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
Tom
April 2016 Rotations & Winter Forage
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.
March 2016 Sorghum & Winter Forage Nitrogen
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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February 2016 Organic SorghumSudan
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.
January 2016 BMR Sorghum
There has been a growing interest in the use of sorghum as a corn replacement or partial replacement across much of the northeast and southern Canada. Many areas are constrained by short seasons already. A large number of farms have decided to get off the “long season corn” train.
August 2015 Making Winter Forage Work for You
The June newsletter covered the spring conditions that made a perfect storm for poor winter forage yields this year. Yields were down but quality, for those who cut on time, was very good as always (see fermented forage analysis in Addendum to this letter). Some have been talking about dropping the crop, but there is NO crop I have seen in my 40 years of working and researching that is perfect. Every crop has a hole in its veneer.
The real advantage of the winter forage is for farms that have had weather related decreases in their total forage supply. Winter forage (triticale) will give you the earliest high quality, potentially high yielding crop, next spring; forage for the high cows. This crop is a real advantage in areas where much of the corn is growing in standing water.
July 2015 Last Chance Forage
With weather repeating the wet conditions of 2013, there are farms who still have not planted fields or have crops that have drowned. We have research in the ground looking at various choices but you need suggestions now.
June 2015 The Brick Wall of 2015
Winter triticale has a major role in forage production across the whole Northeast and Canada. There are some very promising new varieties coming that with normal rainfall will boost yields. There are some new seed treatments that will control snow mold and may allow for a slightly reduced seeding rate due to the optimum fall growth. And finally, in spite of the major loss of yield this year, forage harvested at flag leaf was very high quality and still the best forage we can grow in the area.
May 2015 How to Make Haylage-in-a-day Fail!
Ensiling hay crop silage at the correct moisture the same day you mow it continues to expand across dairy farms. Yet there are some who have not been able to make it work.
Here are a few of the reasons:
April 2015 Forage Harvest
The weather has been two sides of the coin lately. The Northeast, and Canada are still in the center of cool temperatures while the South is much warmer. It is a naturally occurring oscillation based on the temperatures of the water in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. In this natural cycle we are going back to the long term average temperatures. The earlier than normal springs we had been getting, are now reverting to what we used to have a number of years ago: cooler, later springs. This year is approaching the 30 year average of 1965—1995. Don’t panic, we survived then and will survive now if you adjust to the new (old) normal spring.
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