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Successful cover croppers say adding livestock to the system makes dollars and sense.

Curt Arens, Editor, Nebraska Farmer

February 4, 2022

7 Slides

When Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke to the American Farm Bureau Federation annual convention earlier this year, he announced a bold initiative. The goal is to double the number of cover crop acres planted on corn and soybean fields across the country to 30 million by the year 2030.

Cover crops are nothing new. They are an ancient practice for farmers, but planting cover crops has been gaining steam over the past few years as farmers focus on improving soil health and making the most efficient use of water and nutrient inputs without giving up on production.

Anecdotally, experienced cover croppers say that adding livestock to an integrated systems approach improves the profitability of cover crops, and this practice improves soil health properties, including bacterial and fungal microbe activity — the underground livestock — in the soil.

At the Nebraska Grazing Cover Crops Conference held this past fall, Mary Drewnoski, Nebraska Extension beef systems specialist, mentioned the great benefits of adding livestock to cover cropping systems.

“There are really dual benefits,” Drewnoski said. “You can get conservation benefits, but we can also produce some very high-quality feed for a relatively low cost. There is a low cost of gain on grazing calves, or we can feed cows for fairly low costs.”

Big gains

Drewnoski said that gains for calves grazing cereal rye in the spring have been surprising. During three years of trials, researchers have witnessed gains of up to 3 pounds per day.

“Cereal rye can have TDN [total digestible nutrients] of 70 and crude protein at 20%,” Drewnoski explained. “You can’t let the rye get ahead of you, so you have to rotational graze and move the calves around. Graze the rye hard, down to 3 inches or so, and manage the moves to keep up with the forage as much as possible.”

If one paddock gets too tall, producers can pull that paddock out of the rotation and harvest it for hay or forage, or terminate it in preparation for the next cash crop.

“What we plant for cover crops depends on when we can plant it,” Drewnoski said. “In the fall, after wheat harvest in July or early August, we are planting warm-season grasses like sorghum-sudan or pearl millet.”

The warm-season grasses are lower quality by grazing time, ranging from 55 to 65 TDN, with crude protein around 8% to 15%, she said.

“After Aug. 1, we would plant cool-season and winter-sensitive covers like oats, radishes or rape. These can be great sources of feed. You get a lot of biomass quickly,” Drewnoski said. “Combining oats and brassicas lowers the seed cost, and you can expect 1 ton to 1½ tons of production.”

This would work well for developing heifers or backgrounding calves, because the gains on this type of system are very good, and the cost per pound of gain is around 25 to 50 cents.

Producers should plan to plant up to 50 or 60 pounds of oats in combination with about 3 pounds of brassicas, so the grazing forages that result are not too high of quality. If brassicas take over, producers might consider feeding dry hay or allowing access to cornstalk residue to help balance the ration, Drewnoski said.

Later in the fall, after the first week of September, cover crops would be planted more for spring grazing and production, so cereal rye or triticale would be among the choices, which wouldn’t produce much fall forage — but they would come on in the early spring for grazing then, before planting a cash crop.

On-farm trials

Ken Herz, who farms near Lawrence, Neb., with his sons, spoke at the 2021 Nebraska Cover Crops Conference, talking about on-farm research trials for grazing livestock on cover crops in a three-crop, no-till dryland rotation. Working with Drewnoski and Nebraska Extension educator Jenny Rees, Herz developed a series of trials on plots in Nuckolls and Webster counties in south-central Nebraska.

The three-year research project took an intentional systems approach to integrate livestock in a dryland cropping rotation, Herz said. The study looked to understand the impacts of growing and grazing cover crops on system profitability, along with the impacts of an integrated livestock and cropping system on soil health.

Each plot studied three different treatments, including ungrazed wheat stubble, grazed cover crops and ungrazed cover crops, and there were four replications for each treatment, Herz said.

While compaction might be a concern for producers interested in grazing cover crops, Herz said that there were no compaction issues during his trials, and there were no differences in physical soil properties between treatments.

The big gains from grazing cover crops came in microbial activity measurements. “After three years, the grazed cover crops had much higher microbial biomass and fungal biomass than the other treatments,” Herz said. “Grazed cover crops were the most economical treatment when we planted a warm-season cover crop mixture in Webster County plots, where water didn’t have to be hauled in for the grazing cattle.

“The ungrazed wheat stubble, without cover crops, was the most economical treatment with the cool-season cover crop mixture planted to Nuckolls County plots. The reason was probably that the cool-season mixture produced less biomass and was more variable than the warm-season mixture.”

The most difficult part of this research, Herz said, is the challenge in measuring long-term soil health benefits from grazed cover crops. Although it didn’t necessarily show up on the economic side, the higher activity of soil bacteria and fungi found in the grazed cover crops over the ungrazed cover crops or ungrazed wheat stubble will improve soil health properties in the long run, he noted.

Learn more about incorporating cover crops and livestock by emailing Drewnoski at [email protected].

About the Author(s)

Curt Arens

Editor, Nebraska Farmer

Curt Arens began writing about Nebraska’s farm families when he was in high school. Before joining Farm Progress as a field editor in April 2010, he had worked as a freelance farm writer for 27 years, first for newspapers and then for farm magazines, including Nebraska Farmer.

His real full-time career, however, during that same period was farming his family’s fourth generation land in northeast Nebraska. He also operated his Christmas tree farm and grew black oil sunflowers for wild birdseed. Curt continues to raise corn, soybeans and alfalfa and runs a cow-calf herd.

Curt and his wife Donna have four children, Lauren, Taylor, Zachary and Benjamin. They are active in their church and St. Rose School in Crofton, where Donna teaches and their children attend classes.

Previously, the 1986 University of Nebraska animal science graduate wrote a weekly rural life column, developed a farm radio program and wrote books about farm direct marketing and farmers markets. He received media honors from the Nebraska Forest Service, Center for Rural Affairs and Northeast Nebraska Experimental Farm Association.

He wrote about the spiritual side of farming in his 2008 book, “Down to Earth: Celebrating a Blessed Life on the Land,” garnering a Catholic Press Association award.

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