Forage Management: Grateful for 2024, Looking Ahead to Greener Pastures in 2025

Dec 18, 2024

By Dr. Bruno Pedreira

Leading the UT Beef and Forage Center (UTBFC) this past year has been a rewarding experience, made possible with the great support of David McIntosh as our coordinator. Over the year, I’ve learned more about Tennessee’s forage and livestock industries, built strong connections with agents and farmers, and worked to improve the Center’s activities. Our goal remains the same: to support Tennessee’s beef and forage producers by providing research and sharing practical, science-based information.

In 2024, we reached some exciting milestones. We launched the Live.Stock Podcast and Companion, which you can find at utbeef.tennessee.edu/live-stock, giving producers access to helpful and engaging content. Our YouTube channel also grew, with 23.2K views, over 1,000 hours of watch time, and an increase in subscribers from 322 to 641. The UTBEEF.COM website received 171K views from 139K unique users. Social media allowed us to share timely information, including a post about armyworms in pastures that reached over 70,000 people and was shared nearly 300 times. We also continued sharing articles with Tennessee Cattle Business Magazine, which reaches over 7,000 producers across the state.

The Forage Laboratory analyzed more than 1,500 forage samples for producers and processed over 9,000 research samples using NIRS technology, saving nearly $400,000 compared to traditional testing methods.

Our forage variety trials made progress this year. New reports for Tall Fescue, Orchardgrass, and Annual Ryegrass are available at utbeef.tennessee.edu/forages-tennessee-variety-trials/. We also expanded warm-season trials to include Brachiaria and are planning trials for alfalfa, mixed pastures, and winter/early spring annuals.

We updated and developed several new Extension publications, including The Forage and Field Seeding Guide, Strategic Resource Management for Forage-Livestock Systems in Drought, Longhorned Tick and Bovine Theileriosis: Tennessee 2024 Update, Weed Control Strategies to Maximize Cool-Season Pasture Productivity, Buying Hay vs. Raising Hay for Beef Producers, among others.

We also welcomed Malerie Fancher as a new research assistant, along with several undergraduate students and visiting scholars who have brought fresh energy and ideas to the team.

As the year wraps up, I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together and excited to see what 2025 has in store for Tennessee’s beef and forage industries. Here’s to another great year ahead!

Source : tennessee.edu

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators