Cool-Season Annual Grasses Offer High-Value Hay, Baleage, Silage To Arkansas Producers

MARY HIGHTOWER

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS

Livestock producers who grow their own hay often find themselves playing “beat the clock” when it comes to harvest, knowing that once a seedhead appears, the forage quality declines.

This race to beat the clock is heightened when wet springs keep farmers from making dry hay.

“Producers have increasingly turned to round bale silage, or baleage, to improve the timeliness of harvest operations,” said Jonathan Kubesch, extension forage specialist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

“Silage, traditionally corn, was popular with the state's dairy industry,” he said. “Grass silage is often referred to as ‘baleage’ in the southeast.

“Grass sileage, or ‘baleage,’ is a growing opportunity to produce high-quality forage at a time when it is hard to produce dry hay – think rainy April,” Kubesch said. Baleage involves wilting cut forages to 45 to 65 percent moisture, then rolling them into round bales wrapped in plastic.

Cool-season annual grasses, such as annual ryegrass or the small grains like wheat, oats and cereal rye, are routinely planted to provide forage for livestock. “These plants provide excellent forage quality while in vegetative, but protein and digestibility can quickly decline following emergence of the seed head,” Kubesch said. In the southeastern United States, harvest of small grains for hay in the spring is often delayed by spring rains.

“Maturity at harvest has a large impact on quality,” he said.

Kubesch discusses research on cool-season annual grass opportunities in a newly revised fact sheet available for download from Cooperative Extension Service, Using Cool-Season Annual Grasses for Hay and Silage.

He noted three key takeaways from the new fact sheet:

• Winter annual forages offer a lot of nutritional value in Arkansas forage programs
• Multiple cool-season annual grasses can be used to stagger production in early spring. Harvesting these forages on time at the correct moisture level is crucial to making hay, baleage or grass silage.
• Late winter plantings are a possibility for farmers to make up for missed fall plantings.

Kubesch reported new late winter planting recommendations. Farmers might consider annual ryegrass or spring oats for planting between late February to mid-March for early hay, baleage, or silage.

“We've been having dry falls which preclude the typical planting window of September-October,” he said. “We ran a three-year trial at Jonesboro in collaboration with Arkansas State University to develop these late winter recommendations.”

For more information on baleage, see: Baled Silage for Livestock.  ∆

MARY HIGHTOWER: University of Arkansas