2022 Eastern Nebraska Soil Health Conference Presentations - Mary Drewnoski

Deloris Pittman & Mike Kamm Author

02/08/2022 Added

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Using Winter Hardy Small Cereals for Grazing and Silage - Mary Drewnoski, Beef Systems Specialist, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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[00:00:08.230]All right. So how many of you guys have cattle? All right.
[00:00:12.850]About half of the room has cattle. That makes me feel a little bit better now.
[00:00:17.050]so I I'm in one of those positions,
[00:00:20.950]where about half the time I talked to crop producers about half the time I
[00:00:24.340]talked to cattlemen,
[00:00:26.470]today a lot of my discussion is really about the use
[00:00:31.450]of these winter Hardy, cover crops as a forage resource.
[00:00:35.920]And my thought process was you guys came to a cover crop soil health
[00:00:40.780]conference.
[00:00:41.830]I don't have to convince you that adding a cover crop into your rotation can be
[00:00:46.030]a benefit.
[00:00:47.500]my goal here was really to think about what are the possibilities to get some
[00:00:51.790]short term economic impact of using those cover crops.
[00:00:56.140]And forage is a great way to do that.
[00:00:58.090]And a lot of the times we see that in situations where we use cover crops as
[00:01:02.590]forage, we can get the economic benefits without negatively affecting,
[00:01:07.270]the soil health. And in fact, adding,
[00:01:10.780]the grazing component sometimes can even be a positive from the increase in
[00:01:15.580]the microbial biomass. We can see in the soil and nutrient cycling.
[00:01:20.020]Now on the flip side, if we don't have enough carbon in the system,
[00:01:24.070]there's also some negatives, from the standpoint of having enough residue.
[00:01:28.060]And so it's all a balancing act, right? There's no silver bullet.
[00:01:31.720]So today we're going to talk about using these winter Hardy small cereals for
[00:01:35.830]grazing briefly. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about, um,
[00:01:39.760]making silage, because that's been something that's been more and more interest,
[00:01:44.080]especially for people who don't have cattle, but maybe your neighbor does.
[00:01:48.520]And, I don't know how many times I get a call and it's like,
[00:01:52.600]what's the value? how much should I charge? Right.
[00:01:56.440]My neighbors interested.
[00:01:57.610]They see that green stuff over there and they think they want to use it. Right.
[00:02:00.970]So we're going to talk a little bit about some of those ideas.
[00:02:06.080]let me see. I should turn this on. It's a good first start.
[00:02:10.750]Okay. So winter Hardy smell cereals. What are we talking about? Well,
[00:02:14.290]the number one right is cereal rye. Everybody knows cereal rye,
[00:02:17.650]a winter wheat and winter treated Kaley are two other options that we'll talk
[00:02:21.040]about today. I do want to point out though,
[00:02:23.590]before I go any further that I'm talking very general here about
[00:02:28.450]these species, and there is a lot of differences in varieties among species.
[00:02:33.100]And in fact, this picture I have is just one illustration of that.
[00:02:36.490]So this picture is actually from fall city,
[00:02:41.140]Nebraska,
[00:02:42.160]and they planted L Bon and the VNS rye side by side,
[00:02:46.390]same time. And this is what it looked like in the spring.
[00:02:49.540]Now it was really early planted. So the yield was really good,
[00:02:53.050]cause this was on the prevent plant acres.
[00:02:55.600]But the point here is that there's a lot of differences in varieties and this L
[00:03:00.370]bond rises Southern Ry,
[00:03:02.530]tends to come out of dorm C earlier and thus it matures a little bit more
[00:03:05.530]quickly. BNS can be anything, right?
[00:03:10.270]There's a variety of unstated.
[00:03:11.770]We do tend to get a lot more neuro Northern rise in Nebraska that are VNS rye.
[00:03:16.270]So that's kind of what you're seeing is that difference here. Um,
[00:03:20.200]so great thing about the Southern rise. It comes out of dormancy earlier.
[00:03:23.500]We get a little bit more growth earlier.
[00:03:26.380]the further north you get the little bit more concerned I get about, you know,
[00:03:29.530]winter hardiness and in truth,
[00:03:32.140]I've not seen too many problems anywhere in Nebraska with El Bon.
[00:03:35.980]So that's kind of cool. Okay. So what about grazing?
[00:03:39.820]The first thing I always hear when I talk about grazing rye is that it's
[00:03:44.560]low quality.
[00:03:47.080]Is anybody ever experienced low quality rye?
[00:03:52.210]No. Randy has.
[00:03:57.400]Yeah. When it's this tall. Exactly.
[00:03:59.680]So the first thing I want to point out is that
[00:04:04.270]really, when we think about any forage resource maturity matters,
[00:04:09.160]right, I can make it low quality if I let it get ahead of me. Um,
[00:04:13.420]so this is actually the very first experiment I ever did grazing on
[00:04:18.070]rye.
[00:04:18.490]We were actually looking at the impacts of adding rye and grazing it versus not
[00:04:23.440]grazing it on souls.
[00:04:26.200]and indeed what we saw is we had 700 pound calves.
[00:04:30.250]We came off corn stocks,
[00:04:31.900]we put them onto the ride in the first week in April.
[00:04:36.550]We grazed them till the first week in may and then pulled them off.
[00:04:39.850]So we could plant corn and we got 3.2 pound a day game,
[00:04:44.770]and I thought, wow, that's amazing. I'd heard people tell me that before.
[00:04:48.460]And I thought, nah, that's not true. I think that must be Phil, right?
[00:04:53.440]Because they have this big room. And if you don't account for fill,
[00:04:58.540]right, if they're empty going on, you weigh him and they come off full.
[00:05:02.530]Most of that gain can be just how much their gut has in it. Right.
[00:05:06.880]But in this case, we do control for Phil.
[00:05:09.490]We actually limit feed at the beginning at the end. Um,
[00:05:12.160]so we have a procedure for that. We do three day weights. Um,
[00:05:16.360]we do all kinds of things to eliminate this fill factor and I thought, wow,
[00:05:20.590]that's cool.
[00:05:21.850]A couple of things I learned along the way was we did a two rotation
[00:05:26.590]system where the calves would have access to where we would have them in
[00:05:31.480]one field and then we move them over to another field and then we just move them
[00:05:35.440]back and forth so that we could try to keep the forage vegetative.
[00:05:40.420]So keep it short. And I don't know if you look at any extension publication,
[00:05:44.290]they'll say start grazing when it's eight inches too late
[00:05:49.480]eight inches is too late.
[00:05:51.940]we pretty much shoot for five is our target on date five inches.
[00:05:57.080]And then my goal is to keep it between eight and two. Um,
[00:06:02.090]this had three calves, an acre on it. So,
[00:06:06.110]basically equivalent to a cow and a half.
[00:06:08.180]If you are wanting to put cows out there, this is great feed right now.
[00:06:13.010]One of the things that I also noticed is that,
[00:06:17.120]despite the fact that we were trying to keep it between eight and
[00:06:21.920]two, sometimes we get ahead of it. If we get a cold snap,
[00:06:26.330]for instance, right. And if we have a place for them to go, that'd be ideal.
[00:06:30.680]Now this was research and we didn't want to pull them off and have to try to
[00:06:33.470]weigh him and then put them back on and all those things.
[00:06:36.110]So we actually pushed them a little hard. If they got ahead,
[00:06:39.080]they didn't have as much eat. And yet we could still get that kind of game.
[00:06:42.920]As long as we didn't get too far below two inches, we were doing pretty good.
[00:06:48.020]so this is the next trial that we did. Everybody started asking, well,
[00:06:52.880]what should I plant if I want to gray? Should I print wheat 2d CALEA? Right.
[00:06:58.340]so we just kind of side by side, tested wheat triticale and rye.
[00:07:03.290]And this was the first year, same kind of system. In this case,
[00:07:07.730]we had about three calves and acre. They were about 700 pound calves.
[00:07:11.780]We did shoot for that five inch start time. So rye was a week earlier.
[00:07:15.710]We put out on rye a week earlier, then we did,
[00:07:19.940]the Trudy Kayleen wheat. However,
[00:07:22.700]one thing to note about our rye is that where we randomly assigned the rye,
[00:07:27.530]we had a couple low spots in the field that had gotten flooded.
[00:07:32.630]And so we ended up having to pull them off a little bit earlier, which,
[00:07:35.900]that's why the grazing days were the same in that particular trial. Again,
[00:07:38.690]we were shooting for pulling them off and putting, soybeans. In this case,
[00:07:43.160]in that system,
[00:07:43.940]we are looking at the impacts of grazing on soybeans and soil hill.
[00:07:48.590]but look at those gains, a couple things to note.
[00:07:51.740]One was they came off of stocks. They were gaining about a pound a day before.
[00:07:55.850]Some of that is comp a story gain probably about 25%,
[00:07:59.390]but still really great gains. No difference among the species,
[00:08:02.240]as long as you keep it vegetative, as long as you keep it short,
[00:08:07.010]it's going to be high quality feed.
[00:08:08.480]Now you can let it get ahead of you or you can let it get behind you.
[00:08:13.250]And this was a, the next year and we got ahead of the treaty,
[00:08:16.910]Kaylee and the wheat a little bit. what happened was we went out,
[00:08:21.660]we looked, we got five inches and we were like, Hey,
[00:08:24.410]the Trudy Kayleen wheat is actually five inches about the same time as the rice.
[00:08:29.120]So we put them all out at the same time. And unfortunately,
[00:08:32.690]then we got a little bit of a cold spell and the triticale and we didn't hold up
[00:08:36.320]quite as well. so this is not,
[00:08:39.620]this difference is really intake was limited on these guys.
[00:08:43.520]so that's just a little bit of the story here. That for me,
[00:08:47.450]if I'm looking for really early grazing, right. Looks pretty good, right.
[00:08:52.160]if I want to go later into the season, that might change a little bit,
[00:08:55.950]but in this case we were shooting for within a cropping system.
[00:08:59.550]So we're going to get off 15th of May as latest.
[00:09:05.520]this is kind of what it looks like.
[00:09:07.440]This was after a grazing and this was about the time we were going to put them
[00:09:10.890]back. So it does not, it doesn't look like a lot of forage out there. Right?
[00:09:14.310]And I think that's something that you got to kind of get in your head.
[00:09:16.860]Cause it's very different. Like for me,
[00:09:19.110]people who are really good managing these annuals,
[00:09:24.600]have a different mindset than managing perennials because perennials,
[00:09:29.220]you know, you're thinking about,
[00:09:30.330]I need to make sure that I have enough root storage and you know,
[00:09:34.440]slow to recover. Angels are amazingly fast to recover.
[00:09:38.040]They're not shooting for root storage, right? Their,
[00:09:40.570]our whole goal in life is to reproduce, put out seed heads.
[00:09:44.850]So they go very quickly to try to do that.
[00:09:48.330]So your job is to stay up with it if you want maintain high
[00:09:53.280]quality. And so to me, this was a big change in my mindset,
[00:09:57.090]as I experienced grazing with annuals is that most of the time it's because I
[00:10:01.590]let it get away that I started having problems. Okay.
[00:10:04.950]So the next thing I want to talk about briefly is using these
[00:10:09.930]winter Hardy small cereals for silence. And I have a picture up here.
[00:10:14.070]This is Abigail Sargent. She's one of my master's students.
[00:10:17.760]Who's been working on this particular project and I'll tell you
[00:10:23.040]it's a lot of work. So it takes a big team. Um,
[00:10:27.420]and there's a lot of students that are involved in this,
[00:10:29.640]but the questions that we were trying to answer is what should I plant? Right.
[00:10:33.570]So what species, and then when should I harvest it? Right? So,
[00:10:38.820]before we get into the results, got to make sure we're all on the same page.
[00:10:42.360]So to start off, I kind of wanted to get everybody on the same page about,
[00:10:46.290]stages and harvest timing.
[00:10:48.510]And so the first one I wanted to show you is boot stage.
[00:10:51.330]And basically if you can see right here, this is where the seed head is.
[00:10:54.060]This is the flag leaf of the top leaf.
[00:10:56.070]And you can kind of see these little bulges and there's a bulge here.
[00:10:59.670]That's where the head is. It hasn't quite come out yet.
[00:11:03.150]It's right below the flag leaf. that's the boot stage.
[00:11:07.320]And so that's what I'm gonna talk about when I talk about boot. Um,
[00:11:09.990]so you can't see any seed heads yet, but they're almost, and within,
[00:11:14.700]seven days, they'll actually, actually you usually within three days,
[00:11:18.660]there'll be out. Um,
[00:11:20.160]so for most of the time for our planting in mid October,
[00:11:24.810]too late, October,
[00:11:27.240]that's going to be mid to late may depending on the year.
[00:11:31.920]pollinations the next one I'm gonna talk about.
[00:11:34.260]So all the heads are out and then you see,
[00:11:37.620]some people call it the dusting or you just see the yellow that's out there.
[00:11:42.120]and they've put out the POL. And so that's pollination.
[00:11:45.660]So that's what I'm talking about in between boot and pollination is usually
[00:11:50.280]10 to 12 days. Um,
[00:11:52.800]it's of the timeframe in between those two.
[00:11:56.350]And then the last two I want to talk about is milk and soft dough.
[00:12:00.160]So milk stage is you go to that head,
[00:12:03.910]you take the seed out and if you squeeze it,
[00:12:06.310]a Milky white substance will come out. Right? So it hasn't solidified yet. Um,
[00:12:10.480]so that's milk in early. June's kind of typical timeframe for that.
[00:12:14.530]And usually like the first week in June and then soft dough would be,
[00:12:19.060]it's got a little bit further along. You can still squeeze it out the dough,
[00:12:22.810]but it's more like dough now instead of Milky. Um,
[00:12:26.770]and it's usually is still, as you can kind of see, it's still green. Um,
[00:12:30.340]this picture is, this is icon.
[00:12:32.690]I call that almost ready to start hard dough. That makes sense.
[00:12:36.400]So a lot of times soft dough is mid to late June,
[00:12:41.320]depending on the year and the species. Okay. So that I won't have the,
[00:12:44.740]in your mind when we're talking about stages.
[00:12:47.620]So the first thing is a comparison of the three species.
[00:12:51.550]So we treat a CALEA and rye and,
[00:12:55.330]this is tons of dry matter per acre.
[00:12:57.880]I know most of you guys are gonna think as fed,
[00:12:59.680]like how much can I get out of the field?
[00:13:01.720]The challenge with that is that's going to be highly variable depending on your
[00:13:06.190]dry matter management, which we'll talk about a little bit,
[00:13:08.980]but one of the key things I wanted to show you is that really the only thing
[00:13:13.600]that really stuck out to me is that for us,
[00:13:16.450]the wheat didn't really seem to hold up as well. This was pronghorn wheat,
[00:13:21.100]especially at soft dough.
[00:13:23.290]And one of the things that we noticed about the wheat was when we started
[00:13:27.040]getting towards soft dough, we had a lot of senescence of the leaves.
[00:13:30.760]So underneath, we didn't have as much leaf material left.
[00:13:35.530]Like there was a lot of brown leaf material, which was kind of interesting.
[00:13:40.030]but between Trudy Kaley and rye, we really didn't see huge differences.
[00:13:44.560]Maybe the tree to Kaylee you'll have a little bit more,
[00:13:46.660]which is what we would have expected.
[00:13:48.520]If you would ask me what I would have expected,
[00:13:50.620]I would have said Trudy Kaylee without yield the two. Um,
[00:13:54.640]but there's not as big differences as I kind of assumed there would be,
[00:13:57.970]which is kind of intriguing to me. Okay.
[00:14:01.450]So what about the nutrient content? Well, this,
[00:14:05.740]again, not huge differences among the species, if anything,
[00:14:10.600]tricky, Kaley kind of fell out a little bit lower,
[00:14:12.550]which is totally not what I would have hypothesized.
[00:14:15.640]I would have thought treaty Kaylee would have been right up there if not higher
[00:14:19.840]than the Ry. one thing I will point out though,
[00:14:22.630]remember your yield was a little bit higher. Staging is not an exact science.
[00:14:27.460]We did go through collect plants and actually stage individual plants.
[00:14:31.900]And I have the percentages and all those things on average,
[00:14:35.350]I would say we might've been a little bit later on the trip to Kaylee and that
[00:14:39.610]might explain a little bit why we see a little bit lower energy content,
[00:14:43.660]a little bit higher yield.
[00:14:45.070]So the story here is we don't see huge differences,
[00:14:48.760]which is not all that unexpected,
[00:14:51.410]but I think one of the things that I really wanted to show you
[00:14:56.480]is about the combination of the two.
[00:14:58.880]So before we get there looking at crude protein content,
[00:15:03.980]as you would expect, crude protein content decreased,
[00:15:06.980]as we went to later stages,
[00:15:08.750]basically those plants have taken up a lot of nitrogen, um,
[00:15:12.200]in that early spring.
[00:15:13.280]And then they start using it and they grow and they're just diluting it more if
[00:15:17.330]that kinda makes sense. Right? So, um,
[00:15:19.670]actually you'll see on our crude protein yields,
[00:15:22.370]they kind of hold steady per acre.
[00:15:24.410]And it's just the distribution changes because they put on more, dry matter.
[00:15:29.480]on average,
[00:15:30.800]the rice actually had higher crude protein than the wheat in the
[00:15:35.510]Tredegar Kaylee at the early stages. At the later stages,
[00:15:39.320]there wasn't as much of a difference, again,
[00:15:43.460]not what I would have anticipated.
[00:15:46.880]So one of the things for me then is it wasn't huge diff differences
[00:15:51.860]in yield. There's not huge differences in quality. If anything,
[00:15:56.360]the treaty Kaylee maybe yield a little more, had a little bit lower quality.
[00:15:59.360]The rye, had a little bit lower yield and a little bit,
[00:16:03.440]greater quality, but let's look at tying cause that's the other question, right,
[00:16:08.030]is if I can get it off sooner, then I can put in another crop, right? So,
[00:16:13.430]over the two years we did get some differences in results. The first year,
[00:16:17.660]really Ryan Trudy,
[00:16:18.590]Kaylee were almost identical in terms of when we harvested and the
[00:16:23.330]wheat was a little bit behind initially,
[00:16:25.580]and then it sped up and got a little bit ahead,
[00:16:29.830]couple things to note, is that going from stage to stage here,
[00:16:33.770]you have seven, 10 days, like,
[00:16:38.990]you blink and it's changed, right?
[00:16:42.470]So if you looked at the change in quality,
[00:16:45.050]stage matters and you can miss a stage very, very quickly.
[00:16:49.460]So I always say whatever stage you're shooting for when it gets to the stage
[00:16:53.180]right before it, that's the time to get geared up and go.
[00:16:56.480]Cause you're probably going to hit the stage. You're actually looking for.
[00:16:59.750]If we look at year two, then we'd see more of what I expected,
[00:17:04.340]which is the rye was a little bit ahead of the wheat and triticale.
[00:17:08.900]it was about a week earlier, at the boot and the pollination.
[00:17:13.070]And then they kind of started to get closer together. On average,
[00:17:17.630]the ride was a little bit ahead of everything else.
[00:17:19.730]That's what I would have hypothesized to happen,
[00:17:22.490]differences in weather between the two years.
[00:17:24.440]And then also we had a difference in ride variety between these two years.
[00:17:28.640]we couldn't get the same ride variety.
[00:17:31.640]This one actually was a forage rye.
[00:17:34.790]Like it wasn't a hybrid rye and I can't remember the name now I'll have to look
[00:17:38.420]it up. but I actually expected if anything, that would have been flipped,
[00:17:43.160]but again, I get wrong all the time. So,
[00:17:48.500]it's how we learn, right? So we do the experiments, but on average,
[00:17:51.960]I would say, the big thing to, to pull away from this is right,
[00:17:56.250]is not low quality.
[00:17:57.540]It can be as good as the others and at least from our grazing experiments,
[00:18:02.250]it's usually ready about a week earlier. And in some cases, baby,
[00:18:06.120]a little bit earlier,
[00:18:07.800]in the timing for silent harvest.
[00:18:12.540]So the conclusions planting rye or Trudy Kaylee will result in the best
[00:18:17.250]nutrient yields per acre.
[00:18:19.800]So in one Trudy to a little bit lower quality, a little bit higher yield.
[00:18:23.190]And the other one, the ride was a little bit higher quality,
[00:18:25.140]a little bit lower yield now,
[00:18:30.000]what's the cost difference. Anybody got an idea,
[00:18:35.850]cheaper rice cheaper. Yeah. In general rice cheaper than to Kaylee.
[00:18:40.350]It's not a huge difference, on a per pound of seed,
[00:18:44.610]but once you start multiplying it up per acre, it can make a difference. So,
[00:18:49.680]that was a little bit interesting to me. Okay.
[00:18:53.700]So now I just took all that data and put it together to make a few things about
[00:18:58.530]harvest timing. So I've got two axes on here just to confuse you.
[00:19:04.530]So the first one here is TDN, which is this red line.
[00:19:08.490]So this is the change in TDN over, the stages.
[00:19:13.200]And so you notice that it declines from the early boot stage, to milk.
[00:19:18.180]And then we get a little bump. Anybody know why we get that bump?
[00:19:24.630]Yeah. Right. We S we get some seed in there. So we actually get started.
[00:19:28.410]So we've lost all the, really the, the,
[00:19:31.560]digestibility of the fiber component of the forage.
[00:19:34.830]But then we get a little bump because we get some starch formation.
[00:19:39.660]so if we look at it, there's not a huge drop from boot to pollination.
[00:19:44.430]And then we lose a lot going from pollination to milk.
[00:19:48.510]If we look at crude protein,
[00:19:50.670]we see this a straight decline, right. All the way down.
[00:19:55.050]And that's just because we're diluting out the nitrogen that's there.
[00:19:58.440]And that kind of makes sense to me as well. But look, we're very,
[00:20:01.290]very high protein here. That's alfalfa, right? 17,
[00:20:05.670]18% crude protein that's alfalfa, um,
[00:20:10.170]down to 10% crude protein, which is medium quality grass.
[00:20:15.690]So if you think about it kinda like that, depending on what your target is,
[00:20:20.280]that might make a difference.
[00:20:21.420]I know a couple of years ago stillers was hard to get ahold of.
[00:20:25.770]And I had some producers who were timing their harvest of these small cereals to
[00:20:30.750]actually target a higher crude protein content,
[00:20:33.330]so they could add protein into their diets.
[00:20:36.270]So they were using it as a protein supplement.
[00:20:38.460]So they harvest early and that was kind of their goal.
[00:20:43.410]Okay. So what about nutrient yield per acre?
[00:20:45.810]So we got the concentration and we think about that from the feed perspective,
[00:20:50.680]but then we also have to think about,
[00:20:52.330]we have these costs they're on a per acre basis and we're distributing them over
[00:20:56.440]those acres. What if we look at the yield of TD in,
[00:20:59.830]so that's that red line again. And we see, as you expect dry matter,
[00:21:03.160]yield increased,
[00:21:04.840]and it increased at such a rate that it overcome the drop in TDN
[00:21:10.300]if that makes sense to everybody. so in this case, you remember on yields,
[00:21:15.160]we were about three to four ton of dry matter per acre at boop.
[00:21:20.230]And we basically get to about 10, a ton, an acre of dry matter.
[00:21:25.390]Anybody heard 10 ton, an acre, a dry matter.
[00:21:27.250]Does anybody know what that looks like? That's a lot,
[00:21:32.200]that's,
[00:21:33.880]like some corn silage that I have seen harvested it's we can get a
[00:21:38.620]lot of yield out of these guys at soft dough.
[00:21:42.790]So depending on what you're trying to target,
[00:21:45.130]is it balanced between quality and yield, right?
[00:21:48.100]You're going to select the timing. So for me,
[00:21:51.430]if I'm looking for kind of higher quality forage,
[00:21:54.460]and I'm trying to balance that with the yield pollination actually seems to look
[00:21:58.630]pretty good. So most of the time, if you look in the extension literature,
[00:22:01.930]they'll talk about, look for high quality shoot for boot. That's true.
[00:22:07.360]And if I'm a dairy producer, I'm going to shoot for boot.
[00:22:10.660]But I think for most of what we need in terms of beef, cows,
[00:22:15.010]feed feedlots, growing cattle, I think pollination actually works fairly well.
[00:22:19.450]And we get a substantial boost in yield by delaying a little bit,
[00:22:25.180]if I'm shooting for just maximum TD in yield per acre.
[00:22:29.710]So especially like a feedlot soft dough makes a lot of sense.
[00:22:35.410]All right. So one other thing that I really wanted to mention here,
[00:22:39.730]when we talk about harvesting,
[00:22:42.100]these guys for Silas is moisture.
[00:22:46.030]Moisture management is a huge issue.
[00:22:49.130]I think people don't recognize how wet that material is out in the
[00:22:54.130]field. so on average,
[00:22:57.280]we really want to shoot for 65 to 70% moisture or 30 to
[00:23:01.960]35% dry matter.
[00:23:03.340]However you want to think about it is what you're actually putting into the
[00:23:06.850]silo. If we go out and direct cut at these stages,
[00:23:11.320]these are the moisture contents that we got.
[00:23:13.570]And so you can see we're way too wet at boot and pollination to be able to
[00:23:18.220]direct cut. You need to wilt.
[00:23:21.220]You need to wilt at milk, depending on the year,
[00:23:25.180]I have seen it hit just fine. Could a dry cut it.
[00:23:28.720]And I've seen years where I needed to wilt it. So that one, I think you need to,
[00:23:32.710]you need to test to see where you're at and it soft dough.
[00:23:36.580]We can go the other way. Um,
[00:23:38.710]I have seen some people who are sitting and it was a little too wet,
[00:23:41.260]especially if they harvest it in the morning and do still on.
[00:23:44.080]So if you want to direct cut that's another consideration is let it dry out
[00:23:48.200]some, unless you get late, which is the other problem,
[00:23:53.120]right? Cause it gets too mature. I just told you to go for the stage ahead.
[00:23:57.260]So if you're shooting for soft dough and you actually geared up at milk,
[00:24:01.340]all right, then hopefully you hit soft dough,
[00:24:03.710]but if you shoot for soft dough and you start at soft dough,
[00:24:06.350]you might be hitting it at Pardot, which is going to be too dry.
[00:24:10.820]So the problem is how many of you guys have a chopper?
[00:24:15.980]Not a single hand in the room, right?
[00:24:19.760]so anybody who's going to do this,
[00:24:22.010]the majority of them are going to hire a harp, a custom harvester. Right.
[00:24:27.560]And so communication's going to be, a challenge number one.
[00:24:32.510]So again,
[00:24:33.110]staying on top of it and thinking really way far ahead makes a lot of sense.
[00:24:38.090]the other thing is looking about what kind of opportunities,
[00:24:42.680]they have in terms of demand, right?
[00:24:45.770]So if you're in an area has got a lot of dairies, you know,
[00:24:48.110]they're going to be shooting for boot.
[00:24:49.670]You're probably not going to be able to get in. Um,
[00:24:52.430]and then you can also think about,
[00:24:53.870]do I go with a different species to kind of hit a little bit later?
[00:24:56.990]So it works for me.
[00:24:58.940]but the big thing is to actually pay attention and get ahead
[00:25:03.740]of, cutting that down and allowing it to wilt because,
[00:25:08.090]one of the things we've seen is a lot of really,
[00:25:11.840]really wet small cereal silage. So,
[00:25:16.560]a lot of the educators worked with us over the last year or so to get
[00:25:21.560]samples of small cereal silage from producers.
[00:25:24.860]We had 17 producers in 20 samples. Um,
[00:25:28.970]Gary and Todd, thank you very much, for all your help doing that.
[00:25:34.070]And, this is Alexa Johnson. She's a master student who's been helping,
[00:25:38.660]get this coordinated and put together,
[00:25:41.060]which is a lot of work and there would be no way I would be able to manage it.
[00:25:44.570]but I did wanna show you one thing from that.
[00:25:46.670]And that is 40% of those samples were too wet when they were going into the
[00:25:51.410]silo.
[00:25:53.210]So a lot of too wet material going in,
[00:25:57.230]they needed longer wilting periods. The majority of them said they wilted. Now,
[00:26:01.520]when we started looking at the time periods,
[00:26:03.950]they went anywhere from 30 minutes to, it's 12 hours.
[00:26:08.720]It was kind of average.
[00:26:10.130]Now what I have on here on this graph is TD in and then pre and post,
[00:26:14.720]which is the top number here.
[00:26:17.390]So the top of these bars is basically what the TV in or the energy content
[00:26:22.010]was when it went into the silo.
[00:26:26.030]And the black part of that bar is what it was when it came out of the silo.
[00:26:30.650]So it's how much energy you lost during the fermentation process.
[00:26:35.990]So have some stars on here and I want you to notice some
[00:26:40.400]correlations correlations. That's a big word, right?
[00:26:44.430]look at how big these gray area is on these ones that are
[00:26:49.470]starred. So this is the one exception, but if you look at them,
[00:26:52.560]look how much loss and TD in there was from when they put it in the silo to when
[00:26:57.180]they pulled it out of the silo, huge went from 60 to 40, right?
[00:27:02.400]So you start looking at this one and this one, all the starred ones,
[00:27:06.360]what they have in common, they were way too wet when they went in.
[00:27:11.670]So they all actually had all of the red stars had
[00:27:16.500]butyric acid production,
[00:27:18.480]which just basically says that the type of bacteria that were actually
[00:27:21.660]fermenting were the type of bacteria we don't want.
[00:27:26.790]And I don't know if anybody has went and smelled small cereal silo,
[00:27:30.230]if it's put into wet and you get that type of fermentation,
[00:27:34.410]it smells like rancid butter is not a pleasant experience.
[00:27:39.450]It decreases the palatability.
[00:27:41.520]So you can only put it in a smaller proportion of the diet,
[00:27:44.250]but it also results in a whole lot of energy loss,
[00:27:48.330]what you put in and what you got out are two completely different things.
[00:27:52.380]So my point here is that we got a problem with this
[00:27:57.240]and we we've got to work on getting it harvested and actually
[00:28:02.190]put up at the right dry matter to be able to capture all the potential and the
[00:28:06.300]numbers I was showing you, by the way, the numbers I was showing you,
[00:28:10.350]for TD and they were post fermentation on, on the other slides. Um,
[00:28:14.910]and so yeah, we do lose something on average across all of those.
[00:28:18.270]It was five TD in units,
[00:28:20.040]but we had some that were 10 to 17 and you're going to inevitably lose
[00:28:24.750]some there's very few of these. It didn't lose something, but you know,
[00:28:28.980]four or five, that seems much more manageable. Okay.
[00:28:33.180]So I was going to talk just a second about inoculants.
[00:28:36.300]I'm not an inoculant expert, especially when it comes to small grain silages,
[00:28:40.560]but we do have one that's coming. And so if you're really interested, um,
[00:28:44.700]I'll tell you about our conference, which you should come to,
[00:28:47.700]but I did want to point out there are two different types of inoculants,
[00:28:50.910]if you want to generalize them and they have really different goals.
[00:28:54.180]And so most people, if you're using a custom harvester, they said,
[00:28:57.900]you want to put an inoculant on and it's like, yes or no thing.
[00:29:01.920]And the truth is you need to know a little bit more. Um,
[00:29:05.700]so the two types are what we call homo affirmative, which basically just means,
[00:29:10.050]most of the time they're lactic acid producing bacteria that they're not
[00:29:13.470]relating with.
[00:29:15.090]And those guys reduce the pH in the siloed more quickly,
[00:29:19.050]which means you should retain more of the dry matter
[00:29:24.300]and the energy content of that signage.
[00:29:27.690]Assuming a couple of things,
[00:29:29.940]one of which is assuming you don't already have enough of them present.
[00:29:33.300]So in corn siloed, for instance, um,
[00:29:35.730]those types of bacteria already naturally on the leaves.
[00:29:39.090]And so as long as conditions are good,
[00:29:42.460]you get at the right moisture. Um,
[00:29:45.190]you get it packed well and inoculant doesn't really help you that much.
[00:29:48.580]From that standpoint. Now with these guys, depending on stage,
[00:29:51.640]it probably does matter a little bit, but we have the expert coming.
[00:29:54.790]You should talk to him about it. hetero,
[00:29:58.060]affirmative is a little bit different goal and it usually has some lactic acid
[00:30:02.530]producing bacteria that drop the pH,
[00:30:04.600]but it also has some bacteria to produce basically vinegar or a scenic acid.
[00:30:09.340]And that actually helps to maintain the stability of the silence as you
[00:30:14.230]start feeding it out, or you're exposing it to air, right?
[00:30:18.540]One of the problems, not only with the process of the fermentation,
[00:30:23.470]but then you have, you're trying to feed it out.
[00:30:25.600]You're exposing it to air and you start getting yeast and mold growing on it.
[00:30:29.470]Well, if anybody's ever stuck their hand into a pile of silence,
[00:30:33.970]maybe that you knocked off the day before and it's hot,
[00:30:38.020]anybody ever experienced that that's money burning, right?
[00:30:42.190]Cause that's all your energy and dry matter being digested by things.
[00:30:45.250]You don't want to digest it.
[00:30:46.540]You want the bacteria in the room and to be digesting it,
[00:30:50.020]not the yeast and mold that are on that.
[00:30:53.050]The phytic acid producing bacteria helps to reduce how
[00:30:58.000]quickly that happens and can increase the stability.
[00:31:02.050]So the small grain silage we're having a conference,
[00:31:05.980]that's a solid conference and we're focusing primarily on small grains.
[00:31:09.970]It's going to be at the Eastern Nebraska research center in
[00:31:14.470]Mead. And there's, I have a couple of things highlighted here cause I'm,
[00:31:17.550]I'm pretty excited about this.
[00:31:19.150]We have some experts coming from across the country, to talk about,
[00:31:24.160]small cereal silage. We have,
[00:31:26.950]somebody who's going to talk about agronomic management,
[00:31:30.430]which I haven't told you anything about seeding rates haven't told you about
[00:31:34.120]fertility. I mean,
[00:31:36.910]basically I kind of talked about very generally what the plant and when the
[00:31:41.350]harvest that there's all these other questions out there, right? Um,
[00:31:45.220]how it fits into the system.
[00:31:46.900]Then another one is really the fundamentals of silent management.
[00:31:51.190]So it's really about kind of the practical side.
[00:31:53.650]And she does a really great job of thinking about what can you actually do
[00:31:58.510]and what makes big difference in how much of that TDN you capture as I showed
[00:32:02.590]you, some people were having quite a bit of loss. Um,
[00:32:05.860]so anything you can do means more money in your pocket.
[00:32:08.530]You already spent all the money you want to get as much of it out as you can.
[00:32:12.490]And then this is the one I'm really excited. He,
[00:32:14.600]he is the inoculant expert and he's going to be coming and talking
[00:32:19.450]about what inoculants to think about.
[00:32:21.730]And when for small grain silages in general,
[00:32:25.180]the answer is not always yes,
[00:32:28.060]in that the payback to inoculant is going to depend on the conditions.
[00:32:32.020]And so having some of those ideas in the back of your head,
[00:32:34.450]so you don't spend that extra money if you don't need to,
[00:32:36.880]but you do spend it when it's going to give you return on investment, that's,
[00:32:40.370]what's going to be really beneficial. And then lastly,
[00:32:42.800]we have a panel which will be, um,
[00:32:45.470]a couple of producers and a couple of nutritionists talking about using small
[00:32:49.160]grain silages. So if you're interested, there will be both an in-person,
[00:32:53.810]and a virtual, all the speakers will be in-person.
[00:32:58.340]so show up if you'd like, it's free,
[00:33:02.900]you just need to register. And this QR code takes you to the registration.
[00:33:07.460]There's also flyers in the back. If you want to take them home with you. Um,
[00:33:10.910]so you can remember it.
[00:33:12.950]And the last thing I wanted to talk about is if you're interested in,
[00:33:17.960]you don't have cattle,
[00:33:18.890]but you may be interested in getting some money out of the deal.
[00:33:21.770]And you're trying to figure out with, you know,
[00:33:24.800]a neighbor about how much should I be charging for this,
[00:33:29.540]this forage standing in the field. This is a calculator that,
[00:33:33.740]one of my, cohorts over in ag economics,
[00:33:37.940]along with an agronomist and myself worked on putting together. And,
[00:33:41.660]it's pretty handy to kind of figure out, well, how much should,
[00:33:45.330]that value be, really relative to the current market, right?
[00:33:49.340]So it's based off of the value of the forage and what the expected,
[00:33:53.180]yield you're going to get. And I just showed you that it can vary tremendously,
[00:33:56.570]right based off of when you harvest. So,
[00:33:59.690]making those decisions are going to be important. All right.
[00:34:03.770]So it is almost lunchtime.
[00:34:07.130]And I think we'll take some questions.
[00:34:09.950]Some questions. First question, we do have one from online. Mary,
[00:34:13.350]the question was, um,
[00:34:15.920]have you done any work on mixtures of those different, small grain species?
[00:34:19.820]So a planting, a mix of tryna Kaylee rye on purpose or wheat dry.
[00:34:24.590]Yeah. So I have not, I've heard the theories about planting, like a mixture,
[00:34:29.120]especially for grazing with the idea that if, say for instance,
[00:34:32.870]the rag gets ahead of you. Maybe the wheat is a little bit slower to come on,
[00:34:37.670]which indeed the wheat and Trudy Kaley is a little bit slower to come on.
[00:34:41.300]And I would say there might be some advantage,
[00:34:43.970]especially if you're going late with grazing.
[00:34:45.950]Like if you're actually just going to double crop forages, for instance,
[00:34:48.410]and you're going to go into June with grazing. Maybe that makes sense.
[00:34:52.130]I don't have any data to say yes or no. but I would say in general,
[00:34:56.270]if I'm just shooting for an early grazing, get off and get another crop in,
[00:35:00.830]and I'm only going to go to may. I don't think it's a huge advantage.
[00:35:04.520]I don't really see a lot of difference in the quality when they're in that
[00:35:07.850]vegetative state. And I think we can manage with a monoculture.
[00:35:11.420]So that's kinda my, it depends answer, which is most extension answers,
[00:35:15.950]right? It depends.
[00:35:17.390]Yes. Thanks. Okay.
[00:35:19.700]Mary, two quick questions.
[00:35:22.340]This is the Eastern Nebraska soil health conference.
[00:35:26.570]And as I traveled further west down I80, I always see more cattle in the fields.
[00:35:31.970]We got 50 farmers in this room right now.
[00:35:34.640]I would like to see a raise of hands.
[00:35:38.040]How many ran cattle on part of your land this year? Raise your hand high.
[00:35:43.320]Okay.
[00:35:44.010]Oh, maybe even more than I asked who had cattle. Yeah.
[00:35:48.240]That's great. Defend your research at Mead,
[00:35:52.140]Nebraska from the animal science department.
[00:35:55.230]How many days did you run those cattle and you had multiple years of
[00:35:59.910]data on the effect on crop yields, both beans and corn.
[00:36:05.070]Yeah.
[00:36:05.520]So, he was just trying to set me up.
[00:36:10.890]so,
[00:36:12.780]so we've done a lot of various experiments.
[00:36:15.960]We've done a lot of experiments with,
[00:36:18.660]what I would call late summer planted stuff that we grazed in the winter.
[00:36:23.160]And those would be 60 to 90 days grazing or the small cereals that are in the
[00:36:27.180]spring. And we're really only looking at a 30 to 40 days of grazing. Right.
[00:36:32.100]But a lot of what we were doing initially was looking at the
[00:36:36.570]impacts of,
[00:36:38.100]of having that crop as well as grazing that crop.
[00:36:41.730]We usually try to separate the two on the soil and everybody's worried
[00:36:47.370]about compaction.
[00:36:49.830]And what's most interesting to me is even when in some, some years
[00:36:56.700]and some years in the spring, right, it can get quite what,
[00:37:01.260]and we can get quite pugged up.
[00:37:03.750]And yet we really do not see any measurable compaction. What we do see,
[00:37:07.590]the only negative effect we can see is that, um,
[00:37:11.550]if it is wet and we do not pull the cattle off, which we never do by the way,
[00:37:15.960]we, we usually go for the worst case, I guess.
[00:37:21.360]If it is wet,
[00:37:22.530]we can see a decrease in infiltration rates and initially in the spring.
[00:37:27.360]And, but here's the caveat to that. We had the rye and we don't graze it.
[00:37:31.920]We get an increase in infiltration rate if we graze it and it's wet,
[00:37:37.320]we have no benefit of the rye for infiltration rate.
[00:37:41.370]Now that's ameliorated very quickly. I think what happens is we actually, um,
[00:37:45.870]disturb the soil and we get some small particles and they plug holes.
[00:37:49.980]The nice thing about it is some of that goes away fairly quickly,
[00:37:53.640]but compaction wise, we really just don't see anything, bulk density,
[00:37:56.910]penetration, resistance.
[00:37:58.110]We just don't see a lot of impacts terms of yields.
[00:38:02.490]We don't see any negative impacts of grazing.
[00:38:05.880]And in some cases we see positive impacts. So especially grazing residue.
[00:38:09.510]If we have a really high, you know, corn residue,
[00:38:13.380]so 200, 220 bushels, we can see positive impacts on subsequent soybeans.
[00:38:18.810]And in the last two years, we actually did a trial.
[00:38:23.190]So we send out a lot of calves to graze on stocks.
[00:38:28.170]we buy a lot of calves in the fall and then,
[00:38:31.560]we start bringing them towards home,
[00:38:33.960]towards the feedlot as we get into the spring.
[00:38:37.300]And so we start collapsing groups down.
[00:38:39.730]And so we'll have these really big groups, you know,
[00:38:42.160]four or 500 head of calves on a pivot
[00:38:47.380]and we do it right.
[00:38:48.700]They start coming home and they start coming to in rec and the manager is like,
[00:38:53.170]you are causing a problem, right?
[00:38:56.350]So we have really high stocking densities and it rains and it looks
[00:39:00.730]like a dry lot, right? They,
[00:39:03.970]there is nothing left in that field. So last two years,
[00:39:07.300]we did an experiment where we actually looked at high stocking densities,
[00:39:11.680]put them out. As soon as it rain, if it rained two inches,
[00:39:14.530]it was like time to go. We're going to put everybody out there.
[00:39:17.650]We're gonna have the same grazing rate as a medium stocking density in the S in
[00:39:21.970]the winter. And we graze in the winter. We compared that to a no grace,
[00:39:26.560]worst case scenario. It looked horrible. I wish I show you pictures. I mean,
[00:39:30.250]you just thought we had destroyed it. And it was going to be horrible.
[00:39:34.690]Guess what? Our subsequent soybean yields were still greater.
[00:39:38.920]They were actually improved above what we saw with the traditional grazing.
[00:39:44.080]And one of the, which is just crazy, right? I mean, that was a shocker for me,
[00:39:49.630]but again, we just really couldn't see big impacts on compassion.
[00:39:54.520]I think, the fact is that while we think cattle,
[00:39:59.470]you know, causes a big problem,
[00:40:01.270]if you think about your equipment and you think about how much compaction they
[00:40:05.080]can cost, it's so shallow and the most active part of your soil, right,
[00:40:09.970]is where all the bacteria fungi are working. We have the freestyle cycles,
[00:40:14.470]you have the wet, dry cycles.
[00:40:15.670]We just don't get as much impact as what we would expect.
[00:40:20.740]Cattle are low actual weight.
[00:40:22.690]S that's right. Cattle are low. Actually.
[00:40:27.130]I will take time for one more question. Then we'll get started on lunch.
[00:40:32.650]What catch Mary over lunch?
[00:40:37.300]If you're just getting you a grazed, a rye,
[00:40:42.310]and have no intention of planting another crop,
[00:40:45.730]how long can you keep that rivalry growing with a girl? All seven and nine?
[00:40:50.080]Yeah, that's a great question. So how long can I keep it growing? Well,
[00:40:54.880]the truth is that it probably depends on law on whether or not it gets away from
[00:40:58.870]you, but in general, I would say we can usually go until,
[00:41:04.630]mid June on average is what I see people who are actually trying to
[00:41:09.520]do just a double crop forage, before like, you know, keep growing,
[00:41:14.230]but it will be so slow after that point that it's not really worth it.
[00:41:17.320]You're better off planting a warm season that you're going to then,
[00:41:21.400]come back in and grace. So that would be my record recommendation.
[00:41:26.020]And the other thing is that in general, right, you see early on the growth rate,
[00:41:30.550]isn't going to be as fast and gets a little bit warmer.
[00:41:32.620]It gets kind optimum temperature, and it's faster.
[00:41:35.180]So the stocking rate initially that really is optimal.
[00:41:39.380]And later in that season,
[00:41:40.640]it's going to be different if you don't have more animals than pulling some
[00:41:44.570]acres out of that rotation makes a lot of sense,
[00:41:47.540]either harvest into silage or killing it and planting the next crop and
[00:41:51.560]maybe having more acres for the first month of grazing and then fewer
[00:41:56.150]acres for that later half a grazing makes a lot of sense.
[00:41:59.540]So you kind of got to play a little bit with that.
[00:42:01.700]I see a lot of people using it for cows and they'll use it for when they're
[00:42:05.330]calving. And that works really well.
[00:42:06.860]Cause they'll just start adding more cows who have calved and that kind of
[00:42:10.130]works, but, management is going to be the key to getting that extended.

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2022 Eastern Nebraska Soil Health Conference Presentations - Mary Drewnoski

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