New Grasses May Solve Feeding Dilemma

New Grasses May Solve Feeding Dilemma

(Dec. 6, 2005) — For much of the year, the southern Great Plains provides livestock producers with an abundance of forage — be it winter wheat or warm-season grasses — for putting valuable weight on their stocker calves.

But problems arise during April and May, and again from September to November, when the region doesn’t produce enough quality forage to provide good animal weight gain.

These “forage gaps” wreak havoc with livestock managers’ planning and bottom lines, often making them use costly feed supplements so their cattle can continue to gain weight.

Finding ways to efficiently fill these gaps is a primary mission at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Grazinglands Research Laboratory in El Reno, Okla. Two researchers there, ecologist Brian Northup and animal scientist William Phillips, believe introduced perennial cool-season grasses may help solve the dilemma.

“Putting weight on yearling stocker cattle with forage is a vital agricultural and economic activity here,” Northup says. “The region is part of a system for fattening cattle that has evolved over the past 60 years. It relies primarily on two types of forage: annual cool-season grass, such as winter wheat (Triticum aestivum), for grazing in fall through spring, and perennial warm-season grasses — such as native rangelands or the introduced Old World bluestems or Bermuda grasses — for summer grazing.”

Both Northup and Phillips believe perennial cool-season grasses could help fill these gaps because they have longer growing seasons than wheat and, thus, allow calves to sustain high daily gains throughout fall and spring. Phillips says, “That can be the difference between a producer selling his cattle in a seller’s market or in a buyer’s market.”

The researchers add that a rotation including these perennial grasses and winter wheat may also lower risks associated with traditional all-wheat systems for producing pasture for stocker calves. “With wheat, planting date and precipitation are among the important variables influencing fall forage production,” Northup says. “Perennial cool-season grasses don’t have to be established annually.”

In their search for gap fillers for the southern plains, Northup and Phillips have focused on three cool-season grasses not normally used in the area but often used as forage elsewhere.

These include Lincoln smooth brome, which is used extensively in northern Great Plains states such as Iowa and Nebraska, and Jose tall wheatgrass, which was developed in southern Australia and has been used in intermountain regions such as Utah and eastern Oregon. The scientists also studied Manska intermediate wheatgrass, which is used as forage in the Dakotas.

“These grasses vary in their persistence under both grazing and the hot, dry conditions that occur during summer in the southern plains,” Northup says. “Our aim is to develop management strategies to help the farmer survive and be productive in this region. This requires developing guidelines for proper fertilization and timing and the right amount of grazing.”

For more information or to view the entire article, visit www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/dec05/forage1205.htm.

— by Luis Pons of ARS, which first published this article, titled “Filling the Southern Plains Forage Gap,” in the December 2005 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.