Continuing our work reported in the December 2016 newsletter on BMR forage sorghum research, we have conducted a number of tests to determine the best management practice for harvesting and preserving this high-quality feed.
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Rotations are one of those things everyone talks about but not everyone practices. Unless you have all your fields written and a rotation planned for at least the next 5 years or at least the length of the rotation on that field, then you are not rotating but simply working fields. To know your rotation, take the number of acres that you can rotate and divide it by the number of years in your rotation. For example: if you work 480 acres and use a 3 corn 5 hay rotation, your rotation is in an 8 year cycle. 480 divided by 8 = 60 acres in each step of the cycle. That means if you are not seeding down 60 acres/year, you are not rotating. If you only seed down 30 acres a year you don’t have a rotation, but sequential monoculture because your rotation cycle is 16 years. Different land groups can have different rotations.
There is increasing interest in moving this southern US crop, forage sorghum, into the far north. Yields have been competitive with many corn varieties; it is flexible enough to fit between the spring harvest and fall planting date of the rapidly increasing acres of winter forage; it is not bothered by deer and corn rootworm pressure; and the seed cost /acre is $15 to $20, not the $83+ /acre for some corns. We have been conducting research with help from Dr. Ketterings at Cornell, sorghum seed companies, and key help from the New York Farm Viability Institute to determine the true forage potential of this crop in dairy rations and what potential problems there are so farmers can avoid them. The following is a synopsis of what we had this past season.
Our BMR brachytic forage sorghum has done well in spite of the extremely dry weather. It was planted the 25 of May but stood still for a while until it got watered (June 3 planting was killed by chilling injury from very cold temperatures). Soft dough stage was just reached today on most of the plants. Yields are running 22 to 25 tons of 35% dry matter silage in spite of the very dry summer (we has some critical rains others did not). For those growing it for the first time the following are the questions you have asked or should be asking; the following are some suggestions based on our research the with the crop the past five years.
What You Do This Fall Can:
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Across the northeast, the season has been a wide range of conditions. Much of New England and New York has been very to extremely dry. Further west, areas have been wiped out from to much rain. We lost several sorghum research experiments due to extended cold weather in June! The bottom line is that it is mid-July and we need forage. Fortunately, last year with the help of Preferred Seed Co., we put in an “oh crap it is mid July, what can I plant” test. It was very dry thereafter (only 4 significant rain events until the end of September). We still got crops of very good feed quality and economic yields. The potential advantage this year is that weather forecasters are saying September and October will be warmer than normal so we may capture more yield and reach maturity if we miss the frost.
Coming off of an El Nino winter we are moving ahead of the long term average for heat unit accumulation. Yes, we have had cold spells, but with very warm weather in between. This adds to the growing degree day accumulation which predicts the maturity of the haylage. Temperatures have consistently reached the upper 50 and lower 60’s; which is perfect for cool season forages. First cutting haylage is normally the best legume/grass haylage of the season so it is important to get it right. The right stage of harvest is much sooner than you think
The above was written in April of 2012, another year with a collapsing El Nino going into a La Nina. I had a corn silage variety trial and much of the corn died on July 4 from the lack of water and heat. The forecasts are for it to be cool to cold spring and then dry, especially around the great lakes, and hot for much of the Northeast and Midwest.
We have been getting a lot of questions from farmers interested in trying bmr forage sorghum. The January letter on Advanced Ag web site (top of this letter) went over a number of background details. This letter is the summary of what we learned so far planting bmr forage sorghum (research continues this year). If you are round baling we suggest the finer stemmed one or multi-cut BMR sorghum-Sudan or the multi-cut Sudan x Sudangrass which has higher digestibility. We dealt with bmr sorghum-Sudan in the February letter.
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Organic dairy and livestock farms utilize high forage diets to reduce the cost of expensive purchased organic grain supplement. Thus they need an organic source of high energy forage. Most will plant corn for silage and then apply multiple passes by cultivators in attempt to control the weeds and produce a viable, harvestable, economic crop.