For Release February 27, 2001

AGRI-VIEWS
by Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent

I had the opportunity last week to sit down with several other county extension agents from around the state and from nearby states. What ensued was an excellent discussion of traditional, and non-traditional, grazing. A lot of the research that was discussed was supervised on farm studies. These weren’t small scale university trials, but real world studies in producers feedlots, fields and pastures.

One of the out of state participants brought along his ten commandments of grass management. These were originally written for cool season grasses (fescue and bromegrass), but they are easily adaptable to warm season pasture grasses. And while this discussion is about pasture grasses, not lawn grasses, there is a fair amount that is appropriate for lawn grasses as well! I doubt that I can get through all ten of the commandments in one column, so we’ll just have to do the first five this week and the second five next week.

1. Be friends with your grass. For 2/3 of the acres in Geary County, grass is the only real crop that we can grow on them. If we abuse that crop, we can not get the results from the pasture, and ultimately the cattle, that we desire. Therefore, it is essential that you understand your grass, and especially in these pastures, the individual species that can be found, which ones you want, don’t want and how to change the mix of species.

2. Graze at the stage of growth that will present the highest quality feed to your cattle. This is obviously geared more towards grazing steers, than cow herds. For our warm season grasses, the most palatable, and nutritious stage will be in the first two months of growth. Small grass is more desirable than big rank grass. This is why we use early intensive stocking and why early intensive stocking works. But you have to do it right, which relates to the 6th commandment which we’ll cover next week.

3. Know your grass yield. This is one of the big problems that I see for many grass managers. These Flint Hills pastures are a tricky lot. They aren’t flat so side hills have about three different yield rates and tops of hills have another production figure and if you have any draw bottoms, that can be different too. Then we have to calculate how many acres of usable grass we have based on how many acres have brush or tree growth that precludes grass production. Yet how do we stock these pastures. Stocking rates tend to be based on tradition or what’s in the annual bluestem pasture report. There’s a good way to get into trouble!

4. Know the energy requirements of your animals. I think many producers probably know their animals better than they do their grass. But once again, are we managing based on good science or on tradition? When was the last time that you really sat down with your forage and feed resources on one sheet of paper, livestock needs on the other and then tried to match them up for a year? Maybe we don’t do it because we know we aren’t going to like the answers! If we were to do this, I think that more times than not, we are overfeeding a lot of our cattle. We don’t want to hurt our production so we just error on the side of caution. But just like erring in the other direction, this will cost you profits in the long run.

5. Intake is related to fiber content of the forage. This is common sense and observation. The better the forage the more they eat, the older and stemmier the forage, the less they eat. Cattle on stalks always eat the leaves and grain first; lower fiber content. This becomes even more critical with harvested forages and emphasizes the necessity of timely hay harvesting and forage testing. Next week: commandments 6 through 10.

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