Pasture and Forage Minute: Cutting Alfalfa Fertilizer Costs with Manure

Feb 24, 2022

By Jerry Volesky and Ben Beckman

Planning for Summer Annual Forages

Recently, I talked about the importance of planning for cool-season annual forages and the same applies for summer annual forages. Taking care of this early could save you some money on seed or ensure that you get what you want.

Your plans should include whether you plan to hay this forage or have it for extra grazing. But which one will you plant?

It can be confusing because there are six different types of major summer annual forage grasses. These include sudangrass, sorghum-sudan hybrids, forage sorghum (which we often call cane or sorgo), foxtail millet, pearl millet and teff. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. So, base your choice primarily on how you plan to use it.

For pasture, sudangrass or pearl millet are good choices. Both are leafy, they regrow rapidly, and they contain less danger from prussic acid poisoning than other annual grasses.

For hay or green chop, select sorghum-sudan hybrids or pearl millet because they yield well and they have good feed value when cut two or three times. On sandy soils, or when conditions are dry, foxtail millet may be a better choice for summer hay. It dries fast, doesn't regrow after cutting and handles dry soils well. Cane hay is grown in many areas and produces high tonnage, but it’s lower in feed value and dries more slowly after cutting than the hybrids or millets. Or you could choose teff for a really soft, leafy, high quality horse hay.

If the plan is to chop for silage, choose the forage sorghums, especially hybrids with high grain production. They can't be beat for tonnage or for feed value.

While there are several choices of summer annual forages, simply select the one that is best adapted to the way you plan to use it.

Applying Manure Before Seeding Alfalfa

By Ben Beckman

To counter high fertilizer prices, producers may consider planting a crop with lower fertility needs or utilizing an alternative fertility treatments. One good option is combining both by spreading manure on a field about to be seeded to alfalfa.

Applying manure before seeding alfalfa may seem counterproductive since alfalfa is not likely to benefit from any nitrogen in the manure. But manure also is rich in phosphorus, potassium, sulfur and many micronutrients that alfalfa needs in large quantities.

Research studies show that applying as much as 12,000 gallons or 50 tons of dry manure per acre before planting alfalfa can boost alfalfa yield more than commercial fertilizers at the same nutrient levels. This yield bump is seen on both low and high fertility soils, where sometimes higher fertility soils do not respond to commercial fertilizer. Other factors like improved soil tilth, increased soil microbial activity, micronutrients and early nitrogen availability may be the reason manure increases alfalfa yield so well.

Do not heavily apply manure prior to alfalfa seeding if you also plant a companion crop like oats that you plan to harvest for grain. It is likely to lodge and smother the young alfalfa plants, if not cut early for hay. To limit ruts and deep compaction during manure application, avoid driving on wet field with heavy equipment

Before applying, soil test and a manure test to determine application rates. Mix manure well into the soil using tillage to prepare a firm seedbed, so new alfalfa seedlings will emerge rapidly and vigorously. Plan your weed control program carefully since manure can stimulate weed seedlings. Proper timing of seeding, firm seedbeds and herbicides or clipping can control weed pressure.

Looking to cut fertilizer costs? A heavy dose of manure before planting alfalfa can pay big dividends.

Source : unl.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.