Fall Forage Management

Nov 17, 2023

By Stephanie Karhoff and Kyle Verhoff

Fall provides a great opportunity to scout and manage forage hay fields and pastures. In established stands, final harvest or intensive grazing should already have taken place to allow a fall rest period, except if planning to frost seed legumes. If needed, there is still time to soil sample and address winter annual weed concerns.

Soil test fields that will be seeded to forages next year. Apply lime as needed to adjust pH levels. Maintaining proper soil pH increases nutrient availability and will strengthen forage stands, decreasing their susceptibility to stresses like insects, diseases, or weed infestations. The 2020 Tri-State Field Crop Fertilizer Recommendations for Corn, Soybean, Wheat, and Alfalfa (Extension Bulletin 974) recommends consistently soil sampling every 3 to 4 years at no more than 25-acre samples. Lime applications are recommended when soil pH is two to three units below the desired level. In mineral soils (less than 20% organic matter) where the subsoil pH is less than 6.0, the target pH is 6.8 for alfalfa and other forage legumes. In western Ohio, or in general, where the subsoil pH is greater than 6.0, the target pH is 6.5 for alfalfa and 6.0 for other forage legumes.

Now is also the time to scout for troublesome weeds like cressleaf groundsel, poison hemlock, wild carrot, dandelion, and Canada thistle in your hay fields. Fall herbicide applications are the most effective management tool against these species. That is because winter annuals like cressleaf groundsel are at the beginning of their life cycle and more vulnerable to herbicides. Control of biennials like poison hemlock and wild carrot, and perennials like dandelion and Canada thistle, is also improved since systemic herbicides will be moved to root systems along with nutrients.

Managing these weeds now is especially important in fields recently seeded this summer or early fall. Your fall herbicide options include 2,4-DB (Butyrac), Pursuit, Raptor, and clethodim in newly established pure alfalfa stands. Velpar or a dormant application of metribuzin are both options for established stands. Grass hay and pastures have a wider range of options found in the “Permanent Grass Pastures/CRP/Grass Hay” section of the Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois Weed Control Guide (Extension Bulletin 789).

With winter approaching, producers looking to extend grazing need to be aware of a few key concerns. One concern is forage toxicity. Like some previously mentioned weeds, forages like grain sorghum and sorghum-sudangrass hybrids have a high prussic acid poisoning potential. With that in mind, harvest or the final grazing of pastures with summer annuals should occur before the first frost. That first frost is also important if you are grazing high concentrations of forage legumes is a second concern. Grazing a high concentration of forage legumes a day or two after a hard frost increases the risk of bloat, so it is best to wait a few days and supplement with dry hay.

For producers that are grazing stockpiled pastures this winter, now is the time to take samples from hay and silage to calculate the nutritive value of your winter feed and to inform any supplementation needs. While grazing stockpiled forages, leaving a forage residual of four inches and having a plan to protect the pasture from livestock damage following significant precipitation events are vital to the long-term health and production of the pasture.

Source : osu.edu

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”