Get Back To The Basics On Post-Drought Pastures

Mar 16, 2023

By Linda Geist

Recurring drought calls for forage producers to get back to the basics of farming, says University of Missouri Extension agronomist Terry Halleran.

“Practice standard farming practices to rebuild pastures following drought,” he says. Halleran spoke March 7 at the Christian County Livestock and Forage Conference in Clever, Missouri. Southwestern Missouri livestock producers have been especially hard hit from drought in recent years.

Missouri began December with 18% less hay stock than 2021, according to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. Nationally, 2022 hay stocks dropped to their lowest numbers since the 1950s.

Halleran says forage and livestock producers should prepare for the inevitable – there’s going to be drought. Missouri has seen droughts in 20 of the last 23 years, according to data compiled by MU Extension climatologist Pat Guinan.

“Prepare for a problem before it occurs,” Halleran says. If you don’t, “you are going to be feeding high dollar hay,” he says. If you prepare and there’s no drought, you’ve lost nothing.

One way to prepare is to “get out of your tractor or pickup” to look at pastures, he says. Walk pastures and look for weak areas. Post-drought pastures may need time to recover. Expect weakened stands, thin pastures and lower supplies after drought. Also, expect more weeds.

Halleran gets back to the basics with these steps:

• Be patient. Practice patience when turning cows out onto fresh pastures. Wait until grass is 6-10 inches tall in rotational grazing systems and don’t allow cows to graze plants lower than 2 inches.

• Don’t be too patient. Get the most out of your hay crop by baling before July. Don’t wait too long to frost-seed legumes into pastures. Plant cool-season grasses in fall. Control weeds so that spring forages can compete against weed pressure.

• Act. Make honest calculations and then act. Many producers don’t know the yield of their pastures and don’t allow enough acreage per cow.

• Prevent waste by investing in good storage methods and facilities. Invest in a storage facility for hay, says Halleran, and keep a two-year supply on hand to prepare for drought. “It’s not about a better truck or a better tractor,” he says. “It’s about a hay barn.”

• Test. Before you fertilize, take a soil test. Look at fertilizer options. “Nitrogen isn’t the only fertilizer for sale,” Halleran says. Lime pastures if the test calls for it, and be patient. Lime takes four to six months to activate. Drag pastures to spread nutrients from manure piles across the pasture.

• Plan. Plant cool season grasses in the fall. It is late in the season to seed frost-seed legumes into pastures but plan for next year. Choose drought-resistant grasses. Match stocking rates to feed supply estimates.

• Don’t guess. Know yields of your tall fescue pastures, says Halleran. Most producers don’t have an accurate estimate of yields. They also likely overestimate their usable acreage by not deducting woods, fence lines, ditches, etc. where forages can’t be harvested.

More information is available from the Alliance for Grassland Renewal at www.grasslandrenewal.org(opens in new window). The alliance includes partners from university, government, industry and nonprofit groups.

Drought resources from MU Extension: extension.missouri.edu/programs/drought-resources.
Drought resources from MU Integrated Pest Management: ipm.missouri.edu/drought(opens in new window).

Source : missouri.edu

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.