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.
Although not a perennial or a native, crabgrass could be included in this discussion. I worked for several years in Kentucky and it was said that crabgrass in the fescue pastures was what got the beef cattle through the summer slump.
Dalrymple Farms in Oklahoma has been breeding improved crabgrass varieties for a long time. I have done published research projects with these improved varieties and actually just bought some for my farm in northeast PA to spread in my thinning hay field turned to pasture to improve my forage distribution.
It readily reseeds itself and can be pretty aggressive. I interseeded crabgrass at 2 lb/acre into sorghum-sudangrass, and it completely filled in between the rows. In this example, crabgrass matured much earlier than the sorghum-sudan, so there was difficulties in harvest timing if trying to capture the highest forage quality.
When it comes time to graze it, I suspect that animals would select it over dormant cool season species in the summertime. I’d imagine there’s probably a timeframe where the crabgrass would be just coming on when the cool seasons are in full swing, and animals might do some damage to the crabgrass. But since it has ‘weedy’ or aggressive characteristics, it might not harm it too much, especially under a rotational grazing system.
Just some food for thought!
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@KellyMercier, you are quite correct about crabgrass and it’s applicability towards summer slump solutions. It is used by a few producers throughout Ohio, and I’m sure other areas from Illinois to New York and additional states both east and west. Crabgrass could (should?) be utilized much more than what it is for livestock feed. It has a bit of a stigma as being a ‘bad’ thing or a ‘weed’, where a weed is nothing more than a plant out of place (crabgrass in lawns). Crabgrass is very nutritious (especially for a WSG) for livestock. Although not a perennial, here in Ohio it has a fair to good ability to reseed itself to the extent that reseeding every year may not be required.
@KellyMercier, I’ve got a question along these lines that you may have a better answer for. I’m in contact with another operator (cattle) in the Hudson Bay region of NY. It’s a bit removed from OH for my liking. They are utilizing tall fescue quite effectively (less than a 3 day rotation I believe) and they have an excess of forage right now. I’m not positive they have the excess every year, but always enough early season/first half. Then they experience the summer slump. My thought was overseed with crabgrass, but the soil is too wet/likely too wet for that. A 2nd option is/was pearl millet, but I’m not sure that would overseed and might require conversion of the CSG, which I think is tall fescue. If a stand conversion would be done, and I think that may be a possibility with a possible regular excess of early CSG, what about converting up to 1/3 of the CSG to a WSG that is a perennial instead of an annual like pearl millet as has been tossed out as a possibility? I am/was wondering about Eastern Gammagrass as a possibility for this as it apparently is a wet site. (I haven’t seen the site personally).
I don’t know the exact soil types that crabgrass will tolerate, but I suspect the range is pretty wide. I wouldn’t discount it. If tall fescue will tolerate it, I would guess crabgrass will as well.
Research that has been done by ARS in central PA with interseeding summer annuals into orchardgrass sod had mixed results on whether the summer annual was successful due to competition with the sod.
As far as conversions go, when I worked with Extension in Kentucky, they only recommended 20-25% of a farm being in warm season grasses, and that is in the transition zone where warm seasons have a longer growing season than they do in New York. Rather than a third of the farm I’d like to see 10-15% to start I think.
I know eastern gamagrass would be a good option on a wet site. If they plan to drive over the field regularly, it will be a bumpy ride after several years.
Another option might be a summer stockpile. This concept was done at Virginia Tech’s Shenandoah Valley Ag Research and Extension Center.
VT SVAREC Stockpiling.pdf (949.5 KB)
The wet site is what made me think of the eastern gamagrass. I thought about summer stockpiling as well, but that isn’t/wasn’t a promising option if I recall for some reason. I tend to discount summer stockpiling here where I am mostly because 85% of the grasses I am looking at are KY-31 tall fescue, meaning I have the endophyte to deal with. That said, I’m not positive its tell fescue at the NY site, or if it is, that it is KY-31 as it might be a novel endophyte variety if it is tall fescue (or a non-endophyte variety). I agree with starting out with a smaller percentage of the field to convert rather than 33. I put that out there as a max. Start could be 5-10 percent. A target between 15 and 25 would seem reasonable as an end goal.
On another note, or in line with the original intent of this thread, when I was in South Carolina, from about Columbia northward, especially into the Piedmont, tall fescue and Bermuda could, and often did, persist together within the same pasture. The percentages of the two species though might have been somewhat dynamic I think though. South of Columbia, it is/was mostly Bermuda and Bahia with cool season annuals, largely rye, oats and wheat.