Hay Bales: How is your Tall Fescue or Ryegrass Pasture?
It has been a dry fall and early winter for all of Pottawatomie County this year. Forages such as tall fescue and annual ryegrass have not fared well, and the coming spring may end up being one of those where you are forced to feed large quantities of hay and supplement into early spring. If you do have a decent stand of tall fescue or annual ryegrass, you may want to consider fertilizing this spring in order to reduce the cost of feeding and supplementation in March and April.
Many of the pastures that were sown to annual ryegrass or traditionally have volunteer ryegrass stands may look somewhat thin when it comes to the actual plants surviving. If you really get out there and look closely, some of these pastures may only have 3 or 4 plants per square foot. These plants maybe extremely small and are hanging on by a thread, but they are still green. With some rain and a little fertility, it may still be possible to make a decent forage crop of annual ryegrass in early March and April. You just need to get out there and take a closer look.
Annual ryegrass, with adequate rainfall and fertility can produce an abundance of plant tillers that can cover a lot of bare ground and equal a whole lot of forage. A tiller is just a stem that grows from the crown of the plant and produces leaves, stems and seed heads. On average, a ryegrass plant can produce 5 to 6 of tillers. In other words, a healthy pasture can produce a lot of forage. To determine if it is worth the expense to apply fertility to the pasture, an easy method of determining plant populations is to use a white wire coat hanger and actually go out and count the ryegrass plants. The inside of a wire coat hanger is about 0.5 square feet. If we throw the coat hanger on the ground and there are 4 small ryegrass plants inside the wire, we would have about 8 plants per square foot. When using this method, it is important that you take counts across the whole pasture. Drive a pickup, ATV or just take a walk across the pasture and throw the coat hanger down in at least 20 places. Write down the number of plants in each count, add them together and divide by 20 and multiple by 2. This will give you the average number of plants per square foot for the pasture. If its 4 or 6 plants per square foot, adding nitrogen fertility may be worth the expense in reduce feeding costs. If its 1 to 3 plants per square foot, you may want to save those fertilizer dollars for use later in the spring for bermudagrass production.
Annual ryegrass can look a whole lot like other winter grasses that do not respond to fertility as well as ryegrass does. It is pretty easy to tell them apart if you look closely. Most of our annual bromes (winter grasses) will have hairs somewhere on the plant. It may be on the leaf blades, or it may be where the leaf meets the stem or it could be on the collar around the stem. If the plant has any hairs on it anywhere, it is not ryegrass. Ryegrass will have a shiny or waxy appearance when in bright sunlight and there are no hairs present on the plant. This makes it easy to identify correctly if you look closely.
A similar process can be used to determine if fertilizing tall fescue will pay off. Tall fescue, being a perennial plant, will have large crowns that cover quite a bit of area. Instead of counting plants, when we throw our coat hanger down, we will estimate ground cover. If the green tall fescue plant covers 25% of the area inside the coat hanger, record that number. After taking 20 observations across the field, we would add up all the numbers and divide by 20. This would give us the average percent ground cover of tall fescue for the pasture. If this number is above 25%, you should consider applying a fertility treatment. If the average is less than 25%, you may want to save those fertilizer dollars for later in the year to jump start bermudagrass production.
Nitrogen fertilizer prices have really increased in the past months, so it is important that we determine when and where we need to use our fertilizer dollars. If your ryegrass grass pastures are healthy, based on the average number of plants in the population or your tall fescue pasture has sufficient ground cover, consider fertilizing them to reduce your spring feeding costs. None of us know what kind of rainfall we can expect in the coming year, but with a little research of your own research, it could well be worth fertilizing your cool-season pastures. This might ensure that you have enough forage to make it through until your bermudagrass fields green up.
If you have questions concerning this topic or related topics, please contact the OSU Extension Center at 273-7683, stop by the office, or visit our website: http://www.oces.okstate.edu/pottawatomie/
This article originally appeared on The Shawnee News-Star: Hay Bales: How is your Tall Fescue or Ryegrass Pasture?
