Hey Neal!
I’m scrolling through here and saw your intro. By the way, I’m Mark Reynolds. I also work for the USDA. I’m officialy a Soil Conservationist but specialize in grazing. I’ve got an interesting prospect/dillema for you to look at. A warm season perennial grass that can be grown in conjunction with a cool season perennial grass within the same pasture field, that can be managed in harmony for grazing (that’s the key here) is needed from the coast, west to Illinois, and south to Kentucky. My personal thought is to grow little bluestem and sideoats grama in conjunction with one oe a combination of the following: Kentucky bluegrass, smooth brome, tall fescue, orchardgrass, or timothy. Do you have any thoughts?
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I’ve also wondered about that! Consensus is that it’s too unstable but that’s all based on anecdote. I bet one could do it with little blue/side oats/bluegrass in shallow-soiled ridges. In fact, I once saw a patch of someone’s lawn in WI which was sideoats gramma surviving in mowed turf.
I’d love to work on a project like that or just the general goal of grazing-friendly natives. The region you mention (KY to IL to MA) has, technically, NO commercially available cultivars of native grasses that were selected for grazing outcomes. Selecting surviving native grasses from cool season pastures would be first step.
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One aspect of ‘friendly’ that you are speaking of is the grazing management applied to the grasses. The management itself is more easily adapted than adapting the forage species itself, but the converse of this that you are saying is also true. Tall fescue (which is probably the most prevalent grass here) is a case in point. KY-31 is the most durable variety to grazing in existence. It is also the most problematic to grazing livestock of the varieties in existence. That’s great to hear about sideoats surviving in someones lawn in mowed turf! If any WSG could survive in mowed turf, I would suspect sideoats would be it/one of the few that could due to its tolerance to close grazing, or in this case close mowing.
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Thinking a bit more about the ‘mix’, one thing I saw/heard about was the ‘dynamics’ between tall fescue and bermuda grass in the north half of South Carolina. There is/was a definite ‘ebb and flow’ in the two populations over time as conditions varied from year to year favoring one grass over the other, but not to the extent that populations ‘crossed a threshold’ resulting in a loss of balance between the two and complete dominance of one over the other. I wonder if an ‘adaptive management strategy’ could be utilized to compensate for these fluctuations when they occur.