescue based systems- fall growth of fescue slows or nearly stops once the day length shortens and…

  • How do I know when to graze a mix? Tim Fritz, King’s AgriSeeds

    Mixtures bring yield stability to a forage field as each species and variety has its own strengths and weaknesses.  These factors include: soil adaption, climate adaptation, disease resistance, harvest timing, yield distribution over the seasons, nutrient needs and contributions to soil health, and of course nutrition and fiber for the…

  • Cool Season Perennial Grass Selection for the Southeast Paige Smart, Southeast AgriSeeds

    Adaptation to climate and soil type are not the only considerations when it comes to selecting a cool-season perennial. Farm constraints, management style, and long term goals should all be part of the decision. Take a minute to evaluate where your forage system is now and where you want it to be. From there, you can work towards selecting the…

  • When is Corn Alternative Forage? Anonymous

    “Corn” “Diversity” and even “innovative cropping systems” usually don’t go together in the same sentence. When used in a stockpiled winter grazing system, it turns out they occasionally can.

  • Red River Crabgrass as a Forage Paige Smart, Southeast AgriSeeds

    If you have ever been in the row crop or bermudagrass hay business, the name “crabgrass” makes you cringe. This prolific summer annual grass has been rampant across the Southeast for years, showing itself in corn and soybean fields and filling in between fescue and bermudagrass plants in pastures. Its capacity to reseed, “crawl”, survive through…

  • Cool Season Annuals

    Cool season annuals are critical for filling in forage gaps in the late fall through late spring. Each species of grass grows and matures at a different rate, making it easy to select a species based off when forage is needed. Furthermore, these grasses can be planted together for the widest production window. This is referred to as “staging”…

  • Crabgrass: A Short Step from Weed to Valuable Forage! Dr. Joe Bouton, Bouton Consulting Group, LLC

    Everyone knows crabgrass as a weed; few know it as a valuable summer annual forage.  That view is changing with more and more producers planting and utilizing crabgrass as part of their forage-livestock production systems. There are differences between the weedy type and the cultivated type.  Both are botanically in the genus Digitaria…