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Joe Davis is a numbers man. His brain is full of them, and every gigabyte of his phone and two laptops is crammed full. So naturally, when it comes time for the retired chemical engineer to answer a question or solve a problem, he turns to figures. “I don’t like to deal with ‘kinda’ or ‘it depends,’” he says.
Grass-legume mixture yields are similar to grass monocultures fertilized with upward of 100 to 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre. With the cost of fertilizer around 50 cents per pound, grass-legume mixtures can result in substantial cost savings. Legumes also provide greater protein concentration and other soluble cell contents compared to grass monocultures, and cattle intake rates are greater for legumes than grasses.
Most of us are very familiar with the agronomic advantages of endophyte-infected tall fescue. In short, endophyte-infected tall fescue thrives through a variety of environmental challenges most grasses wouldn’t tolerate, including drought stress, overgrazing and insect pressure.
As the growing season advances, producers should know about what proportion of the annual forage production occurs by month. Typically, about 25 to 30 percent of the annual forage production should have occurred by June 1 for most regions of the U.S. other than the Southwest region.
The focus for graziers has always been on forage quality in meeting the nutrient requirements of pastured cattle.
The content of crude protein, neutral- and acid-detergent fiber (structural carbohydrates), water-soluble carbohydrates, crude fiber and minerals in a specific forage has been used for estimating forage quality and for formulating supplemental concentrate rations.
Kentucky was covered mostly by trees, briars, broadleaf weeds and very little forage when the original cultivar of tall fescue, Kentucky 31, was commercially released in 1943. However, in the early 1950s, cattle producers began to complain that their cattle did not perform well on tall fescue and lacked thriftiness in warm temperatures. But it was not until the early 1980s that it was discovered that most tall fescue plants are infected with a fungal endophyte.
Tall fescue is a cool-season perennial grass that is productive and well adapted to the soils and climate in a region of the U.S. commonly called the “fescue belt.”
