Grazing Canola

[InvalidID]

Anyone tried this? I'm new to cattle yet so I'm not doing anything fancy the first year or two, but I'm a really curious guy that likes to experiment. While this year will be mostly fescue on the pasture, I will undoubtedly want to find ways to stock more without buying more feed.

So, Canola? How about Triticale (sp?) and wheat?

[InvalidID]

Wow, I managed to stump HT? This is defiantly a first for me.

[SquashNut]

try rye grass, I planted some with green feild peas on a very samll scale for my rabbits. They are growing like crazy on it and it has cut my feed bill tremendiously. the rye is nice and green and grows fast. i didn't fertilize the ground either.

[oregon woodsmok]

Washington. Plant orchard grass and clover.

Any seed with an awn isn't good for cattle. The seeds get stuck between their lip and upper gum. They get into ears. If they get breathed in, they pierce the lungs and your cattle will die.

So no wheat, no barley, unless you can get beardless barley. Keep the foxtails and cheat grass out of your pasture.

Oat grass is really good pasture, but it is an annual. You'll save yourself a lot of work if you plant perennials in your pasture.

If you really want to plant some annuals for the cattle, try mangels (feed turnips).

I've never heard of anyone grazing oil seed rape, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It seems an odd choice to me. When I lived where it was grown, I never saw any livestock grazing on it. I think there is something toxic in the original plant and it has been genetically altered to make canola into a usable oil. I'd sure find out before I turned cattle onto it.

Or maybe it just doesn't taste good.

[oregon woodsmok]

Incidentally, they won't eat Scotch Broom, either, so you might as well grub that out of your pastures.

[InvalidID]

OW, you are awesome!

I ask about canola cause I was reading an article where a fella was planting it in fall, letting cattle hit it twice, once in fall once in spring. Then he would let it come up and harvest it. Says he was getting nearly 3lbs a day growth on it, which seemed really high to me.

[ramiller5675]

Locally, (Oklahoma) it is pretty common to graze winter wheat. Plant in the fall (around mid-October in OK), start grazing it around Dec., take the cattle off about late Feb/early Mar., and harvest grain in June. No need to worry about awns because it doesn't produce a head until about April.

If you don't want to harvest the grain, you can graze it until about April/May.

I once planted about 2-3 acres of canola in part of a wheat field to see if I could plant it successfully with our equipment, etc. I had a weed problem (volunteer wheat and ryegrass) so I grazed it out with some steers. They ate every bit of it, but I don't know if I would plant it for that purpose.

I have seen a field planted to a mixture of canola and oats (or it might have been wheat) that was probably planted in early September that looked like it had a lot of forage in November. It looked impressive and had a lot of steers grazing on it, but without knowing how much was spent on fertility, seed cost, weed control, etc., it is difficult to know if it would pay to graze a mixture like that.

[KSALguy]

grazeing cattle on wheat is done all the time, you dont graze on seed heads getting ready for harvest anyway, new young cheet grass is grazed as well, if you keep it grazed down it wont be a problem anyway,

[bruce2288]

I planted rape a couple of times and quit. The turnips did better for me. The cattle liked it fine.