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crabgrass seeded around winter feeding areas

Crabgrass for damaged pastures

March 31, 2020

Matt Booher

The winter of 2018-19 in Virginia was the muddiest, sloppiest, wettest one anyone could remember. Heading into spring, many livestock producers were looking for a forage they could broadcast into their damaged pastures, travel lanes and feeding areas to provide some cover and compete with summer annual weeds.

Brixit

March 31, 2020

Woody Lane

In a wide array of agricultural publications, I’ve been reading about something called “Brix.” As in: We need “high Brix levels in our forages” to support good cattle growth.

Managing your stocking rate

March 31, 2020

Matt Poore

Many things impact the performance of your grazing system. Pasture and range are very diverse ecosystems, and finding the sweet spot where the soil, plants and animals come together in the optimal way is the quest of the adaptive grazing manager.

The muck of flooded fields

March 31, 2020

Nicole Richardson

In recent years, many in the Midwest U.S. have experienced wetter-than-normal conditions, causing headaches for many area farmers. Flood conditions bring more issues than just moisture; saturated situations can cause contaminants, alterations to the physical soil profile and a severe loss of nutrients.

Spring checkups for pasture and native grasses

March 5, 2020

Brian Hays

This article discusses spring checkup recommendations for introduced and native pastures.

When you can’t turn off the rain

March 1, 2020

Serkan Ates and David Hannaway

Pastures provide an inexpensive source of high-quality feed for livestock and have a positive impact on soil- and water-related processes.

A specialist’s grass

March 1, 2020

Woody Lane

Every profession has special tools – auto mechanics, surgeons or sheep shearers. You know, those weird gadgets craftsmen pull out of their toolboxes when they need a whatchamacallit to fix a thingamabob.

An antidote to the summer slump

February 27, 2020

Ken Albrecht, Christine Nieman, and Dan Schaefer

Midwestern pastures are generally dominated by cool-season perennial forages that are productive in spring but have slow growth in mid- to late summer.

Eight of 10 calls for help have one thing in common

January 31, 2020

Jason Duggin

Like many of you, an intense interest for cattle develops in the blood and soul of a person, to the degree that it is hard to describe. It is in our DNA and is often a passion we can’t seem to let go of, even if we tried.

Reviewing to renovate pastures

January 31, 2020

Marty Chaney and Steve Fransen

Looking across a pasture, we should expect to see grazing animals, a diversity of forage species, fences with gates and drinking water sources. Not so obvious is the dynamic flow of energy, nutrients and water above and below ground. But rest assured, this is occurring constantly, just at different rates depending on the seasonal growth cycle.