During 63 months as an agronomy/livestock Extension agent in Central New York, I learned the “correct” term for winter small grains planted in early autumn: cover crops. After leaving Extension for a career in ag sales in 1978, I continued referring to such crops as cover crops. Then I began resurrecting my dormant field crops training, trying to put such to good use. The main motive for that was to underwrite customers’ livestock feeding programs by shoring up their often-shaky cropping situations.
I soon started calling these crop programs sick, trying not to verbally step on growers’ toes too often. I rapidly learned that these programs’ illnesses were caused by unhealthy soils.
My re-education involved attending a field crops demonstration in the Hudson Valley in July 2012 while a widespread drought blanketed the western two-thirds of the U.S. I pointed out to the retired county agent in charge some small grain stubble left from recent combining, telling him, “These must have been your fall cover crops.” He told me to stop calling them cover crops, and to call them “winter forage – they’re doing a lot more than just holding onto and covering soil.”
I told him that his word choice was similar to the concept of “the glass being half full, rather than half empty.” He liked that comparison.
Winter forages can include rye, wheat, triticale and often barley. In the Northeast, fall-planted triticale and rye are rapidly approaching harvest stage, driven by short bursts of warm weather. Our region may face extended rainy weather which can delay harvest. A bright spot with this damp, chillier weather – which delays field operations – is that day temperatures may stay under 60º and night temperatures range from the upper 30s to the low 40s. When this happens, surprisingly, the forage quality doesn’t suffer. Strangely enough, with these weather conditions, headed-out triticale can still have the digestibility normally associated with the flag leaf stage.
But such silage will still be wetter than what we’d prefer. It’s best to chop whole plant at the same cut length desired for sorghum, i.e., ¾- to one-inch long to reduce leaching – juicing silos, upright or horizontal.
Toward that end, we recommend applying homolactic inoculants, and with that, a higher rate to make up for potentially lower sugars. Perfectly fermented silages can be made with dry matter around 20%. Chopping shorter than the cut length just mentioned is a bad idea: finely chopped material may end up somewhere between mush and ooze.
While we don’t like hauling all that water, that may be the hand dealt us by the elements. I stress that with homolactic fermentation, the end product is almost exclusively lactic acid. With this biochemical reaction, one glucose molecule becomes two lactic acid molecules. This organic (meaning just carbon-based) acid is the natural component which puts the “sauer” in “kraut” – a process which is much appreciated by the German part of me. Mostly we’re talking here about haylage, not baleage; these wrapped forages can be inoculated, but it’s a much more complex process.
When forage moisture approaches and exceeds 70%, natural bacteria of the Clostridium genus tend to prevail and direct starch fermentation toward butyric acid, an end product likened by trained noses to rancid butter. Using such a bacterial inoculant firmly nudges microbial activity toward lactic acid fermentation and away from butyric acid. Another minus for butyric acid is its tendency to serve as a precursor to ketone bodies, which in turn can predispose a dry cow to acetonemia (ketosis) when she freshens.
In examining life after winter forage harvest, we see that more and more farms have added the high quality and high yields of these roughages to their rotation schedule. Some such growers have gone as far as eliminating alfalfa.
This raises the question as to what’s the best crop to follow winter forages. One beauty of winter forages is that your options are open to what fits your farm best. A real plus here is that there is 60% less moisture under a harvested winter forage than under bare soil. So you can safely traffic these fields in a wetter spring than you can bare ground. Think about driving on a sod compared to driving between corn stubble rows.
I know of one case where a farmer got his corn planted on winter forage stubble in a wet spring, only to have to wait for the non-winter forage ground to dry out enough to accommodate corn planter and tractor. For dry springs – like most Northeast locations thus far this year – the soils could be in excellent shape for deep zone tillage, to start removing the compaction that may have been limiting yields.
The first step in the next rotation crop is to not remove stubble, nor till the field. With winter forage stubble, growers have excellent cover with a mass of roots going six to 16 inches deep in the soil profile. This channels oxygen and water into the soil for maximum root growth. Those who have chiseled, or worse, disked winter forage stubble realize that they’ve made a mess, evidenced by softball-sized lumps crafted from soil. I believe this physical configuration takes a lot of work to be converted back into soil.
It doesn’t make any sense to work 43,560 square feet of soil, seven to eight inches deep – processing 1,000 tons/acre – just to end up with a couple inches of fine soil around a properly planted seed.
Following the winter forage in the rotation, more and more growers are drifting away from corn, favoring sorghum and its hybrids. Thus, they’re introducing a new crop in their game plan – namely brown mid-rib (BMR) sorghum – because its season dovetails well into that of winter triticale. Male sterile BMR sorghum is the latest advance in producing very high-quality forage to support high milk/component production in dairy cows.
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