Summer grazing may look a little different this year with producers potentially harvesting oats or triticale as supplements.
A K-State Beef Cattle Nutritionist shares more.
According to Phillip Lancaster, “Lots of different choices out there, so, and it depends on when you want that additional forage and so planting some things like cool season annual crop, so like triticale or wheat or rye. We plant that in the fall and we plant it early enough in the fall, we can get some fall growth and we get some grazing in the fall and early winter and then we can do a couple of different things with it. In the spring, we can regraze that spring regrowth or we can keep the animals off and then hay it. So, we got forage for the next winter or whatever we need to do there— gives us lots of options.”
While the grazing window for those cool-season annuals, like oats, may be over, options for plating right now include several warm-season annuals.
“We’ve got that field that was planted to annual cool season. So, we can come right back in this time of year in mid-June and we can plant an annual warm season. So, like sudan, pearl millet, crabgrass, and there’s a newer forage species, that’s kind of being used a little bit more out there called teff, again in a warm season annual, and so we can plant some of those this time of year and then we got options to either graze those or hay those,” he adds.
