Reduce your feed bill and maximize grazing days by incorporating bale grazing, interseeding, and other fall pasture management techniques into your routine.
Managing your pastures and hay meadows can be as daunting as flying a jet at supersonic speeds. And, in both cases, it’s crucial you focus on where you’ll be in a few seconds, days, and months — not where you are now. With careful foresight and planning, fall can be one of your more productive grazing periods, depending on moisture and the plant matrix you have at your disposal.
In some locations, it’s common to have a healthy distribution of both warm- and cool-season perennial species that produce quality forage during the entire growing season and that might offer good feed potential through winter. In other areas, your matrices might be warm-season dominant or cool-season dominant. In these situations, strategies for maximizing grazing days are still possible. Year-round grazing is attainable in some locations under careful management; even reducing your animal days on feed by a week will significantly add to your business’s bottom line. When managed effectively, you’ll improve your soils and productivity in the process. Most of what follows assumes you understand and employ the basic principles of management-intensive grazing, where stock density, grazing duration, and paddock rotation are integral to the program (search for “management-intensive grazing” at Sustainable Agriculture at UGA for more information).
Fall Pasture Management Strategies
Bale Grazing
During periods of excess pasture growth, preserve some of that bounty for later use by simply baling it as dry hay and dropping the bales where they’re made. For example, if your herd only utilized half of your warm-season pasture, bale the rest while it’s still got good feed value. If you leave that bale in the field, you can use temporary electric fencing to ration out the bales in early fall before the cool season pastures have grown sufficiently. By feeding on the hay where you made it, the animals will return excess nutrients to those fields. Employ this approach for using excess spring forage in your cool-season areas to supply bale grazing for your herd during the “summer slump” in forage growth in areas with predominantly cool-season pasture matrices. You can also use this strategy for feeding hay in winter, depending on your snow loads and the animals’ access to suitable wind protection.
Stockpiling “Standing Hay”
Rather than cutting and baling excess forage, you can allow paddocks grazed early to grow tall and even go dormant for the purpose of feeding that plant material as “standing hay” in the field. Again, let the animals do the harvesting. But to maximize utilization, limit the herd’s access to the stockpile so the animals don’t trample and waste most of it. You can accomplish this by moving a temporary electric fence in front of the animals that allows access to a fresh patch of the forage at appropriate intervals. Stockpile is less nutritionally dense than vegetative, growing forage, so you might need to supplement with a protein source. Cool-season pastures tend to have higher feed value when stockpiled than warm-season pastures do, so keep that in mind when planning your annual grazing strategy. If your fall pastures are a bit slow in coming on, feeding strips of stockpiled forage will give them additional time to grow. If you have excess stockpile, feed it as standing hay as far into winter as practical.
Interseeding Pastures with Forage Crops
Another strategy for extending your pastures into fall — particularly in regions with adequate moisture — is to plant annual forage crops into dormant pastures. For example, grazing brassicas drilled into a summer dormant pasture in August (Northern Hemisphere) can provide literally tons of nutrition and forage in 4 to 6 weeks that can extend your fall grazing well into winter. Interseeding can provide benefit in almost any season, depending on the type of pasture. Small grains can be interseeded in warm-season pastures in fall for early spring grazing. If you wish to add other perennial species (such as clovers or alfalfa) to your pastures, add them to the drill at the same time.
Growing Annual Forages
Believe it or not, annual grasses, such as crabgrass, sorghum, and corn, can be grown in mixed or solid stands and can provide tons of high-quality forage from summer through fall, depending on how you manage it. Feeding is best accomplished by rotating the animals through these paddocks just as you would through perennial pastures. If you manage carefully, you can get some regrowth and more than one pass through the paddock. You can also stockpile these species for late fall and winter grazing, although, with the grain crops, you’ll want to limit access until the animals are adapted to a grain-rich diet to avoid acidosis. Likewise, some sorghum and Sudangrass can be toxic at certain stages of growth, so do your research and exercise care with those species.
Alternatively, you can plant any number of annual-forage “cocktails” that will supply excellent nutrition in virtually any season, even winter. The more diverse the mix, the better it will be for your animals, so they can make choices based on their daily needs. Your best bet with forage cocktails or mixes is to consult a forage-centric seed company for advice on what mixes would support your goals on the upcoming seasons.
Being Flexible with Your Fall Pasture Management Plan
When planning your annual grazing model and forage-production strategy, monitor and adapt the plan routinely. Predicting the weather is difficult at best. Maybe you can only stockpile 20 acres of the 40 thanks to the dry spring. Adjust your plan, even if it means selling animals, buying feed, or planting an alternative annual-forage cocktail. If you look after your pastures and keep them healthy, they’ll provide forage for your herds long into the future.
Oscar H. Will III has managed cattle, sheep, and poultry on diverse pastures for several decades with the goal of maximizing plant species diversity and soil health.
Originally published as “Extend Fall Feed and Forage” in the October/November 2023 issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.
