The Stockman Grass Farmer
Innovative Graziers Find Year Around Finishing Quality Green Pasture Is Indeed Possible In Colorado -by Allan Nation
August 2005
PUEBLO, Colorado: The Rocky Mountains of Colorado are not generally thought of as a prime place to finish beeves and lambs on green winter pasture, but two of Colorado's most innovative graziers are finding this is indeed possible with winter annuals.
Russ Maytag produces grassfed beef on a ranch near Pueblo in southern Colorado as well as on another upland ranch in the mountains. Both ranches are irrigated.
In Pueblo in August of last year, Maytag drilled in 100 pounds per acre of cereal rye with an Atchison no-till drill under a center pivot. He said he got an excellent germination rate.
Due to the extremely high price for calves last fall, Maytag waited until February and then bought broken mouth, pregnant cows to graze the rye.
"The cows were a condition score 4 to 4.5 at the time of purchase. By June, they were a condition score 7 to 7.5 with calves at their sides and we had fed absolutely no hay."
Maytag said that in April he felt the rye needed a boost of nitrogen and applied 40 pounds of actual N per acre.
"The nitrogen not only gave us a lot of excess feed, which we had no use for, but it also forced us to graze a more mature feed."
As a result, Maytag said he would be taking a more organic approach in the future utilizing purposefully built-up natural soil nitrogen.
"I would say I liked the winter rye and will plant more this year but it needs better management on my part as far as getting the stocking rate right."
"Also I can see the benefit of planting wheat and rye so that your pastures don't mature all at the same time. That way I could swap to the wheat when the rye starts to mature."
(See Anibal Pordomingo's article on this in the July issue for sample winter forage combinations.)
Maytag plows under his rye in the late spring as a green manure crop and after a month of allowing the soil to digest it plants sorghum-sudan for summer grazing.
"I tried to no-till the sorghum-sudan into chemically forested rye last year and had a total crop failure," he said.
"The rye looked dead but when I turned the water on it revived and totally prevented the sorghum-sudan from growing. I now believe plowing it under is the only way to go."
On his high elevation mountain ranch. Maytag follows winter rye with graze-out oats as the summer temperatures there are not high enough to grow a warm-season plant.
He uses stockpiled cool-season perennials as the transition forage in both late spring and again in the fall while the annuals are germinating and growing.
This article is reprinted with permission
