Struggling with how to implement cover crops on your farm? If so, you are not alone.

Fear not, because the secret sauce in making cover crops pay on the farm can be very simple in livestock grazing. Being able to use cover crops as a forage can increase the profitability of cover crops.

At a recent online Forage Field Day, conducted jointly by the Nebraska Extension, I-29 Moo University and the South Dakota State University Extension, Shelby Gruss, Iowa State University Extension forage specialist, talked about how to get the most out of cover crops, even in a corn and soybean rotation, by grazing those covers with livestock.

Small grain

Gruss noted that adding a cereal grain such as cereal rye into crop rotations provides multiple benefits, including another growing component in the field, living cover to reduce erosion and runoff, and weed suppression.

Cereal rye is a great weed suppressor because of its quick growth and allelopathic properties to keep weeds down. Although adding wheat or other small grains may not work into the rotation, another way to receive those same benefits is through planting cover crops and grazing them with livestock. “Grazing doesn’t take other benefits away when grazed properly,” Gruss said. “Cover crops used as a forage in some aspect brings in additional benefits.”

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The forage production and quality of cover crop forages may offer 2 to 6 tons per acre for grazing livestock. “There are some concerns, like soil properties, compaction, water infiltration, infrastructure and having enough biomass production,” Gruss noted. “In a research review, it shows that in 55% of studies, grazed cover crop fields saw an increase in compaction, but very few of these were bad enough to impact root growth, and it varied among years.”

An extremely small number of acres had compaction levels that would inhibit root growth for row crops the following season.

“Grazing with heavy stocking rates on wet soils can lead to soil compaction,” she said. “Additionally, avoid overgrazing. This can reduce soil cover, increasing evaporation and erosion. Implementing rotational stocking can help reduce the risk of overgrazing and better spread nutrients (manure) across the field.”

Water infiltration

“As for water and water infiltration, the majority of the time this was not impacted by grazing,” Gruss said. “The majority of studies also found that soil organic carbon was maintained.”

Very few studies conducted have found any difference in crop yields after the grazing of cover crops. “There was minimal impact on crop yields throughout the studies reviewed, and fields that had negative impacts typically had higher stocking rates,” Gruss said.

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Additionally, studies have shown that in water-limited environments, grazing cover crops can increase evaporation and seemed more likely to negatively affect the following crop production.

What to plant

“The cover crop species to plant is dependent on how you are fitting them into the rotation,” Gruss said. “If we are looking for a cover that we can plant behind corn or soybeans, typically it will be a small grain for grazing in the spring. As a small grain, particularly cereal rye is one of the few cover crops that can establish in the short fall growing period and survive winter.”

Rye is the highest for production of biomass, with high-quality forage for grazing before the boot stage. “If we are trying to fill a summer fallow period,” Gruss said, “whether it is following a winter wheat harvest or prevent plant acres, a summer annual will be one of the best producers, like sorghum-sudangrass, forage sorghum or millet.”

Termination advice

“For spring grazing of cover crops, we will need to terminate before row crop planting,” Gruss said, “but typically for summer or fall grazing, many of those cover crops will winter kill, so we do not need to worry about termination for spring planting.”

Grazing is not a reliable termination strategy, Gruss said. You need enough time to remove animals then terminate the cover crop. To determine when to terminate can vary depending on a couple of factors, such as if you have the availability of permanent pasture to move animals to, if you have additional stored feed, and when you need to plant your cash crop.

“Delaying termination for extended grazing can be done if additional grazing is needed,” Gruss said. “The general rule of thumb is to terminate cereal rye 10 to 14 days prior to planting, as corn has a hard time tolerating the residue. We do not see that in soybeans, so termination can occur right up until planting, and some will plant green and terminate before soybean emergence.”

The bottom line, Gruss said, is that cover crops offer “great opportunities for use as forage.”