Fall Cover Crops And Supplemental Forages

By Sjoerd Willem Duiker

With dry weather affecting many parts of the state some farmers will be making an early corn silage harvest. Additionally, wheat, barley and oat fields are mostly open now after grain and straw harvest. In both cases, there are opportunities for planting cover crops that may also be used for forage.

This year is a bit of a roller coaster with many parts of the state affected by dry weather. There are farmers considering early corn silage harvest because taking it to grain harvest is not economical. Additionally, wheat, barley and oat fields are mostly open now after grain and straw harvest. That opens up good opportunities for planting cover crops that may also be used for forage. The window for cover crop planting is closing quickly in northern Pennsylvania but is still wide open in the south. In fact, the first frost is expected September 20th in the north but not until October 20th in the southeast. The following table shows recommended planting dates and rates for common cover crops. Although the cost of cover crop seed can be a challenge, it is especially critical in a year like this to plant them to maintain soil cover and improve the soil after a year of limited biomass and root production of the main crops. In addition, it is to be hoped that some rainfall will come our way to give the covers a boost yet this fall. This can help produce feed this fall or in the spring while the living roots and the stubble still help for soil improvement. It can also be possible to graze some animals on these forages.

For fall forage production, oats is the preferred choice. It is too late to think about species like sorghum, sudangrass or millets – you will only be disappointed because they will winterkill at first frost and not grow well in the cooler weather that is coming. It is possible to mix species, but our experience has been that you will disappointed if you shoot for both a fall and a spring harvest by mixing oats with winter-hardy cereals –these species compete too much so that both harvests will be small or one will be substantial while the other one is negligible. Mixing grasses or cereals with legumes, on the other hand, has been shown to be quite successful. Some popular mixes are crimson clover or hairy vetch with triticale or annual ryegrass. Mixing more species is also possible, although more is not always better – you need to know which species make a good combination and this is still mostly a matter of experience because we don’t have good research data to guide mixture composition. When mixing species, rule of thumb is to divide the seeding rate of individual species by the total number of species in the mix, and then adjust for less or more competitive species. So if you have 5 species in a mix, you would use 1/5 of seeding rate for each species. However, don’t reduce legume seeding rates as they tend to be less competitive, but reduce forage radish seeding rate to 2 or 3 lbs/A in a mix for early seeding. This rate can be increased as time progresses.

Source:psu.edu