Drought stress is one of the most significant limiting factors in crop production worldwide, and alfalfa is no exception. Dealing with droughts and water shortages can be challenging. However, there are some new tools available to alfalfa producers to help mitigate yield and profit losses.

Check out our new product rollout for December 2024.

With hay prices ranging from $95 per ton for Grade 1 (125 to 150 relative feed quality [RFQ]) round bales to $190 per ton for Prime (greater than 151 RFQ) large square bales, hay is a valuable commodity on farms. We already have the labor and expense into producing the hay, but storage and feeding have a great deal to do with how much of harvested hay is actually consumed by animals.

The good news is that despite the downsizing of proprietary and public alfalfa breeding programs, there is still a lot of genetic improvements being made. This is in part due to the technical advances in plant breeding.

As an alfalfa stand ages and thins, the primary question becomes: Is this stand good enough to keep? Now is a good time to evaluate stands as more time is allowed for planning crop rotations than when stands are evaluated in the spring and determined to be uneconomic.

With agriculture using more than 40% of total U.S. freshwater withdrawals in 2015 and hay and forage crops weighing in at 37% of U.S. irrigation water use, environmental groups and the media have been known to blast alfalfa producers for excessive water use.

When a producer plants an alfalfa field, there is an expectation that the field will remain productive for several years. Alfalfa is a perennial crop but there is a limit to its longevity, since all alfalfa fields naturally thin over time.

Alfalfa, often crowned the “queen of forages,” has long reigned supreme in the world of agriculture, commanding respect and admiration from hay producers and dairy farmers alike.