Growing an array of cereal grains to augment the traditional corn-alfalfa cropping cycle has become the new normal for dairy farmer Josh Tranel and his family of Cuba City, Wis.
“We got burned so many times with alfalfa winter-kill,” Tranel shared on a recent Iowa State University webinar. “And we wanted to take advantage of a longer growing season. Trying to raise all of our feed in just a few months in the summer wasn’t working very well.”
The Tranels now raise a variety of small grains as both cover and nurse crops to feed their 600-cow organic herd. Through several seasons of trial and error, they have learned the best ways to incorporate winter wheat, triticale, winter rye, oats, sorghum-Sudan grass, and summer forage “cocktail mixes” into their cropping plans. By raising more cereal grains, they also are now able to grow more corn as well.
“In our old rotation, we could only keep about 25% of our acres in corn,” said Tranel. “Now we can routinely plant 40% of our acres to corn.” He cited several additional benefits to embracing small grains, including:
- Soil health and protection. By keeping the ground covered virtually year-around, less soil is lost to erosion, soil tilth is improved, nutrient update is better, and weed pressure is reduced.
- More tonnage from the same acres. Tranel shared a calculation of their 5-year average annual tons per acre now versus their years of a strict corn-alfalfa program. On the same 2,000 acres, the farm’s new rotation yields an average of 12.25 tons of dry matter per acre per year more than the old program.
- Greater manure management flexibility. Because crops are coming off at different times of the year, the Tranels have more opportunities to hose-applicate liquid manure on acres close to their dairy site. This saves on hauling time and expense; allows them to keep their manure inventories lower; and expands the manure application season, versus just small windows of opportunity in the spring and fall.
The Tranels also appreciate the harvesting flexibility of cereal grains, which can easily be chopped for silage; baled and wrapped; or grazed. Because they are almost always one-cut crops, the chop height can be fairly low, at about 3 inches.
Along the way, they’ve learned to customize forages and harvest times depending on the target group of animals they will be feeding. Lactating-cow rations generally require harvest at boot to late-boot stage for maximum digestibility. Heifer forages will yield appropriate nutrition and more tonnage at the heading-milk stage. Dry-cow rations are best formulated with forages like winter wheat at the milk-to-dough stage.
Tranel’s favorite small grain forage? “Triticale, for sure,” he shared. “It has flexibility for fall or spring seeding, is fairly high in protein, and has tremendous NDF value compared to alfalfa.”
