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Rejuvinating Hayland

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Big Muddy rancher

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I am about at my wits end haying this year. Most of our hayland has been seeded down for a while and Crested Wheat has dominated the fields. On some other land we have alfalfa still showing up pretty good but Foxtail has taken over.
I was wondering since this is tough country to get good stands established if i would be better to drag the crested fields to smooth them out and fertilizer rather then spend money on trying to re-establish Alfalfa just to have it die out in a few years?

The land with the foxtail is more saline land in the Big Muddy bottom that can produce if conditions are right but is more likely to burn up and bake hard.

Any ideas?
 
Have yall thought of a different type of forage? We re-seeded with a timothy and brome mix in existing hay fields and its working pretty well after 3 years. We have a heavy clay soil.(I did rotate it out to winter wheat for one year).
 
buy hay from an honest fella....want my phone number !!?? :twisted:
 
Does meadow foxtail work in your part of the world? Or is that what you have already? Another thought is that if alfalfa is tough to get started, seeding it with red clover works well up here. Often times by the time the red clover dies out the alfalfa is well established.
 
Faster horses said:
BMR, we have the same problem--just dont' have the foxtail. We did get a nice stand of alfalfa using a no-till drill that we rent from the Conservation District. It was a grazer type of alfalfa, too.

FWIW
Click to expand...

Did you have to spray it the fall before and the spring of the seening as well? No till for hay fields has interested me for awhile but talking to folks and reading up on it it looks like there is alot of spray, fertilizer, and dormant time involved in getting it done right.
 
ha ha ha...around here we tend to do it the easy way...and that's why
we have hay ground that has gone back to crested.

No, silver, I don't think they sprayed it. I think they planted it to
barley hay one year and it didn't make and the next year they
planted the alfalfa in the stubble. But I'll ask to make sure.
We didn't graze it last year; just let it be and cut it this year.
 
How long do your alfalfa stands last? There are big differences in persistence between varsities, but I'm sure you are already using the most persistent ones for your area. Would it work to broadcast some seed and fertilizer before you drag the fields and take what you get or would that just bury it too deep?
 
The Fox tail is Fox tail barley.

A creeping root alfalfa last longer here but I have used a bit of tap root that can really produce for a couple years.

Most grass/alfalfa seeding are done on luck in this area. Depending on the spring rains it can take 2 to 5 year to get established.

That is why I was thinking of dragging/rolling and fertilizing the grass to produce and not lose a couple years production. Not sure if I could get desired results.
 
It can definitely be a real challenge, expecially on saline soils. The easiest way to get the pH back to somewhat normal levels is manure. If is is simply too much land base, then try using a forage blend of up to 10 different species to reclaim that land. Fescues, crested wheat, smooth and meadow brome and creeping and tap root alfalfa. Not all of the species are going to do well, but you will find 2-5 of them will grow well, choke out the weeds, and do fine in the saline soil. Even though you do live on marginal land, make sure you have enough planting density to start off with, because if you don't then the foxtail will just grow through, and you will be picking beards off your cows in the winter. Just my 2 bits
 
I have about the same problem here. I have fields that were once farmed. We planted a grass alfalfa mixture in them 15 or more years ago much of the alfalfa has died out Unless we have a good year some are hardly worth harvesting. When you plant a tame or interoduced grass You have to accept the fact that you are farming grass. You do not have all the componants of native grassland, even if you plant the native species. You usually have only two choices either destroy what you have and start over or make what you have more productive usually with fertilizer. Here on dryland fertilizer is little more than a break even situation on the good years and nearly unsuccesful on the dry ones.

We made some mistakes when we planted this grass. Our conservationist at the time suggesed a mixture of crested wheatgrass, intermediat wheat grass and alalfa. On the highly erodable land on on the rolling land he suggested adding 1/2 pound smooth brome. This was a mistake as the brome has often increased and taken over.

I am going to live with what I now have. Will fertilize some when fertilizer costs are reasonable. I don't want to farm again. Will let the next guy that owns this land figure out what to do.
 
Big Muddy rancher said:
I am about at my wits end haying this year. Most of our hayland has been seeded down for a while and Crested Wheat has dominated the fields. On some other land we have alfalfa still showing up pretty good but Foxtail has taken over.
I was wondering since this is tough country to get good stands established if i would be better to drag the crested fields to smooth them out and fertilizer rather then spend money on trying to re-establish Alfalfa just to have it die out in a few years?

The land with the foxtail is more saline land in the Big Muddy bottom that can produce if conditions are right but is more likely to burn up and bake hard.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Sometimes we've turned cows in early, high density, short duration, has helped rejuvinate the alfalfa.
 
Big Muddy rancher said:
I am about at my wits end haying this year. Most of our hayland has been seeded down for a while and Crested Wheat has dominated the fields. On some other land we have alfalfa still showing up pretty good but Foxtail has taken over.
I was wondering since this is tough country to get good stands established if i would be better to drag the crested fields to smooth them out and fertilizer rather then spend money on trying to re-establish Alfalfa just to have it die out in a few years?

The land with the foxtail is more saline land in the Big Muddy bottom that can produce if conditions are right but is more likely to burn up and bake hard.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...
When you harvest a crop off your land, you take about 20 to 40 pounds of P and K out of your soil. Unless your soil is very fertile and has deep fertility, you will begin to deplete available P and K. This will favor a different class of plants...when those new plants aren't desirable, we call them weeds! P and K help legumes.
 
This is an interesting topic that many of struggle with. RobertMac is on the right track as well as whoever suggested manure. In Sask it is very unlikely that you would need K and our only easily available source is Potash which is 50% Potassium and 50% Chlorine. The chlorine will wreak havoc with the biology and the K will bind with the Mg that you also will have an abundance of in your area to make sure that your soil will stay tight. You need an element that will give the tightening minerals and salts a ride out of there. The most available and almost affordable mineral to do that is Ca. Some forms of Ca are easier to work with than others and carry their own baggage but I like the GSR type that can be suspended in water and sprayed on.

I kind of found myself rambling here BMR but the reason I jumped in was to discourage you from the K in that situation and to tweak you interest in finding out the chem and biology that causes salinity in the first place. Also to let you know there might be solutions.
 
Cal said:
Big Muddy rancher said:
I am about at my wits end haying this year. Most of our hayland has been seeded down for a while and Crested Wheat has dominated the fields. On some other land we have alfalfa still showing up pretty good but Foxtail has taken over.
I was wondering since this is tough country to get good stands established if i would be better to drag the crested fields to smooth them out and fertilizer rather then spend money on trying to re-establish Alfalfa just to have it die out in a few years?

The land with the foxtail is more saline land in the Big Muddy bottom that can produce if conditions are right but is more likely to burn up and bake hard.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Sometimes we've turned cows in early, high density, short duration, has helped rejuvinate the alfalfa.
Click to expand...

we turn cows in on two seperate hay fields this spring. both these fields we seeded back to crested/alfalfa about 3 years ago, but very few alfalfa plants seemed to make it. so i turned cows in on these fields this spring seems grazing the crested early was worth more to me than what hay those fields had been producing. when the cows were pulled off these fields in late may, i had no intention of haying them. well.. i finished baling one yesturday and the other about 10 days ago. the hay wasn't very tall but really thick and lots of alfalfa for the first time, beautiful hay! now, we did have a fairly wet spring, but i gotta think the cows out there had a lot to do with it.
 
BMR:
As you know, the foxtail barley stand lets you know that the field has some water sitting on it for awhile and that the soil is saline. Along the Big Muddy there, turning up the soil only brings more salts up, so cultivation sometimes is not the answer, which puts you in a fix.

Have you heard of the hybrid wheatgrass, "Newhy?" It was developed as a hay type grass for this problem. It's a cross between quackgrass (yes, I said quackgrass) and bluebuch wheatgrass. It has been released because it doesn't spread like quackgrass, but has its salt tolerance and its saturated water tolerance.

Several years back, the Plentywood field office tried planting some test plots of salt tolerant species along the Mig Muddy floodplain. I don't know how they turned out since I left Montana, but if you are close maybe you could check them out.
 
Justin, we had a similar experience here. When we bought Dad's place, the calving pasture was only used March 1 - May 15 since forever. Grandpa and Dad believed having cows on it longer than that hurt the hayfields. The bottoms are flood irrigated every spring and the place raised pretty nice grass hay.

We put the cows in the first fall we had it to put weight on the calves. Jesus, Dad flipped, but we kept them there all winter and through calving. After it got water on it, the bottoms was solid alfalfa, alfalfa Dad had not seen for 20 years or more. He still won't admit that the grazing MAY have broke up the sod a little. We did not graze it in the fall last year, but it did get some winter use. More hay this year, too, but that could be the 5 feet of snow we got through March? :)
 
BMR

What does your soil test tell you that is in short supply? Could the Saline problem be cured with a little drainage pipe? My choice of fertilizer in my area is chicken manure since it is cheap and readily available. We tried notilling some inproved grass species into several hayfields/pastures and the jury is still out if we got our money back.
 
Whoa :D This great discussion, I don't know where to start, We are a little far to haul manure to this land besides we don't generate much in the feed yards as we try to keep as many cattle out in the hills grazing. We have tried a bit of bale grazing but in this dried clime the residue doesn't break down real well and tends to make weedy patches.
The Foxtail Barley grow on the dry land even with out flooding, Seems to have mutated from the Notill ground in the country as if isn't just a flood type plant anymore.
I guess I should get some soil testing done.
This land does pack very hard, I tried grazing this spring but i think we just plain ran out of rain to bring a decent stand of Alfalfa on. It is strange how there might be a acre of top quality hay then falls off to nothing in a matter of feet.
Frisco did you used to live around Plentywood?
We are just 35 miles from Pwood.
 
BMR have you tried unrolling the hay in the poorer areas? That would decrease the amount of hay residue and spread out the animal nutrients. Greg Judy has a homemade device in his new booK "Come Back Farm" that may work.
 

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