Grazing Flown On
Posted by romeethredge on October 25, 2013
Hey, if the cows are going to soon be hungry, you can get a jumpstart on fall grazing by flying on a small grain while the summer crop is in the field, Jack.
It’s hard to get a stand as good as you would get by waiting and drilling or disking in the seed, but every situation is different. Here are some photos of where we did this in soybeans, The grower waited until most of the leaves were off the soybeans so the airplane could get good coverage of the area and so there wouldn’t be so many leaves covering the seedlings. This grower used 2 bushels of wheat per acre. They were flown on by an aerial applicator and the grower started up the irrigation and very lightly watered the field and did it again in three days. It looks like we have good germination, and after the soybeans are harvested he should be able to put his cattle in to graze in a short period of time. It won’t be perfect but they will have some grazing earlier than they would have and the cow won’t jump over the moon but the airplane came close.
Jim Bell - Bell Bacon Farms said
In Western Missouri we flew on rape, forage turnips and rye either fpr a ppure stand or as a mixed forage and we applied the seed just a day or so before the first frost so when the frost occurred we had a nice leafy cover for our newly applied seed. We only did this on double crop beans or milo and it works very well. In our area the forage turnip and rape mixutre was very successful. Our double crop beams were no till so the top soil profile was harder than if it had been a field with traditional tillage. The leafy cover we felt was important for us as 80 miles South of Kansas City can experience pretty cool weather by late October amd really slow down seedling growth.
Mace said
Show us how the stand looks in a few weeks Rome. We broadcast ryegrass, crimson clover, and radish ahead of the peanut picker. Mostly seeing radishes and some ryegrass so far.
Flown on Forage update « Seminole Crop E News said
[…] Here’s an update on the wheat that was flown onto some soybean fields a few weeks ago. Link here to that blog post. Grazing Flown On […]