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Warm-season annual forages play a vital role in many grazing, haying and feeding operations across the country. We typically think of crops such as forage sorghums, sorghum-sudan crosses and the various millets to provide summer forage production needs in place of or as a complement to perennial forage systems.
Forage tests give us very valuable information about the forages we are feeding. But which numbers should we be looking at? Which are the important ones? The forage report (Table 1) gives some very good examples of numbers to compare to your forage tests.
A simple definition of soil fertility is a soil’s capacity to produce crops. For practical reasons, traditional fertility emphasizes soil chemical aspects that affect yield and nutrient availability.
Herbicide-resistant Palmer amaranth continues to invade many areas of Michigan and the Upper Midwest. Our first encounter with Palmer amaranth in Michigan occurred in the fall of 2010.
Kansas farmer Gail Fuller (near Emporia) experimented with no-till farming during the 1980s. Later he started grazing cover crops with cattle. During the past few years he has also been experimenting with pasture cropping.
Alfalfa weevils continue to plague our alfalfa hay production in the north-central states. Last year, producers and agronomists reported severe defoliation from weevils, reducing the alfalfa biomass and yields, especially in drought situations.
Late-summer harvests of alfalfa are often disappointing to growers, with low yields and low quality. Let’s face it, our crop sometimes gets “the blues.”
Rabobank International predicts dairy prices will drop over the next year amid increased supplies from exporting countries and weaker demand from China.
