Planning Pasture Species Selection for Sheep and Goats

- Alright, welcome, everyone.

As Melanie said, I'm Justin Brackenrich.

I'll kind of jump through some of these introductory slides a little bit.

This is just to remind you that this will be recorded.

So I think you'll probably get a copy of this later as we jump back through this.

My next one is just to tell you, I'm not a vet, if we cover anything animal health wise, which we will, the reason we're doing this is for general knowledge, right?

This is just to kind of educate you on all of that stuff.

But if you have any issues with your livestock or your sheep or your goats, by all means, please reach out to your vet.

Don't reach out to Melanie or myself, 'cause our advice is gonna be to talk to your vet.

So let's kind of cut out the middle person and go straight to the smarter people than us that can give you the advice you're looking for.

So, yeah, so Melanie asked me, my name's Justin Brackenrich.

I'll kind of get to my introduction here in a minute.

But Melanie asked me to talk about planting species for pasture with sheep and goats.

And I can tell you, this isn't quite an exhaustive list, but about everything you really need to know is on this table, right?

We can kind of track across through a lot of this stuff.

And I could have summarized this from an hour to about 30 seconds and freed up a lot of our evening.

But we're gonna get a lot more into it, I hope that we can take something from this, and leave you with a lot of stuff.

But we are gonna see this table again.

And really what we're looking at is this species selection based on livestock groups.

And as we kind of scroll across this, what we're looking for are the perennial species.

Most of these are gonna be cool seasons that are gonna perform best.

What we see is a lot of Bs, maybe some Cs in this Timothy category.

That's because it's kind of a hay grass, right?

It's not gonna tolerate that repetitive vegetation that we would see from sheep and goats.

The other things that we can see are some of these issues with the clovers kind of showing up in here.

But this is a great place to start.

And a lot of what we're gonna talk about tonight, it's not this thing that's very clean and cut, that I can say, these are the species and this is the mix and this is the thing you should be using on your farm.

But more so of what I can advise you and how I can kind of equip you with some tools to put you in a good situation to deal with the person that's either selling you seed or talking to myself or someone like me or Melanie, and how we can kinda all get on the same page and make some good advice and some good recommendations to help all of us in our endeavors.

So as I mentioned, my name's Justin Brackenrich.

I'm an agronomist with Penn State.

I was at WVU '15 to '17 as a graduate student, worked for WVU in the Plant and Soil Science Department as well as Extension.

I spent five years, almost six years working for Penn State and Butler.

After that, I'm recently now moved down to kind of the southwest corner working in Greene, Washington, and Fayette.

So as much as I do work in corn and beans, my true and real love is in forages and what we can do better with our livestock systems.

Tonight, what I want you to leave with are the tools to understand species selection.

I want you to understand how we can prepare these seedbeds to be very successful while we're doing this.

And kind of throughout this, we're gonna talk a little bit about these best management practices, these BMPs that we can say, now we understand why this is happening or how we can do better to make this make sense to us within our livestock systems, right?

As agronomists, we don't get maybe all of the glory because we're not out there with the animals and we don't get to see 'em as much.

But it's a very integral part, right?

Is having a good pasture, having a good forage system to help support that animal.

So why are we reseeding, right?

Why are we thinking about species?

What's wrong with what we have?

Well, there's a couple different reasons, right?

Will this reseeding actually help?

People call me all the time and they say, "Well, my pasture is just not performing." Why is that, right?

So grass' job or legumes, whatever the characteristic or the plant may be at their root and at their base, it's to grow and it's to provide this forage and go to seed and do their job.

Why are they not being able to do that?

And with that knowledge that we've kind of generated is why is this maybe not helping that can change this type of reseeding that we would do?

And so this isn't gonna be just species selection, right?

This is gonna be depending on the species, depending on the issues we have.

Why is it happening and how can we reseed this better to be sure that it will work in the future and we can avoid some of this?

So the biggest reasons I see people end up doing these reseeding, and this is gonna come back around full circle, I promise if you bear with me a little bit.

Fertility is one of our biggest problems when we start thinking about pasture, right?

Pasture, when we set these up traditionally was everything unsuited for row cropping, right?

These were the steeper areas, these were the rockier areas.

We've since gotten better in the Mid-Atlantic or in the United States as a whole list of accepting that pasture is a crop.

We need to be managing as a crop because we want it to support the livestock that we're putting on that.

And so that means that we need to be managing a pH, right?

Somewhere between 6 and 6.5 We need to be monitoring some phosphorus of 30 to 50 parts per million.

There's some research, there's some crops, there's some things that support that we can be below some of these numbers.

But when we start talking potassium, right?

There are things from an animal health standpoint of grass tetany, the potassium and magnesium and the way these things interact.

These nutrients need to be there to not only support the grass but to support the animal.

So when we start first that step in reseeding our pasture selection species, conversation is how good is the fertility there?

And what can we do to improve that before we invest in the seed?

The next one is what's our grazing management, right?

Why are we losing seeding?

Is it part of this continuous stocking situation?

Are we rotationally grazing?

Are we doing some different things?

I think there's a lot of wonderful great things that we can do.

With grazing practices, not one size fits all, right?

This is very specific to some of our areas, the aspects of our slopes, our soils, our drainages, and all of these are gonna support things a lot differently.

The goal of good grazing management is to achieve canopy conditions that result in optimum levels of forage and animal performance.

So it's not just that animal performance, we don't just wanna throw 'em out there, make sure they're eating, make sure they're fed, because when we rotate 'em out, that seven days, if we're on this schedule and we bring 'em back 21 days later, we wanna make sure that we still have that forage there.

And we're not finding ourself in this kind of perpetual loop of over seeding or doing something to kind of strengthen that stand.

And what this looks like is, what's above ground is kind of reflective of what's below ground.

As we have this taller kind of vegetative state up here, what we see is better root response below.

If we have a very short grazing period with a longer recovery, we end up with a healthier above root, above ground plant, and a healthier root structure.

As we kinda lengthen out this grazing period and shorten up this recovery period, all of it kind of truncates, right?

We have less above ground growth, we have less group growth to support that.

And then this continuous system, which hopefully, we're kind of drifting away from a lot, but we see this kind of more in our dry lots or in our barn adjacent areas.

But that's what's happening and especially with like sheep and goats, right?

Is they can graze a little lower, they can kind of pull some of those up by the root in some cases.

That's where that root mass is really very important to see that we're getting that into the soil for, for some kind of structure.

The other reason some people can think about reseeding is for weed competition, the big one that I see in spring is when we're fighting winter annual.

So if you're looking out now and you're seeing stuff like some mustards, some purple deadnettle or maybe things like marestail, these really small annual plants, often that's due to a fertility concern, right?

If we had better fertility in our pastures, maybe we weren't grazing so closely, we would be able to kind of strengthen these stands, get more tilling, get above ground growth, get below ground growth.

And these annuals, these opportunistic type weeds aren't gonna be able to kind of express and proliferate in their development.

So again, overseeding new species isn't always the answer.

Damage, right?

This is kind of one of those things we deal with in overseeding or reseeding a lot is now that we're looking at March 5th, we're coming out of winter, we're looking at some rain right around the corner for us, we've really kind of woken up these grasses.

They're starting to grow.

What's next, right?

We see this damage start to occur, maybe that's why we're reseeding.

And then lastly, it's new varieties.

Every year, every couple years we're seeing these new and better varieties and sometimes we just want something better out there from a palatability standpoint, or maybe it's from a protein or a digestibility standpoint, right?

All of these things are good reasons.

I'm not saying one's better than the other, but we have to address what's going on before we know this reseeding is gonna help.

So now we're gonna talk a little bit about what type of reseeding we're gonna do.

I like to look at this kind of analogy as renovation versus rejuvenation.

If we're talking about this renovation, right?

We're starting from kind of ground zero, we're tearing it down to the studs, and we're putting it back, versus this regeneration, excuse me, this rejuvenation standpoint of, maybe we're gonna slap a little pain on this thing, maybe we're gonna update some sconces or something like that.

But we don't have this really invasive type treatment that we have to do.

Maybe six months, two months, we can really have something coming around versus this renovation, which can be a couple year process if things aren't so great.

So I wanna kinda look at these as some examples and talk about what maybe this could look like, right?

This is some very characteristic stuff I see coming outta like crept ground, right?

We see a lot of golden rod, we see some of this grass that may not be great, but this is probably a rejuvenation type situation.

We mow it, we soil test it, we lime it, we can oversee this with something likely and get some stands to kind of express versus something like this that's really been damaged.

We've seen a lot of winter feeding.

That's something we really kind of have to start from the ground up and work through this.

So here's some pictures.

We can't really interact, right?

This is the downside to Zoom in these types of meetings is I can't see you and I can't talk to you as much, but at home, think about what you would suggest with this type of a seeding, right?

So this is one of those where we've got a lot of hay, we've got a lot of organic matter.

I'll admit this is a beef cattle pasture, but this is gonna be one very similar that we would look about with this renovation, this total to the ground up, right?

This doesn't mean we're gonna have to till it, but what this means is we don't have a whole lot of side there to really start from.

We're starting over, we're picking new species, we're working through that process kind of top to bottom, bottom to top.

We already talked about this one, but again, this is gonna be one of those rejuvenations.

What about this one, right?

So we've come out a winter.

We clearly have some rings out here where hay may have sat.

We've got some tracks coming up through here.

What is this?

What do we think this would be, right?

This is a very characteristic of what one of these rejuvenations could be.

We don't have to come in here, we don't have to get really involved with a bunch of metal or a bunch of plows.

Often we can pick species that can be aggressive enough with what we have.

We can clean up a lot of this.

We'll talk more about all of these individual type applications.

But what I'm trying to do here is get you thinking about what you're dealing with at home and your operation and how all of this is gonna fit together?

So again, right?

What we see is we've got some alfalfa, we've got some orchardgrass.

This is a fairly thin stand, but we could probably just rejuvenate this.

We could come through here with a seed drill or an over the top application of something that's fairly aggressive and we could fill some of this in.

This is one of those I would suggest we might have some pH issues or we might have had some overwintering problems that have led to this.

So we might want to jump back and kind of consider what we can do here.

So this looks like it might be something more familiar to some of us, right?

This is kind of one of our concentrated animal feeding areas.

We're coming out of winter again.

We've got a bunch of sheep that are moving around here looking at mineral.

They're kind of pinching through this gate out here.

It looks quite nice, but right here is a problem.

To me, this one can go either way, right?

And it be becomes how much damage is here.

If we start to apply seed to the top of this, are we gonna be able to keep them out of here long enough to get that to establish?

How much of the top soil have we mixed with the subsoil?

Have we made this kind of very homogeneous mixture of soils that we're not gonna be able to really seed without some lime or some fertilizer mixture?

And so that can be a bigger process and we'll talk about some of those things here in a minute.

And then this last one that I wanna review is, is quite bad, right?

I took this one from a newspaper in New Zealand, but this is a pretty rough looking situation.

And this is absolutely gonna go back to one of these renovations, right?

We're not gonna be able to just broadcast seed on this or drill this with something else and get this to cover up.

We're gonna have to be back in here.

We're gonna have to make multiple applications of something, right?

We're really gonna have to clean this up and try because this is somewhere where they've been grazing a cover crop.

They've done some damage, likely gonna go back into a row crop to clean this up before it could go into forages.

But this is kind of the extent in the spectrum we may look at.

So just a quick recap, right?

Rejuvenations, if we're thinking about that, we can go with these very aggressive growing species of forages.

We can talk about things that are very competitive, less equipment, fertility is often the problem that we're dealing with that we can manage with some of that.

We can overseed these, we'll talk about broadcasting, and sometimes this can be a yearly activity, right?

So we look at something like this where got these bale rings, maybe every year we're coming back in here and just cleaning some of this up in April.

And that's not a problem, it's just part of the game.

And maybe some management tweaks, just some small things could help fix some of that establishment.

Renovation, these are more expensive, they're gonna be more involved.

They could take a season or two to get some of this stuff knocked out.

Hopefully, they're very infrequent I'm gonna sidestep a minute off of the pasture, but the one time I really do recommend a lot of these kind of total renovations is if we're talking about pasture or even hay ground where you've got a bunch of groundhogs or it used to be cropping ground and you've got a lot of dead furrows or problems that could lead to animal health concerns because of feet and ankles or your equipment.

There is a time where we can clean all that up, we can sew it down and we never have to go back in again.

So that's that very in infrequent type option.

And we really have to consider management changes if we're doing these things often.

So I see, I've got a couple questions.

Weeds are good for goats and sheep, yeah, right?

A lot of my producers, right?

I think that the weeds being good for them comes back to some of their habits as browsing versus grazing.

I often think that when they eat some of these things as a function of the rotation that they're in, right?

When we have these kind of conventional or continuous systems, weeds are good in moderation along with everything else.

But if they've stripped all of the other grass and the only thing else they have to live on are weeds, that's probably not a great problem that we can have.

Creeping Charlie is not, right?

So Creeping Charlie is not gonna be a fertility issue.

That's gonna be one that gets in there and is gonna be really hard.

So that issue is gonna be, it started maybe by a bit of a bare spot, now that it's in there.

It often takes some type of an herbicide to get rid of that because it is so low in the way that it's spread, right?

So prolifically that we can't get low enough to mow that out.

If we can get 'em to graze it, if we have a very tight rotation, we can kind of encourage them to graze down a little lower than usual.

But a lot of those low line perennials like that tend to be things we have to deal with a little bit differently.

Okay, so we're gonna go back to this and when we're gonna talk about seeding techniques.

The first place is timing.

There's two really different times that we can do this.

Spring and fall.

I'm preferably a fall seeder, right?

And when we say fall, we talk about this six weeks to killing frost.

The other option is spring, which would be six weeks before 80 degrees.

And that's hard to do this kind of day and age in this climate that we're in, right?

And so where I'm at in Southwest Pennsylvania, we're gonna hit some of these day highs at 75 degrees and we start hitting these lows greater than 60.

That's when these cool season grasses are gonna start to shut down.

That's when they're really not gonna wanna grow.

And so if we're talking about this spring seeding, we need to be in about six to eight weeks before this date.

And so if you're in Pittsburgh, that makes it about early May.

As you move kinda West, it makes, or excuse me, East, it makes it even earlier that you might even have to be in in April.

And the challenge that we deal with with these spring seedings is we are so darn wet.

We're getting wet really early, right?

Right now we're warming up but we're getting wet.

And so the thought of trying to be out there, get the livestock off of that field and somewhere else, but being able to appropriately manage the soils without causing more compaction and more rutting or something like that in March or early April can be really challenging.

So I like fall seedings and we call these fall kind of late summer and we're still kind of backtracking that six to eight weeks before frost.

So a lot of times I tell people Labor Day, if you can get it in before Labor Day or on Labor Day weekends, you're usually okay.

And the reason I like this is a new seeding, you need to keep your animals off of it for six to eight weeks at a minimum, right?

We have to get those new seedlings established.

I've heard some people recently call this like a tug test, right?

If you go out and you've recently seeded something, kind of pull on those little pieces of grass and if they just pop right up out of there, we know that they're not mature enough to be able to withstand any kind of graze.

And so that, again, that's that six to eight weeks.

If we do this in the fall, right now, those grasses are gonna be waking up.

They're gonna start going.

And so by late April, early May, we're gonna be in a position that we can kind of quickly graze that moving into the spring.

If we get a very bad winter and we need to overseed we still have a little bit of time in the spring that we can do that without taking that entire field out of production for a full year.

So I think it's very forgiving.

We often get warmer later now than we do some other things.

So we can see some growing in October, November, even December.

It's usually a haves and have not.

If I talk to 10 farmers, five of 'em are gonna like falls and five of 'em are gonna like springs.

The other thing we can do is frost seeding.

This is traditionally done with legumes or hard seeded things, maybe like Timothy or something.

But what this is doing is using the freezing and thawing of the ground to get this out, get it down in kind of honeycombing.

Again, this is haves and have not.

Some people really have had good success.

We would like to see you doing this mid to late February, depending on where you are.

You can get that out there.

It can go on top of the snow, but we really want it to be when we're getting some good frosts so we can open and close that ground.

Right now, we're warming up but we're not freezing to kind of expand that and get it back open.

The problem with grasses can also be, if you do this and then we get a bunch of rain or mud, it'll actually kinda rot those seeds before they have an opportunity to germinate and get kind of worked down in where they need to be.

From a seeding standpoint, right?

We're gonna talk about two things that cause failures in seedings.

One of those is poor seed to soil contact.

And really what we're gonna talk about is this seed drill term, right?

This thing that's gonna kind of open a channel, it's gonna kind of drop it down in there and it's gonna close it back.

And that's gonna give us this really good seed to soil contact.

This is gonna be something more that we would see from like a broadcast or if we're hand spinning, something like that, right?

The better we can get it touching the soil, the better we can get water absorption, we can get faster germination, we can get faster emergence.

That's the name of the game.

We have these very small seeds, they don't have a lot of reserve, kind of starches and carbohydrates in there.

So they have to get up, they have to get these leaves out to start making photosynthesis.

And that's what we need to do to get 'em going.

So if we're talking about this, this seeding, right?

And we're gonna do a conventional type method, we're gonna find a really good catch.

But the downside is we can really expose ourselves to erosion because we're gonna till everything.

And we can often have problems with weeds because we're also tilling everything, right?

We're gonna open up that seed bed, we're gonna bring weeds that may have been buried back up to the top, but we're also opening it up for birds.

We are gonna use this if we're talking about forages and grazing even, more if we're talking about annuals.

But the way we're gonna do this, we're gonna spray this or we're gonna plow it for a total termination, right?

There's gonna be a non-select type herbicide or we can use something like a mold board.

Then we're gonna come in and we're gonna disk that and we're gonna get it really quite fine.

Then we can go back in with something called a cultipacker.

And this has got weight to it.

And what its job is, is we've loosened up all this soil and now we're packing all this soil back down.

And this is because of the second reason for failed seedings, and that is seed depth.

As we start talking about any of these, Kentucky bluegrass or brome or Timothy or any of these clovers, we need a very shallow seeding depth.

Once we get past about a half an inch of depth for planting, we see about 50% germination on most of these species.

And so what that means is, if we're not a very firm depth, right?

So if we don't have this cultipacker, we just plant into this loose soil, we can calibrate our drill or we can set our seeder and as soon as we drive those wheels of that seeder out there onto this very soft ground, it settles three inches.

And now that depth that we had set at a quarter inch is now and a quarter.

And so that's the importance of getting this firmness in there.

Kind of general rules of thumb, if you're gonna do this, if you walk on it, you shouldn't sink any more than half an inch.

And when you're done, you should see about 10% of your seed on the soil surface, kind of scattered out there as it's being dropped or deposited.

This is a brilliant seeder, this is a very common way that we would seed in this.

It's gonna put a very close pattern.

You're not gonna have these rows, you're not gonna be able to look down at, you might talk to an agronomist or a seed person and they'll talk about a seed drill, which we will next and being able to row things.

But this is gonna be what you would use if you're actually doing, kind of a seeding in this regard to get a really nice catch.

The next option is gonna be a seed drill.

And a lot of the conservation districts in my area, and I know other areas rent these, the downsides you have to have a fairly large tractor be able to operate 'em.

But what they're really, really good at is, is out here on the front, there's a little knife, like a double disk opener or something like that, that's gonna kind of cut a channel.

Then the seed's gonna come down this tube, drop down in there, and then this press wheel is gonna close that channel back shut.

And what that means is we're not opening up a bunch of soil, we are not kind of using seed that's being wasted up on the top of the ground.

We're not opening ourselves up to weeds as much, but what we see is we're able to row this, right?

Because we're not just kind of scattering things out as much.

And regardless of what we do, no matter how long we leave this, unless we're using some sod formers, we can almost always see these rows kind of down here where we drill.

By far, this will be the preferred method if you can do it for interseeding, overseeding or reestablishing, because we don't have to do that complete tillage or disking or whatever that may be, right?

We can do this into live green sod to just strengthen it or we can terminate and drill this to start completely over whatever you'd like to do.

The last one we're gonna look at is broadcasting, right?

This is using a spinner spreader on the back of a tractor.

It could be one in your hands, cheap to operate, mechanical handheld, allow for you to spot treat.

Where this is a challenge is it needs to be adjusted, you need to calibrate what you're doing, because most all of these, and when we get to that species selection component to this are based on a pounds per acre.

And if we're really talking about this bale ring or this little piece of that, how do we judge if we went from 43,560 square feet in an acre and we needed 13 or 15 pounds down to the calibration of seeding 50 square feet, right?

So that can be the bit of the challenge.

We're gonna see a lot of overlap and some of our species are not gonna like that type of competition.

It's gonna throw different seeds, different distances.

So if we're using mixes or blends and we start getting into some of these things with like radish or kale or rape, it has a very heavy, very large seed.

We can see those get shot way out compared to something like brome or Timothy or orchard, excuse me, not Timothy, brome or orchard or fescue they have kind of fluffier seed, that aren't gonna catch the wind as well.

My advice when doing this is is that we would wanna mow or graze our stubble probably shorter than what we're used to.

Most of the time, my advice is gonna be, we're either in this take half, leave half, but a minimum of of four inches, right?

Three to four inches.

I'm gonna advise you to go down to about two.

For one, that's gonna reduce some of the competition that this new seed would be facing.

Also, it's gonna help us get that seed to the soil surface.

If you are someone that drags your field, I think a lot of people go out and they seed and then they drag, but we can kind of see some displacement with some of that.

Maybe not all the seeds, but as you drag that manure and if there's any stickiness to that manure, it can collect those seeds and take that to a place that you may not want it.

So if you're gonna drag, do it first.

I like to see this before a light rain, or kind of right around there.

Allow the animals to be in there briefly, a couple hours if it's a small paddock and they're gonna kinda hoof that down in, kind of encourage them to get across that well.

They can kind of track that in there with their feet and keeping them out for at least eight weeks, especially on this type of a method because we really need this small lighter type application and this light seed that's on top to have the time to grow downward and establish before we graze it.

Okay, so I'm gonna jump back to my questions.

Okay, I've got a couple weed ones here.

Yeah, so I've got a couple weed ones.

I'm gonna save those to the end and I'd be happy to answer, answer those.

So I've got more seeded to fall seedings than spring seedings.

We're gonna talk about a lot of tables in these species and I will identify them.

And I will answer the other one about, I don't know, Kernza, I'm not sure about that one.

I'll have to look into that one.

So I'm not doing too well.

I'm about 50% on my questions, but I will certainly get answers to those and solve the ones at the end when we get to those.

And I think I can answer the fall and summer species.

So let's pick a species, right?

This is what you came for.

You didn't come for me to ramble about what the problems were, how we get 'em in the ground, but I think that education is important because I want you to have the tools to do this well.

So if you call and you say, Justin, I need you to help me pick a species mix, what's that conversation gonna look like?

The first thing I'm gonna ask you is what was planted and what's there now, right?

There is no better species to plant back than what is already living.

And I wish I could tell you that I was, was really good at my job, but what makes it really easy is to go out and look at what's growing and thriving very well and say you know what we need is more of this one because it's obviously well-adapted to what you're doing.

But one of the big challenges to this may be identifying.

And so there's some really nice stuff.

University of Minnesota Extension, we use like blades and leg wools and oracles and sheaths to kind of look at identifying grasses and that's a real challenge.

It takes a good eye and it takes someone some time.

And if you're not sure what's growing out there, I'll have Melanie add this to the SharePoint with some other links that you're gonna get.

But this page has a great way of talking about identifying them by their habitat, whether it's a growth is a bunch or a sod.

It shows their head when they're out as a panicle and then it shows this oracle and this leg wool.

And so you can go out, you can find some of these grasses, you can open them up and identify 'em, and that's kind of that first step of helping us identify what to plant is to identify what's growing there now.

I wish it was a little bit different.

The next thing is what are we feeding?

Obviously, in this case, we're talking about sheep and goats, but a lot of us may have multi-species operations, right?

We may have some cows or we may have some horses, or we may have different lactation or pregnancy or maintenance levels of sheep and goats.

And so all of this can be very different, right?

If we're in sheep and goats and pregnancy, our demand for crude protein is much different than our demand for crude protein at maintenance.

And mostly everything that we need is gonna come from our cool season perennial grasses.

They're wonderful grass, right?

We should be really maximizing what we're doing with those.

But there's nothing that we're gonna plant as far as a digestible dry matter goes that we can't satisfy most of our needs.

What I want to also show is when we, before we get caught up into tall fescue or orchardgrass or brome, what matters more than the species is the management.

And if you're really concerned about dry matter or crude protein or total digestible nutrients, there is not a lot of difference between tall fescue or orchardgrass or if you're in the South, even Bermuda, right?

We don't use that in Pennsylvania, but our friends to the South do.

But what the big difference is, is are we cutting that or grazing that in vegetative state when it's small and leafy?

Or are we doing that when it's mature, right?

It's really tall and rank and stemy.

That's the biggest concern and the biggest thing that we need to change with our management before we start worrying about the best quality, right?

I need perennial rye everywhere because I want the best quality protein and the most digestible grass that we can get.

But I'm gonna let it go to full maturity, that's not gonna be our answer.

We looked at this already, right?

So we've got all of these really great options that we can use.

Tall fescue is good, right?

And I would caution us, and we can talk about using this novel or this free or novel-endophyte varieties, right?

Where we're at in Pennsylvania, I'm gonna suggest using a novel-endophyte if we wanna have that conversation, I'd be happy to do that when we're done.

The differences between a regular fescue and a novel fescue and endophyte free fescue, and kind of how they fit in the food chain and even the conversation of what endophytes are and how they affect our animals.

Perennial ryegrass is always gonna be our best quality.

If we let it go really heady, right?

That's still gonna be an issue.

But what we'll see is when we're talking about lambs, that's an A plus.

Perennial ryegrass consistently will be the best forage quality that we can get.

But it's not gonna wanna be grazed very much and it's gonna have to be reseeded pretty frequently.

So that's that trade off, right?

We're not gonna get a lot of biomass out of it.

We're not gonna have these 10, 15, 20 year stands outta or something like that.

But if you're really interested in quality and you're really interested in pushing a lot of nutrients and digestibility, that's your huckleberry, that's the one that you're really gonna be wanting to look at.

Orchardgrass again, that's kind of our go-to for a lot of these things, these nice grazing options for that.

The cautionary to orchardgrass is, it's a bunch, and by say bunch, it's a bunch type grass, meaning that you go out, you cut it, you graze it, you always see this clump.

And so we don't wanna have nothing but orchardgrass because we have nothing but clumps, right?

That's where we want the things like the tall fescue, the perennial rye, the Kentucky bluegrass, the smooth brome, these ones that can add this sod former to kind of help fill in these bare spots and give us that nice mat and that nice carpet of things to help us maintain good quality and good vegetative state all the way through the time that we need that cool season pasture.

Now jumping to legumes, alfalfa, I have mixed opinions, right?

If you're a very nice, very good manager and you're rotating very well, you're looking for that high protein content, you're looking for a little bit more of a challenge to get incorporated, I think that's a wonderful option for you.

Red clover, I know there's some issue with some of the estrogen, what is it?

Phytoestrogen and red clover and sheep in that third trimester in parts of their pregnancy.

So I think that's something you should be concerned about.

And even white clover, right?

Is it stresses?

You can see phytoestrogen levels go up.

Birdsfoot trefoil is a wonderful, wonderful species, right?

It's got the anti-bloat, it's got high levels of tannin.

What I will say about that is it's difficult to start.

If you're thinking, I'm gonna go out here and broadcast birdsfoot trefoil out of a spinner spreader.

Unless you have a very low forage percent, it's gonna be a very low catch, right?

But once you get it to catch, you can probably put it on the deed to your property that you'll have it forever.

It's just getting that to establish, getting it to be a part of that stand.

And then once it's there, management is quite easy and quite doable.

It's just getting that initial stuff to grow.

So now we're gonna break into some of these characteristics, right?

We talked about this table of livestock and how things can work with there.

We've talked about some quality factors.

The other big one that we're gonna have to address is what is the wetness, right?

And this doesn't have to be as simple as it's very wet.

This can be how dry does it get, and when it's dry, how hard is that dry ground?

And so a lot of our species are also gonna have these tolerances to soil moisture and drought tolerance.

If we look at like something Kentucky bluegrass, it's gonna do very well in well-drained to moist.

Orchardgrass, droughty to moist.

But we don't want this wet like we would see with reed canary.

And so we kind of jump back to some of these tables, but we also look at this drought tolerance.

Are we up on top of this kind of shale knob that we know that once the spring is over in March or April, boy, it's dry from May to August, these are not gonna be some of the better options for us, right?

We're gonna wanna drift down here a little bit more into the smooth brome and Timothy and Orchard to give that a better chance and not give us some issues because of soil moisture and its drought tolerance.

Same things exist for legumes, right?

Drought tolerance is gonna be across the board.

Birdsfoot trefoil will again, droughty to wet.

So it's got a very wide range of things that it'll work in.

It works very well in medium to fair soil fertility.

So we're not always having to push high levels of nutrients and it's gonna be fairly well-adapted to drought tolerance, right?

Compared to alfalfa, which needs to be a little bit more catered or a little bit more pampered to, to get some of this growth and get the extra cuttings and tonnage that we need out of it over the course of the season.

How often are we gonna use the area, right?

So this is just all of the questions you should be talking with yourself about or your seed person or whoever to make this selection.

This goes back to this period of production, right?

Are we gonna want this early in the spring?

Are we gonna want this late spring, fall?

Is this gonna be a summer and fall?

We have a lot of different things that'll give us this period of production and how that kind of fits into that table as well as this relative maturity class.

That's a big deal.

And I'm gonna take a minute to talk about relative maturity and that's how this matures over the scope of the year, right?

And this is comparing, Kentucky bluegrass being compared to all the other grasses.

It's gonna mature earlier than everything else, right?

That's just the way this is gonna be.

We also have some of these things in orchardgrass now that are late maturing orchardgrass.

Take that with a grain of salt.

What that means is if we planted 10 orchardgrasses, this one that we're calling late maturing, matured the latest of the 10, it could have matured two days later than the first one, but it's the latest maturing.

For that region it was tested in.

This does not mean that it slid back two weeks and is now going to mature better with the smooth brome or with the red clover.

Knowing what your productive region is when you need this high demand, all of that is very important.

This harvest tolerance, right?

All of these tables are gonna be things you can look at.

They've been provided to Melanie, she's gonna share 'em with you.

This is a big one for me, right?

And especially when we're talking about a conventional system versus a rotational grazing system or some of the others.

Smooth brome, if you're making hay, it's one of my favorites, but it's not a super great pasture grass because it's tolerance of harvest or it's ability to be frequently cut.

It is fairly low, right?

And so if we're in this system where we're rotating every, you know, seven days, we're resting for 21, and we're circling back around, you can see that grass start to disappear, right?

Same as Timothy because it's not getting enough time and that tolerance is just not there.

We also kinda look at persistence with this too, right?

How long will it persist over the course of its lifetime?

The last thing I'm gonna ask you is how thin is this stand, right?

There's a lot of ways we can calculate this.

There's some fun apps.

There's one called CannaPO, that you can go out, it uses your camera and it takes some pictures and it inverses that photograph and it'll tell you what percent is green and what percent is brown and give you kind of a pasture density type thing.

NRCS has some really nice pasture density calculators, and paperwork you can use to judge it based on grasses and forbs and legumes and bare spots.

Our equine group does this thing called the Equine Pasture Evaluation Disc, right?

And that's essentially going out throwing a frisbee and seeing what this little arrow points to.

Is it pointing to bare ground?

Is it pointing to grass?

Is it pointing to a rock, right?

And if you do that 10 times, I would suggest doing it 20, maybe 30, maybe 40.

But that's gonna give us that percent stand that we're looking for to know.

What do we need, right?

We need something with some high seedling vigor, something when we throw it out there, it's really gonna grow.

It's gonna be competitive.

Unlike reed canary that's got this low seedling vigor that may not come in if we're at an 80, 90% stand, probably none of them are gonna do great, right?

Unless we're drilling into that.

But if we look at something like orchardgrass, that's gonna be, one that's gonna be pretty competitive at a 65, 70% stand.

If you can get that drilled in there well, there's a good chance you're gonna see that show up.

So the last couple things I think about are, do we need a new bunch or do we need a new sod, right?

And that's back in this table is considering orchardgrass, perennial rye, these bunch types.

We have reed canary, smooth brome, which are sods, tall fescue and Timothy.

Those are the ones again, are they gonna spread out and fill in bare spots?

Are they gonna kind of stay to themselves?

What do we need here to help us a little bit?

How often do we plan to reseed?

What about our legume inclusion, right?

What's our climate zone?

How far north are we?

When are we gonna do this?

What about the soil pH and our seeding method, right?

All of these are the things that I would like you to think about and that I'm gonna think about before I give you a mixture.

So let's do an example, right?

This is kind of where we're gonna put all of this into practice.

We have this rotationally grazed pasture, it's moderately well-drained, adequate fertility, pH is six, right?

All of this looks very good, doesn't seem out of the usual.

We have a thinning area where the animals are congregating.

So what's that tell us, right?

So we're thinning out, we see the animals probably means we're gonna want something like a sod former, right?

If we're already seeing some abuse 'cause the animals are there, I would suggest kind of staying away from some of the bunch grasses.

But let's look towards sod so we can kind of develop that.

We already have white clover, orchardgrass, and perennial rye.

And so those are gonna be great indicators as to what our soils are doing, what our depth is, what some of these quality standpoints are gonna be, and we're gonna oversee this as a broadcast.

So that's gonna help give us a little bit of an idea when we go back to these tables.

So we're gonna kind of jump back and forth a little bit.

But let's think about this.

So we have well-drained, okay, well-drained, well-drained, well-drained.

And we know, all of these are gonna fit very well in here, right?

We have adequate soil fertility, so that all makes sense.

But the unusual one, right?

That not fit as well as the orchardgrass because we are kind of droughty to moist.

And so this is where we're really gonna fit kind of what we're looking for within this, this top selection of making this example.

So let's go back.

We've got areas are thin, so that means we're looking for this sod former, white clover, orchardgrass, perennial rye.

Okay, so we're gonna go back to our table.

We've already got this one, so that's probably not our great option.

We've already got some perennial ryegrass, so let's not throw things out there that we already know exist.

So what we can look at now are this kind of dense sod or this open sod from the brome or the Kentucky bluegrass.

Drought tolerance is not good, but this one's gonna be okay.

And we're gonna be staggering some of our maturities.

So let's think about this a little bit more.

What about seedling vigor, right?

We've got a little bit of this that we want to be competitive.

The Kentucky bluegrass is kind of moderately vigorous.

The brome is gonna be very vigorous.

That's the real important part to this now is because we're broadcasting this with a spinner spreader, we want something that the seedling is gonna be able to compete and we want something with some high persistence because this is where these high traffic areas are.

So my advice, we could go back and forth and we could argue that because maybe the Kentucky bluegrass is gonna not have a great harvest tolerance.

Excuse me, it's gonna be good, but the brome's not, we could argue a little bit, maybe one's not worth it, but my suggestion would be to kind of hedge your bets and we're gonna plant both of these species because we're gonna add some sod to that.

We're gonna give ourselves the ability to fill that area in with something that can take the abuse.

I think we should add a little bit of white clover to this.

Nothing crazy.

Two pounds to the acre is a fairly minimal rate, at three pounds of Kentucky bluegrass, three pounds of smooth brome, and two pounds of white clover.

Basically what we're doing is adding like a 75% grass, 25% clover mixture to that area, and giving us that pretty good ability to, inoculate the white clover.

We can get some good legume contributions out of this, but we're also getting that stoloniferous effect out of the white clover to kinda help fill this area in.

So I know as we kinda wrap this up and I jump back to some questions, you may have wanted this to be, tell me what to plant, tell me in this place, how to do it and what to do.

But it's really quite challenging, right?

And you all will know your farms and operations way better than I could ever sit here, and try and guess to know 'em.

And it's really kind of a big puzzle, right?

There's more than one way to seed these things and not everything's gonna work every year.

And so it's using these tables, it's understanding what we're trying to do and putting all that in.

Knowing what your field and what's thriving is a great indicator of what's gonna work when we start to put this there.

And this is an investment, right?

Grass seeds are really high right now.

A couple years ago maybe they were a little less than what they are.

But one thing about we're precariously placed in Pennsylvania, our drought maybe wasn't so bad, but is our grass producing states get affected by drought or fire or rain, that trickles into seeding costs.

And so I encourage you to think about what you're seeding, how you're seeding your management choices before you invest in this 150 or $200 bag of seed and making sure we can really get that to stick.

There's some wonderful calculators out there.

University of Wisconsin-Madison, excuse me, Wisconsin-Madison, yeah.

Has a wonderful pasture, hay calculator that you can get in there and you can plug in all of these different numbers and it's gonna tell you seeds per pound and it's gonna tell you how many legumes versus grass in your percentage of your mixture.

I would encourage you, if you're thinking about this, to play with some of those, my contact information is there.

I'd be happy to run some of these scenarios or look at pictures or whatever it is.

But you should be having conversations with someone before we get too far into some of these things.

So I'm gonna stop.

I do see some stuff, so I'm just going to start back at the top.

Maybe I put Melanie asleep.

So milkweed organically is really quite tough.

And the biggest thing, and so I'll preface this is even non-organically, milkweed is tough.

The foundation for that is good agronomic practices, that means mowing regularly or having a very nice rotation.

I know there are a lot of scenarios and a lot of things where you can tighten up your rotation and your livestock can kind of nip off some of those leaves and you can use them as a little bit of that.

But in the cases, they don't mow those off.

We're targeting these mowings or these grazings on that, somewhere around that bud to bloom stage or late fall, somewhere like late September, early October.

Repetitiveness of that, right?

That's kinda the way you're gonna have to get that.

Keeping your pH up, keeping your phosphorus, and your potassium up, giving your grass a good chance.

We can stop the rye's ominous spread of those through these good agronomics.

But what we have to do is fill in the grass so that when those seeds kind of blow out, we've got the ability to stop that.

I've forgot about fall seeding versus spring seed.

What I would look for in the fall versus spring.

Spring seedings, you wanna look for things that are gonna be more suited for a wetter type soil, right?

Because they're often gonna be, we would call that mudded in, right?

You're kind of sticking 'em out there and hoping that they're gonna get into the ground a little better.

But typically think of the things that are a smaller, harder seed working better in wetter conditions.

The fluffier, the bigger the seed in some cases like our grass is that moisture can actually rot that seed before it can grow.

Fall is a great time to seed about anything, but spring you can have some limited success.

The other part I will say to that is if you're planting mixtures, often what I see is the first year is the legumes in the second year is the grass.

And so if you plant this mixture of grass and legumes and you don't see anything really, really nice as far as the grass goes the first year and it's 80% clover and you're like, "Man, what happened to this?" Keep mowing it, keep grazing it because the next year then the grass comes, right?

So it's a little slower sometimes than some of the other species.

So this one is looking at forestry mulched and trying to turn into pasture.

pH is a big problem there, right?

So if we're talking about forested ground, often we see a high pH under trees and then if we started mulching up more of that bark and if there's any kind of pine trees or any of that around, we can really drive up the pH.

Managing that is sometimes the issue, getting seeds to start, and that can also be a problem, right?

As we really start to see all of this organic matter being there, we can cover 'em up.

Remember they're very small seeds.

A quarter inch to a half an inch is all of the depth that we want, but we also need that depth to be into soil, not just into organic matter or residue on top.

Weed management usually isn't so bad and things like that, you can usually mow it and knock back the little volunteers, but getting a good pH control and you're usually taken care of.

Okay, so if you're using a no-till drill to renovate into existing, when would be the best time to do this?

Or does it match?

So I'm still a fall guy, right?

And again, that's a personal preference, that's experience of what's worked and what hasn't worked.

I still, you know, like I said, you can talk to 10 people.

Five are gonna say fall, five are gonna say spring.

Try, see what works for you.

Talk to your neighbors and your geographic area, right?

Jerry, if you're in Pennsylvania, it might work.

If you're in North Dakota, we may only be doing spring, right?

Or South Carolina, we may only be doing falls and so that may affect some of this.

But where we're at in Pennsylvania, you can go either way with something like that.

It's just in the spring, making sure you keep that livestock off of that field for six to eight weeks to let it grow.

Oh, sorry, Jean, I'll jump back to that.

Oh, oh, so yeah, so that table on the, before the let's try an example, that was the kind of characteristic table, but for legumes.

And so it ran through everything that was a part of the grasses, the bunch type, the adaptation tables to wet soils, dry soils, planting periods, all of that stuff but it was for the legumes.

And all of that stuff is in a SharePoint that you guys are gonna get, that you can look through on your own and you'll have access to that.

If you're thinking about species or seeding mix, you'll be able to do that.

I've got one here that says, what about trefoil?

I'm not sure we talked about that a little bit.

Any hope for sacrifice that gets hammered in the winter?

Man, that's a big topic, right?

If we had another hour, maybe we could, we could solve all the sacrifice area problems, but they're tough.

And my advice for those are pick something.

Because if it's a perennial sacrifice area that every year, you're in that area from November to March, there's not a lot of point in investing this really strong, expensive perennial seed, right?

What we're looking for is like some perennial rye and some annual rye, maybe some oats, something that we can get some green on.

Something that we can form a dense sod that we can get some traction for those animals, start pulling some of those nutrients up.

But keep a bag of that seed on you all the time because if we're going right back to it, that's where we're gonna be every year in April is smoothing that out, doing a little weed management and reseeding with some type of nice quick green blend to cover those up.

Melanie, I'm just running through these.

If you've got stuff you wanna talk to 'em about, I'll give you some time and then I can jump back.

- Okay, so we had a question about grass finishing the weaned lambs.

So your forages are not gonna hit that 77% TDNs.

So basically, what's going to happen is the lambs are going to be a little bit more deficient in their energy and it'll just take longer for them to get that body condition on them.

So if you're using a high quality grass, add some legume in there, say maybe 30% in the mix of a legume, and then make sure you maintain it in a vegetative state so that it's very lush and then you'll have a better opportunity to meet the needs of those growing lambs because their energy has to be very high because they don't have a high consumption rate at that point.

One thing that I was going to mention is about the fescue, and I think Gene might be hinting at it, about adding a column to the table, titled palatability, because fescue is not real palatable for sheep and goats during the summer.

It tends to get a very coarse, very sharp leaf on it.

They don't like to eat it.

I haven't tasted it myself, so I can't explain palatability, but they do tend to eat it very readily once we've had a hard frost.

So just keep that in mind.

You don't want pastures that are, have a high percentage of that fescue in them unless you're going to save them for an extended grazing season in the fall.

I'll turn it back over to you, Justin.

- Sure, so I used to work with a dairyman and he always said that he kept tall fescue in every field he had because no matter what season it was, it gave the cow somewhere to lay down.

I think there aren't right palatability concerns and I get that part, but they've come a long way in tall fescue, and you all know better about your animals than I do.

So great comment.

I looked up the one, I apologize for not knowing more about wheat grass, but this one was kind of a new one for me.

I don't know specifically.

So the Kernza as as like a perennial wheat, so it's gonna be a wheat grass and I'm not sure enough about this to speak on it as far as livestock health or any concerns that would fall into any of that arena, using it as a pasture.

I think that it's gonna fall in a very similar arena to like ryegrass.

It looks like a very thin leafed type thing.

It's gonna put out a very nice route, but as far as that, I'd be happy if you'd like to send me an email or reach out with your email for me to follow up on more of that, but I don't know, I don't know much about it and I'd be cautious to speak on something I don't know about as far as affecting animal health.

Does tall fescue like to be mixed with white clover?

Ryegrass and bluegrass.

To tall fescue depending on what you're using, right?

If we're going to like an endophyte free tall fescue, it really should be kind of kept by itself because it's not gonna have that competitive nature.

If we're using an endophyte like a Kentucky 31, I'm not gonna encourage you to do that either.

But if we're kind of staying in that moderate novel-endophyte that meadow fescue that they would kind of coin them as now, those do pretty well, right?

They're not super aggressive, so we can't go out here and drill them into something that's gonna be a 90% stand and accept to see this, this really nice growth out of them.

But I tend to believe that we don't wanna get crazy with the species we mix together, but the spatial variability across your field is quite large and so you're gonna have dry areas and wet areas and north facing slopes and south facing slopes that if we can mix some rye and some bluegrass and white clover and fescue.

Somewhere, one of those is gonna be the superstar and the other are gonna be the three backup dancers and somewhere else they're gonna flop roles.

And so that's kind of how I like to see these as being used and I think that would be how I would like to see that fit, and yeah, they'll play well enough.

Now if we were talking hay, it might be a different conversation, but for grazing I think it's gonna be fine.

I know we're at eight, Melanie, I'll stay and answer questions, but I do wanna be respectful of everyone else's time.

I don't know if you wanna, what you wanna do, but up to you.

- Yeah, we usually keep going.

- [Justin] Okay.

- As long as people want to stay online, we just keep answering questions.

- Okay, well then, I'll just keep answering questions.

So someone, an anonymous attendee asked, what about trefoil?

If you would like to give me more information on that, I would be happy to answer it.

I know Melanie really likes trefoil, so, you know, maybe Melanie would like to give you the rundown on trefoil and where it fits in this system.

- So the fields that I have, the picture behind my head is one of the fields that we've got.

We have either shallow shale soils or we have wet soils.

So the trefoil works very well for us.

We have actually frost seeded it, and I think we got lucky and you know, I definitely agree with Justin, you've got to be very patient.

It has that hard seed coat and they often scarify it so that it will absorb the water more quickly to get it started.

But you just have to be very patient.

It stays in the pasture system very well around here in the summer, if I'm driving down the road, the whole road is lined with these pretty yellow flowers and that's a birdsfoot trefoil that's blooming.

But I mean we like it very well within the fields that we have here.

The sheep like it, if you let it go to seed, then you know it's still spreading.

It's pretty tough plant really.

- Okay, Gene, does your table deal with the change of nutrition when plants head out?

Not particularly, right?

I kinda did mention that in the management matters more than the species, that I don't think that, so statistically, is if we look at our variety trials and to use like that insignificant difference, there is not gonna be a significant difference in orchardgrass, ryegrass, festulolium, fescue, any of those in our variety trials when they're all harvested at boot.

Where we start to see that significant difference of crude protein and total digestibility is when you let orchardgrass go from vegetative to boot, right?

When that head starts to emerge to that late heading, and then it really starts to get variable because there are some species that can hold that very well late.

Some of them, if we start to talk about stockpiling or something, some of them have the ability to hold that quality much later in the year.

Some of them, as soon as they elongate and head out, it really takes a nose dive.

And so we don't have a lot of great data on that.

What I would say, we do, but it would be hard to truncate down into good or bad because it would have to be three tables to kind of express that as physiology and maturity of that plant.

Okay, great.

Thanks for sending me an email.

Happy to look into that more.

Here's another one on forage finishing lambs.

Do you want that one, Melanie?

- Sure, I'm actually looking up some of the, you know, on a table right now to see what they're listing as far as the energy values.

- Okay, sure, I'll go ahead then if you.

- Yeah, so I think the highest that I'm seeing is wheat and that's got a 71% TDN, it's not listing a sorghum-sudangrass in here.

Oh wait, yeah, it is, so fresh immature sudangrass runs at 70% TDN.

So some of those annuals can be much higher in TDN and Justin may want to comment in about as far as cost of getting these annuals established because sometimes they can be more expensive than what you're expecting out of them.

So I would caution you.

If you're using something like wheat that you can, you know, follow up with a grain harvest so if you're grazing your lambs, it's going to depend how early they are born on whether or not you are, you know, are the timing of the lambing.

Are they born early enough to take advantage of early grazing or are they born late enough to take care of an early grazing in the fall?

So some of those plants could certainly be a possibility, providing the cost doesn't outweigh the outcomes from the gains on you're getting on those lambs.

- I've got another one for you.

So I don't know much, so for Festulolium, excuse me, for Festulolium.

I mean it's not a bad species for other stuff.

It was very popular, right?

It's a hybrid with rye and it was very popular for a while, but I don't know anything about its combination with sheep.

Melanie, do you have any experience using Festulolium with sheep?

- I do not.

I would think it's somewhere in between the wheat and the grass, and I just don't have much, I don't have any.

- I'm hesitant to mention because some of these can end up with some adverse animal effects, health effects that I just don't know about.

You mentioned about the annuals, right?

So some of the annuals can be expensive.

I guess to me, and this is a lack of experience with grazing sheep, but when we start getting into some of the annuals, like cool season annuals, we would call like rye or wheat or triticale or something like that, right?

Versus our warm season annuals, which would be millet or sorghum Sudan or Sudangrass.

They both have pros and they both have extreme cons, right?

And there are a lot of issues with calcium and magnesium that come from the summer or the winter annuals and using those early in the spring, and they can work very, very well.

But you have to be very in tune with what some of that soil fertility is or you can even end up with some health concerns within your livestock.

- And that brings up a good point that, we need to meet those minimum nutrient requirements for calcium and phosphorus.

But if you're raising ram lambs or weather lambs, we definitely need to make sure we're balancing that calcium to phosphorus ratio.

We need at least twice as much calcium as phosphorus in the diet, otherwise we're looking at urinary calculi.

If we're talking late gestation and lactation for our use or your dose, we definitely need to make sure we have enough calcium in the diet so that we're not ending up with milk fever.

Those fetuses, especially if we have multiples twins and triplets during that last third of gestation, they're drawing on a lot of calcium and we need to make sure that we're providing that the diet so that the females aren't pulling that out of their system because they can't do that very efficiently.

- And so then the contrast to that would be considering like summer annuals and I'm not sure, and Melanie would answer this, I'm not sure how aggressively a sheep could tear down a sorghum Sudan plant so I'm not sure where that fits in the spectrum as an option for this.

- Yeah, so I've seen them turned out into Sudangrass- - Okay. - Where it takes a week for you to be able to see the sheep again.

- Yeah.

- And it is a little challenging.

If the stalk is really, really stiff for them to be able to pull that down.

So it's more ideal if it's shorter and they can reach the leaves as opposed to dealing with stalks.

- And so if that's something you wanna consider, my advice would be a millet or a Sudangrass.

Those tend to have a smaller stem, they tend to be a little shorter, a little leafier because if you're intentionally grazing things these summer annuals when they're shorter, that's when we seem to be more prone for issues in prussic acid because that's gonna accumulate in the leaves.

And so we wanna be careful with intentionally grazing something at 18 or 24 inches that that could be the issue.

So go with something with the thinner stem and those are things that are quite thin, even to the point that you could dry 'em down for hay.

So it would probably be much more manageable for them to get around and reduce some of those animal health issues.

Alright, so Sericea lespedeza is kind of a southern weed, right?

But we still use it as a, I've seen posters out of Texas where it's like, get this weed, right?

And so we still use it some, I'm not sure what it's widespreadness is, once you get this far north and how it winters.

So I'm not sure where you're at or not.

So that would kind of be my question would be what state are you farming in before I would recommend a grass to mix with that just to make sure I knew what your climate was.

So again, Tia, if you wanna send me an email or another one, I'd be happy to answer that.

But just so I can get some geographical information first.

- And the reason they may be asking is because of the tannins that they're- - Yeah. - Incorporating it into prevent internal parasite.

- So are you guys starting to use that a lot here now?

Okay, I didn't think so.

- No, because there we don't have any seeding rates.

- Okay.

- I've had numerous producers ask me about it over the years, but I don't have a good answer for that.

- Yeah, it's more of a name from academic career of being used in the south than it is something from practice.

And so there's a couple here.

So I can't really speak to the carbs going to the seed after the shaft.

I mean obviously there's some carbohydrates that move up.

The concern is more so in palatability and quality is more that we start getting into cellulose and lignin as we start to develop that elongated stem, right?

We start to lose leaf tissue and we start to elongate that stem and it's less about the transfer of the carbohydrates into a seed head, but more about just, now we're it's 70% cellulose and lignin compared to what we were when it was vegetative that reduces that animal quality.

Okay, how many more you want, Mel?

You got any of these?

- The one with the vitamins with mineral mixes?

- [Justin] Sure.

- I mean generally I recommend making sure that you're using a high quality salt and mineral mix that is formulated for the species that you're raising.

This is critical especially with our copper because our sheep do not tolerate a high level of copper, but yet our goats need higher levels to keep a good functioning immune system.

And the other thing I want to comment on is that some producers will put out the salt and minerals, the loose, and then they also have another salt block, you need to get rid of the salt block because that salt and mineral mix is formulated based on expected salt intake.

So the amount of minerals that an animal needs that they want added, they base that on how much salt they expect to consume in a day.

And if you have a separate salt source, then they don't consume enough minerals to meet their needs.

- Okay, I don't know anything about Q&A export or any of that.

That would be one for you Mel.

Sue, Tia, I'm gonna circle back to you.

So as you start to move into Illinois, you're in the north or the south, right?

Fescue and that fescue toxicosis can become even more of a problem as you start to move into that part of the world and you can kind of warm up.

So my familiarity with what your predominant grass species, I will admit kind of dwindles, but I do know that you all are really starting to move, at least from the research and some of the things.

They're looking at a lot of novel fescue species to going into some of those areas just because of some of the heat, at least in Southern Illinois.

I think bluegrass would probably do very well as a sod former in that, the brome is certainly not gonna hurt anything.

But again, once you're above those really hot temperatures, so you're kind of north to south within that state would play a little bit of a concern into what species.

My advice would be talk to Illinois Extension, right?

You've gotta have some good agronomists out there and I'm sure one of those would be happy to give you a nice seeding recommendation for pasture.

Cool.

- Okay, there's another question from Diane about the warm season grasses.

And the red clovers, I'm not sure why your cattle don't like them.

I mean, I've never had any issues with cattle that we've run not not liking them unless, you know, I don't know Justin, with there being issue with soil fertility that would change palatability?

- Not to my knowledge, my experience is they've always liked them too much, but I don't know that I've ever experienced cattle not liking red clover and it could be a varietal thing if they're getting very, very high.

Some of them tend to get very tall and it could be that they're getting very stemy and not enough leaves, but that could be something to really dig into.

Yeah, well Diane- - Nice.

- You said you were gonna send me an email about the wheat grass.

So send me an email, add some of this stuff in it and I'd be happy to kick some of it around with you and chat more about these things.

- Okay, and then she mentions the warm season grasses and you know, if you're using those, they work great for filling in for the summer, but if you need your animals to be producing.

So calves to be growing, cows to be producing milk, the nutritional value of those warm seasoned grasses for the most part is not real great.

That eastern gamagrass would be the best one for that.

So just keep that in mind as you're bringing those into your grazing system.

- And the other challenge with the warm seasons is we covered a lot of this with the seeding.

They can also be incredibly difficult to establish.

Years of hard work to get those things to really take off.

Once you get 'em, you're usually in pretty good shape as long as you manage them well, right?

And that's grazing them at the right time.

They don't seem to care whether they're on good deep rich soil or poor shale dry soil, right?

So they're a pretty easy keeper.

They don't need a lot of fertilizer.

They just like a little bit to hang out on, but it's tough to get 'em started.

So once you get 'em though, again, I'd be happy to talk to you.

I've done some work in Switchgrass so maybe we could talk it.

- For those of you who are hanging in here, if you wanna go ahead and answer these poll questions.

There's just four questions and then there's a slider bar on the right hand side so you can see all the four of the questions.

You guys have had some excellent questions this evening.

We appreciate that.

- Yeah, I appreciate you hanging in there.

I know it was a lot and it was a long night and it's getting late.

But thanks for sticking in there and asking questions.