Birdfood Trefoil

[Callieslamb]

since growing corn is going to be too big of a project for me, we have decided to learn to bale our own hay. I have been reading up on Frost seeding pastures/hay in Michigan over the last few days. BFT was one of the higly recommended legumes to plant. Does anyone know anything about it? Does it make good hay as well as pasture - or just pasture? Do you let it grow, or does it need to be kept trimmed?

I need to get some better food planted for my cows. I think frost seeding is the way to go for us. We have grass- but we have a lot of weeds out there too. I need to add some protein as well as drought resistant grasses. If I can find something that will green-up early that would be a help too.

Besides BFT, what can I add to the mix that would also be good for hay? Sudan grass, clover, brome? I need to be able to frost seed it so timothy is out for my area. Any one have any ideas? We get pretty cold here, but are quite close to Lake Michigan. We get the piles of snow, not the bitter cold.

[haypoint]

In the UP, and upstate NY, it grows well and sets a lot of seed, reseeding and spreading itself. It takes longer to dry for hay than timothy. It gets wirey if cut late. Horses eat around it in pasture, but eat it in hay. It does well in low ph, acid, soils, where alfalfa will fail.

BFT grows and flowers all summer. You need to mow weeds before they set seeds.

Brome is good, but pricy.

Get a soil test and figure out your soil type, then get back to us.

I'm more worried about "learn to bale our own hay". You may need to spend a lot of money or be very mechanical.

[Riverdale]

Birdsfoot trefoil is BIG in the eastern UP, where the soil is very heavy and the water table is fairly high. It is a legume choice where the soil is too wet to grow alfalfa.

Depending on what you expecting to pasture, I would lean towards a clover/grass mix (alsike and timothy, red clover and brome, you get the picture )

Clovers lend themselves to frost seed (BFT and alfalfa have a MUCH more difficult time establishing themselves via frost seeding), and we successfully frost seeded (on our farm in Charlevoix County about 40 minutes south of the bridge)every month between October and April. Yes, even January in northern Michigan. Tried it as an experiment. Not as successful as October/November and March/April, but a fairly decent catch.

The nice thing about clover is after it goes to seed, the cows will still eat it, and in the process reseed and fertilizer, all in one fell swoop

My info is first hand from a family farm that operated for over 100 years, and this was tried and true for most of them (my grandpa and great g-pa frost seeded).

[jwal10]

I grew it for seed here, it will grow on wet soil. Makes fine stem, leafy hay but does not like the competition with grass as well as alfalfa. I would think it would stay dormant in cold climates until heavy frost is over. If I wanted what you describe, here in Oregon I would plant Subterrannean clover. It grows well with grass, makes fine hay, dries well along with grass if turned with a rake or tedder, likes competition from grasses, never needs reseeded as it seeds right on the ground, improves soil fertility, easy to adjust fertilizer to keep ratio of grass to clover, excellent pasture or hay. Will start growing early in the spring. Plant with a 3 way grass mix, orchard grass, tetraploid ryegrass (perenial) and fescue....James

http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/cgi-bin...e/show_crop_39
http://msucares.com/crops/forages/le...eanclover.html

[jwal10]

Sudan grass is a warm weather crop, needs planted in the spring after frost in a good seed bed. Here brome is too course stemmed and hard to keep a good stand. Red clover is a biannual and needs reseeded bianually or every year to keep a good stand. I would seed it down and leave it, Cheaper, sod for pasture and get a better hay crop every year. Trefoil does not like to be pastured when the ground is wet early in the spring. When sub clover grass pastures need rehabilitated just disk it lightly reseed grasses and you are good to go.I have had pastures in for 30 years with nothing more than regulating fertilizer application. Less nitrogen when grasses are taking over and clover is weaker, like 16-20 or 10-20-20 and triple 16 when you need to feed the grasses....James

[anvoj]

One note of caution- if it is baled with just the wrong moisture content it can become toxic (at least to horses). When I was a kid we lost 4 horses to it over the course of about a week. I think this problem is extremely rare though- the U of Madison ag people came up and did a study on our situation, and I'm not sure they had seen it before. I don't recall exactly, but I think they said that when it's baled just wrong that something in it converts to cyanide. Only our "lead" horse survived. He was able to pick around the affected hay, but all the rest died. Apparently, once the poison was in them they were done for, but it took them about a week to die. It was awful.

Otherwise, it seems to me and it seems to be the general consensus around here that the cows don't love it. The county and utilities etc plant it a lot, so it gets into everybody's fields, but is looked at as kind of a weed. Clovers seem to be a better choice.

[sammyd]

I'd go clover as well unless you felt up to alfalfa. There has been some work done on getting the alfalfa to stand up to grazing.
We never reseeded clover but with corn in the mix we kept the fields rotating often enough that we never saw bare spots either.
I do make hay on a field that is clover/orchard grass and the animals seem to like it. Have used Brome around here and it makes decent hay with the clover.

Sudan grass I can't recommend. We did a field of that one year and were less than impressed with everything about it. I can't imagine trying to make hay with it in a northern climate. we used it for green chop. It grew like blazes but we really didn't see any production increase from it. It kept the cows full is about all we could say... In an emergency like say winter kill of all your alfalfa it might be an option.
But you're better off seeding something decent down the year before.

Buddy's dad had a 40 acre spot of BFT that he grazed dutch belted beefers and goats on.
He really like it but it took forever to establish well. I can't remember if he made hay on it or not.

[fishhead]

BFT grew well on my pond dikes. It got so thick it was hard to walk through and my riding lawnmower couldn't cut it or even drive through it.

My goats liked it green or dead.

Langston had a paper saying that the tannins in it acted like a natural wormer in goats.

[Chixarecute]

BFT doesn't like being cut/grazed real often, and here where it was seeded in pasture, it started out slow, then died away. The seed that blew in the wind/with the birds got a real good start, and grows well in the fencelines.

[bruce2288]

BFT is not a preferred forage with cattle in my experience. They love red, white and sweetclover where I am, but are so so about bft. It is a nonbloating legume, which if I remember is because of high tannin content. Tannins have a bitter taste which may be why the cattle do not prefer it. I am pleased with a wet pasture I planted to orchard grass. Smooth brome is a good producer, but will have a summer slump in hot conditiions and once is seeds out is not very palatible.

[Callieslamb]

Then why does Univ/MI recommend it...just because you can frost seed it? Because the BFT growers paid them to do the research? So glad I asked.

Okay, BFT out --Sudan - out

My concerns about clover:
they eat it but it can also bloat them. I am scared stiff about bloat. If I have to reseed every other year, does that even out the cost with other grasses? I bought some clover hay last year. I was glad to get it but the leaves shattered and left a mess that the cows couldn't easily eat and they didn't like the stems at all. Was it just baled late? Do the leaves always shatter after it's baled? I can see having part clover in the pasture, but I need something else to go with it.

What else is there?

Timothy or alfalfa would mean killing off all that's there and starting over - so I would be back to the plow issue. I don't want to park hay AND plowing equipment!

I am glad to hear that watching us city folks bale hay makes some of you nervous. It makes us nervous too. DH is studying tractors. Yes, he can fix things. Really well. He doesn't alway have time. His real job keeps him hopping. He even had teleconference meetings over the holiday this weekend - they loved his roofing outfit. (it's beats the international travel though! ) I was actually raised on a farm....but only know the lifting business of a bale of hay. But we think we can learn. If I can learn to lamb sheep, castrate calves, and build fences, I can learn to bale hay. Or rather, Dh can. We know what it's supposed to look like...we'll give ourselve a year's learning curve. We found a nice little ford 661 Workmaster tractor. Dh's trying to see if it's big enough to pull the compact baler he found. We have lots to learn, but it's a long time until the next hay season!

I really appreciate your patience with me! I promise eventually I will learn all this stuff. Now wouldn't you rather help me learn to drive a tractor and baler than to plow/disk/harrow/plant/harrow/cultivate a field?

[agmantoo]

Will pearl millet grow in your area? If so, I know you wanted to earlier plant corn and pearl millet is a decent substitute but can be sod drilled and the seed are cheap and for grazing a few weeds would not be a problem.

[sammyd]

You could seed the field with your selected hay stuff like clover/timothy and plant an oat nurse crop with it.
Cut the oats about 60 days after planting when they are in the "boot" stage which is just before the seeds start showing. Hope that it stays dry for a week and bale them oats as hay.
You should be able to get a second cutting off the field from your hay as well.
Neighbor took it off after it headed out for silage, he had an awesome regrowth of more oats that he also harvested for silage and was able to get a cutting of alfalfa off before Sep 1.
Course you don't need as much dry weather for silage as hay.....

[rambler]

Here's the problem - you are all over the place with your thoughts, very hard to answer when you change the question.

BFT is a wonderful plant in a pasture for grazing. It adds N to the soil for the grasses to use, and livestock graxzing it won't bloat. So it's a _great_ plant if you are grazing. Helps the grasses, adds protien, and adds N to the soil with very low risk to the animals. Wonderful plant.

There are many, many better ones tho if you are making hay. BFT doesn't like to be cut down often, stays short to try to hay, and won't grow back real fast like alfalfa would. Alfalfa is 10 times better as a hay crop than BFT. BFT doesn't compete well with other hay plants, it doesn't give as many cuttings as other plants, it is very fine for trying to bale, it's harder to get growing, it's just a lousy hay crop plant compared to others.

So, you talk about pasturing, then you talk about making hay, then back to pasture....

Well, what is the plan? Why you are buying hay now for your critter(s?) when you have all that hay out there right now? No need to grow corn, or plant more stuff, until you actually use what you have.

You've got 5 acres to graze or hay in a cold climate. So about 5 months of grazing, or probably 2 cuttings of hay, or a combination.

What you should be doing is putting 4-10 head of cattle on your 5 acres over the summer. Break your 5 acres into 4-6 smaller pastures, and let those critters eat up one plot down to short, then move them to the next pasture. Plan out your water source so it's centerally located, easy to get water to all 4-6 small pastures. (Number of cattle depends on soil type, if you suppliment any small amount of grains or hay, etc. - could be less than 10 for sure, but once your pastures are improved, could easily be 10....)

After the cattle are done with a pasture, whack out any few remaining weeds - cattle eat most of the weeds when you force them to clear out a patch of grass, won't be many left.

Frost seed clover, alfalfa, and/or BFT into your grass when you can.

Over a couple years, this will make many less weeds, much more lush native grasses with legumes, and full pastures.

Each little pasture will get grazed down to a short level patch, with clumps of manure & urine added as fertilizer. Then it will get a rest of about 25-30 days with no cattle on it - the legumes and grass will flurish because that happens to be their prefered nature. Weeds will not get a chance to seed out and many don't like to regrow in the heat of summer, so will get shaded out, diminish. Parasites in the manure will die off between grazings.

Your pasture will do great, you won't need much machinery, you will be buying feed for when you need it not all year around, you will maximise the most feed you can grow on your few acres to feed the most critters. After getting the fencing up, very little expenses. And these fences don't need to be very expensive, they are just splitting up your 5 acre perimeter fenced pasture.

You'll need to buy hay for the winter months, or sell off some stock every fall to need less winter feed.

This is called managed intensive grazing, 'MIG', you can look it up & study it online or your local Extension service.

Improve what you have. Cheaply.

There are a lot of wild, extreme, test plans out there. Not every one will fit what you have, or what you want to do.

BFT is a great option for the right person. If you want to only graze, it is a good one to look into! If you want to make hay, it is a poor one - make acceptable but poor hay. So the stuff you read about it is correct, but so are those who say forget about it - depends on what you want to do.

You have seen the hay & pasture FAQ's on the internet? Thay are a good general resource.....

Haying FAQ
http://www.sheepscreek.com/rural/haying.html

Pasture FAQ
http://www.sheepscreek.com/rural/pasture.html

Good luck with it all, good to be studying it, and keep asking questions.

--->Paul

[Riverdale]

Callie, did you talk to the Extension agent? Or did you just pull it off the 'net

BFT can be frost seeded, but I would recommend going with something that your local agent recommends, and with a soil test. Clovers don't need as sweet (ph wise) a soil as alfalfa.

An alternative to tilling is to graze the area as close as possible (if you don't want to use any chemicals) then broadcast the seed you wish. It might ake longer, but it would be cheaper.

Or like a sign in our work area-

We do things 3 ways, good, fast or cheap
You may choose any two
If it is good and fast, it will not be cheap
If it is good and cheap, it will not be fast
If it is cheap and fast, it will not be good

[stickinthemud]

THirty years ago BFT was being recommended for wet locations, in combination with reed canary grass. I see that RCG is now classified as an invasive, at least in some areas. So much for what I remember of my college education. Sigh...

[Callieslamb]

Hey all --thank you! You are right- I am confusing. We are trying to figure out our plan.....investigating different possibilities. We have decided AGAINST growing a crop like corn. Our main drive is to try to make our place a bit more self-sufficient. We are currently investigating raising our own hay. We have NOT settled down exactly on this plan, but it is an option. Ultimately, we would like to get to the point of grass-fed only. I am not sure it is possible entirely in our climate and with a milk cow, but we would like to give it a good try.

Currently, I have a family milk cow and her calf. A steer ready to butcher this month and a steer that I am giving to the neighbor Oct 1 in payment for letting us pasture on his land this year so we could have more hay. We didn't get any hay for all that plan because our hay guy didn't come. Not once. So much for plans. We also have six small sheep. The sheep are an option we are trying and will see how they do for us. They are supposed to make us a bit of money selling the babies as fiber animals to offset the cost of grain for the cows . We will see.

My pastures are not up to grass-fed only yet. We need to improve them. We also need some good hay. We will feed hay for as long or a bit longer than we pasture in any given year.

I didn't think that your hay should be different than your pasture...but now that I think a little more, my dad did have alfalfa fields we didn't graze the cows on. Okay...I should think harder - or more often.

I don't know about Pearl millet. You graze it or harvest it as grain or both? I will investigate that further. I would LOVE to talk to the extension guy. They don't have anyone that is in the office to answer phones and they don't return messages. Or haven't so far. We are orchards, row crops and vineyards here - I think 2 of us have cattle of any kind.

I could raise more cows. That is definately an option. But not yet. Those pastures have to be up to snuff first. If am I not big enough to entice a custom baler to come - he could have just charged me 2x as much -we would have paid it- then we will make our own. It doesn't seem worth the effort to make bad hay though.

Our property is 220 feet wide and 14,000 some feet long. Okay, maybe not that far, but it seems like it. We have 1/2 acre flagon the back that makes us about 400 feet across there. We are long and narrow. We have no shade. We are basically flat - a slight roll to the south. It isn't the ideal for rotational grazing due to the distance from water, but we can put a trough on a trailer and move it around. Currently, I have just over an acre divided into 4 small pastures with temporary elec wire. It has done well for us so far. I did run 3 strands all around the neighbor's place this year.....so I can move that and put it on mine.

I am not as inexperienced as I might seem.. But I do have a lot to learn. I just need to know what to plant. none of the websites tell me just waht to do. .it's that thinking and deciding part that catch me. so if you know of any good grasses I can plant without having to kill what's here, till and all that....I would love to know.

Many, many thanks for all the info and ideas!

[rambler]

Plant fence posts.

You have 5 acres available, you are only grazing 1 acre of it? And 2 acres of the neighbor's.

If you want grass fed meat, graze your stuff, buy hay.

That's most often the best $$$ return for a situation like yours.

Anyhow, start out with that as the baseline, good to explore other options from there, but likely pasturing what you have, and buying hay will end up penciling out best.

====

Thanks for the list of critters you have - you never really laid it out for us before. 1 cow/calf, 2 steers, and 6 sheep.

Sheep will pull roots to eat, and can kill stuff if you over-graze them.

Cattle on the other hand stop a few fractions of an inch above dirt, so they will 'graze out' a weedy grass patch much better to what you want. Cattle will do a good job of re-establishing your grasses that are there. I don't know about sheep, but they can get a little rough on the grass I've heard.

It is common for the MIG folks to plant different things in different padocks. You might want a 1/2 acre of warm season grasses - these are _heck_ to get growing, and grow slowly but they tend to last through anything once you get them established and will grow pretty good through summer heat compared tot he cool season grasses.

A padock with 50% alfalfa will get you a lot of forage many years. Yes it is scary to put cows on alfalfa/clover due to bloat. It's a real issue for sure, but if you manage it, they will do fine. If 50% of the field is grass, they will almost always do fine - don't have them too hungrey, and don't turn them out for the first time in the dew, and it works. There are special grazing alfalfas that have low crowns, or 'creep', but they don't grow as fast so it's a tradeoff.

Types of grass to grow depends on the type of soil. Here we have wet yellow clay, so it's hard to get anything but grasses that like wet feet. There are 100's to choose from, often what is growing right now is pretty good for your area, you just need to improve what you have, not totally change.

Are you in an area that has ph issues - too high as I almost have, or too low and needs lime? If you are borderline you can select grasses that like your soil a little bit; but if you are way off low then lime will be your best friend, whatever it costs. All the fert in the world won't help a soil that is very low ph.

You would be surprised what a good mowing once a year, and rotational grazing will do to bring back grasses, after you get the ph and fertility sorted out.

I find it good to add a little handful of grain every day for the critters, keeps them tame & wanting to come back to the barn every day. And helps stretch that pasture even in poor grass growing times. Under 3lbs a day is considered same as grass-feed by most folk, it doesn't change their tummy around, still the grass processing setup in there with so little grain.

Do you have any corn fields next door? Cattle love to browse those all winter long. I fence in about 2 acres of stalks per critter for over winter, while I sure add some hay and some grain, it's cheap feed and gives them something to do.

There is no one, correct, for everyone, answer to this. I guess that's why there are 100 different options for you to consider.

--->Paul

[rambler]

Originally Posted by Callieslamb

Our property is 220 feet wide and 14,000 some feet long. Okay, maybe not that far, but it seems like it. We have 1/2 acre flagon the back that makes us about 400 feet across there. We are long and narrow. We have no shade. We are basically flat - a slight roll to the south. It isn't the ideal for rotational grazing due to the distance from water, but we can put a trough on a trailer and move it around. Currently, I have just over an acre divided into 4 small pastures with temporary elec wire. It has done well for us so far. I did run 3 strands all around the neighbor's place this year.....so I can move that and put it on mine.

Black plastic roll pipe is cheap, lay it along a fence line so they can't step on it, and it lasts a long time even if you don't bury it. Can set a water trough near the middle of the pasture that way, easy to fence off 5 acres even if it;s long and narrow.

A bit more daily work, but long & narrow is _perfect_ for moving temp fence, every three days you have them move into the next small section, think this is refered to as 'mob grazing' if you want to look it up. Very easy to have 3 tapes, just leap-frog one of the tapes every 3 days to create a new pasture area they get locked into.

--->Paul

[Callieslamb]

Rambler,
Thanks. Yes, grazing on the corn is originally why I started looking into planting corn on 1 acre - to graze them on it, not to harvest the corn.(on that 'need a plow?' thread). There is a 20 acre corn/soy bean field next to us. But at harvest time, they chew up the stalks and I guess dump it back on the ground rather than save it for me. I have a continual worry that my cows will decide that elec fence isn't enough to stop them from eating it. They eat corn stalks from the garden right now - and they will travel all 1400 feet at a run to get to it.

The only way I could afford to buy calves is if I buy them as dairy bottle-feeders.....not sure I want to do that. I might find beef calves at an auction, but then I have transporting issues. There aren't cows in my area- the nearest in-state auction is 2 hours away. We just have orchards as far as the eye can see in all directions. I am sure with my current graze available, were I to fall-sell them, mine would not be as large as others that had them for sale. So - lower price. But I could do 2-3 grass raised (with a touch of grain) for private individuals. That is another option we are looking into.

Either way - hay or pasture - I need better grass. I will not raise animals if I can't feed them properly. They can surely get by on what they have, but I have the means to give them better and I should. Better pasture means I have more options. I can raise more cattle or I can bale better hay. I cannot do hay unless we are willing to do it ourselves. Since we don't want to spend another summer waiting for a hay guy that doesn't come. I do like having it delivered on a truck though. 2 hrs work and I have a winter's worth of hay in the barn. That's what my current hay supplier is advising me to do. . . .

Our soil is a tad to the acidic side - 6.2. I limed it last fall to ready for fertilizing this year. I was supposed to fertilize after the 1st cutting, but with no first cutting....that plan ended. We pastured on the neighbor just so I would have plenty of hay this year. I didn't want to reduce my hayfield size to smaller or I was sure he wouldn't come. I didn't need that 2nd steer- he was a rescue calf I was gifted with while gone to visit a new grandson. . . I will be really glad to toss him over the fence.

As long as there is grain to buy, I will feed it. I like feeding my cows....but I don't want to feed out 100 lbs a day! I also want to pasture my sheep with the cows if possible - multi-species grazing - to see how that works. That will involved a different perimeter fencing than I have now. I would like to be ABLE to grass feed only if it comes to that.

I would like to find a good option for overseeding and/or frost seeding. Not having the ability to cut it down when it got too tough was a real issue this year. I might have saved a cutting or two. Once it got to large there wasn't much I was able to do wiith it. We won't have that problem this year. I will mow it.

Thanks for all the help.