How can you make your cropping and livestock operations complement each other better to improve overall farm efficiency? Kathy Soder suggests that if you raise beef cattle, one option is interseeding cereal rye into corn early in the growing season. After corn harvest, rye will be ready to graze in just a few weeks.

“We began testing the system in 2017, and our trial is still ongoing,” says Soder, a researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service Pasture Systems and Watershed Management Research Unit, based in State College, Pa. “We have summarized data from the first four years, and we are confident that it can be an effective way to fill the gap in forage needs in November and December, and again in very early spring.”

How does interseeding work? “When corn is around V4 to V6, less than 18 inches tall, we interseed cereal rye in between corn rows with the Interseeder developed at Penn State University,” Soder explains. “It drills a cover crop between corn rows, applying nitrogen and herbicide at the same time.”

Cereal rye grows slowly until corn is harvested, and then it takes off, she notes. “Besides providing additional forage late, we’re increasing length of the growing season, cutting down soil erosion, improving soil quality and reducing needs for stored winter feed, all at the same time.”

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Grazing trial results

The trial consists of 12 2-acre paddocks, planted to corn each year. Paddocks aren’t rotated out of corn. Instead, interseeded cover crop is grazed in the fall and spring when possible, and then terminated so corn can be planted again.

“We gained additional grazing days, and corn yields have not decreased, even though it is corn after corn with the cover crop every year,” Soder says. “Weather can become a factor. We couldn’t graze in ’19 due to weather issues.”

Compared to grazing cereal rye alone, they’re also picking up benefits when beef cattle graze corn stover, Soder says. In fact, interseeded cereal rye combined with corn stover can provide more than double the amount of dry matter per acre compared to grazing cereal rye alone.

Lessons learned about interseeding

At the beginning, the researchers chose 102-day corn, relatively full-season maturity for the area. They shifted to around 96-day corn and are now planting 85-day corn. “We needed to get corn off a bit earlier, so that rye could take off and grow,” Soder explains.

They also learned that selecting cattle suited to grazing corn stover and cereal rye is important. Early on, they tried grazing with dairy heifers. While the animals ate the forage, they were giving up body condition. “Beef cattle we’re using now are better adapted to this system,” she notes.

Implementing this system requires permanent fences around crop fields. Even in other locations where people are trying rotational grazing with virtual fencing, it is critical to have a permanent fence around the outer perimeter.

“We’re looking at some more ideas to tweak the system moving forward,” Soder says. “We’re looking at adding brassicas in some plots, and we are going to evaluate things like potential soil compaction more closely, too.”