In my tests, we have harvested 2 to 3 tons of very decent forage, even though it was planted in mid-July with a warm fall.
One often overlooked crop is brown midrib pearl millet. Other researchers and I have found that pearl millets have high feed quality.
In one replicated study I did, grazing corn was 12.9% crude protein, and sorghum-sudangrass was 14.2% crude protein. But the BMR pearl millet was 20% crude protein.
The energy was similar for all three crops, and all three had high plant sugars. But the pearl millet did not have prussic acid management issues. It yielded very well in late summer and had thinner stems, making it easier to round-bale for wrapping.
If you are planning to graze it, be careful. It is so rich that it can cause bloat.
Turning the page: Cool-season forages
Cool-season crops can thrive in fall. Stands of straight cool-season grasses, if fed with nitrogen and sulfur in August — and with adequate rainfall — can give good yields in early October. The key is that it will not dry fast, so wide-swath same-day haylage and the proper inoculant can help preserve it.
Keep the bar at 4 inches, or you will have mostly weeds next spring. It will be a very high-quality forage as it is growing in the increasingly cool fall weather. Yields may not be spectacular because they are also growing when day length and intensity are decreasing every day.
Some farms take legume cuts after a killing frost. If you are short on forage, this is a possibility. It does not meet the high-quality standards due to the lack of sufficient day length and sun intensity to produce digestible components. I have found that it has a significant negative impact on legume growth next spring. If the field is rotated to corn, it doesn’t matter.
For those planting in early August, oats for forage have shown huge potential and are the most practical. Planted at 100 pounds of seed an acre of grain-type oats with seed treatment, you could harvest 2 to 4 tons of good digestible dry matter by the end of September, if planted in early August in mid-New York and Michigan. Farther north, plant earlier. Farther south, plant later.
Keep in mind that if planting gets delayed, yields will fall dramatically. Also, diseases can wipe early stands out.
Keys to success
The normally cool September nights conserve the sugars and can produce forage of very high fiber digestibility. With sufficient nitrogen, plus sulfur, or manure, it will easily reach 18% crude protein.
Fall oats require all steps, no shortcuts, to be taken to establish it. Planting at the end of July or early August, especially in more southern areas, brings the risk of aphids that can carry barley yellow dwarf virus, which can kill the plant. Cool nights with heavy dew seem to knock the aphids out and reduce the potential for loss.
Elson Shields, retired from Cornell, says: “Since barley yellow dwarf virus is circulative, a neonic seed treatment will kill many aphids before they can transmit the virus. … Most of your problems would be in the disease area, like rust.”
Gary Bergstrom, also retired from Cornell, says rust populations in New York have developed the ability to overcome certain oat resistance genes, and they can now infect older, previously resistant varieties. Field scouts have reported fields looking like orange highway cones from all the rust spores.
The good news is that there are fairly new rust-resistant varieties — Steuben and Hayden, for example — that can be used. The other alternative is scouting to apply a properly timed fungicide to control rust. Ignoring it until you mow could be a disaster.
If you choose to plant non-treated seed, you should slightly delay plantings until the cool nights of August, which can help reduce the aphid population but will significantly reduce yield.
Grain oats for forage will be ready by the end of September when you still have some heat to dry it for silage. It fits better than the slower-growing forage oat type. But be liberal with manure before planting and immediately incorporate it to capture the ammonia nitrogen. Also, keep in mind that if you apply manure before planting, it is not recommended that you feed this to dry cows, as potassium levels will run over 5%.
Heavy-yielding fall oats are wet. You should mow a wide swath and ted it after two hours of drying. Even with that wide swath, the sheer mass will only allow the top to dry. As soon as the top has a light grey cast, use a tedder to get the lower layers spread for photosynthetic drying. It is critical to watch your forward speed, or you will make non-drying tedding lumps by driving too fast.
It is critical that it be ensiled the same day because of the very high sugar levels. Leaving it overnight — unless it goes down into the low 40s and 30s — will burn off the sugars and produce higher populations of clostridia and higher levels of butyric acid.
Same-day haylage, because of the very high sugar levels, will speed the fermentation process and produce an excellent forage. The key is to use a homolactic inoculant (not Buchneri) designed for wet, high-sugar forages, and to chop an inch long to control leachate. You need a sunny day before you mow to have sugar substrate for the inoculant to work.
Kilcer is a certified crop adviser in Rutledge, Tenn., formerly of Kinderhook, N.Y.