 Welcome to the Alfalfa in the South online workshop series. I'm Dr. Jennifer Tucker with the University of Georgia. Today I'm gonna be providing a quick review of recent research that we've been conducting in Tifton, Georgia. My research program began in 2016 at the UGA Tifton campus. I conduct producer-driven applied research projects that help to develop best management practices, specifically looking at Alfalfa and Bermudagras mixtures, and their management by our producers. Before we get into talking about the data and reviewing some of the research projects that we've conducted, let's talk a little bit about the weather. As you can see in the past five years looking at the temperatures in Tifton, they haven't really varied that much from the normal. So we've had that warmer temperatures that we've continued throughout those hot summer months, and nothing's really off from the expectations of temperature. However, when we start to look at that precipitation, we see a very different story. If we look at 2016, we started off very wet, and then we turned off pretty dry in that May time period. In 2017, we had what we would consider a more normal time period, or more normal precipitation during that time period of active growth of our forages. 2018, if anybody remembers, was a very, very wet year with a lot of impacts from hurricanes. And then 2019, our most recent year was riddled with drought. As you can see, we only really had significant rainfall in that June time period, and it's just if the rain shut off throughout the rest of the year. We need to keep this in mind as we look through the data and the research, as we know that environmental impacts really affect our forage production. So the first project that I implemented when arriving in Tifton in 2016 was looking at alfalfa and bermudagrass mixtures in baylage production. This was a comparison of the yield and quality of Tifton 85 bermudagrass to Tifton 85 bermudagrass with Bulldog 805 alfalfa, all of this harvested as baylage. This was part of Dr. Taylor Hendrick's PhD project and supported by the Georgia Beef Cattle Commodity Commission. Now, one of the questions that we get from lots of producers after presenting our data is will alfalfa work in other bermudagrasses other than Tifton 85? The real interesting part of this is we had already seen a lot of success with alfalfa and bermudagrass varieties, of all kinds of varieties, and we hadn't seen a lot of work with the Tifton 85 and we were concerned with the robust growth of that Tifton 85 that the alfalfa would not compete. However, we are proud to say that Tifton 85 does compare very well and match very well with our bermudagrass mixtures, or alfalfa bermudagrass mixtures. Now, one of the reasons that we wanted to look at baylage production is baylage can be a game changer for our producers in the Southeast. If you live here, you understand that in the early spring months, there's a lot of rainfall. It's very hard to get those multiple days of dry weather to really successfully produce dry hay production. By utilizing baylage technology, we can minimize that weather factor, which allows it to be easier for us to maintain that harvest interval that we're looking for to get that timely harvest and that higher quality forage product. Another advantage to baylage production is harvesting at a higher moisture or baling at a higher moisture allows for better leaf retention of our forages, especially when we're working with a delicate forage like alfalfa, which when dried out really has a tendency to shatter on those leaves. We established the Bulldog 805 alfalfa into an existing Tifton 85 bermudagrass hayfield in February of 2016. Now, you will notice that that does not follow with our recommendation of a fall harvest. We do usually recommend planting in that October time period. However, weather and other factors forced us to go with a spring harvest and it did have an impact on our first year establishment. We harvested at around 20 pounds an acre seed on a 14 inch row spacing. Now we do recommend that 14 inch row spacing to allow for successful competitiveness of both the alfalfa and bermudagrass stands. When you plant on that seven inch row spacing we really start to see a lot of shading effects of that alfalfa and to start to have a negative impact on that bermudagrass component that we do wanna see in our stand. In this comparison, we use Tifton 85 bermudagrass where we applied commercial nitrogen four times throughout the season following what our hay recommendations are for Tifton 85 bermudagrass or we had our Tifton 85 and alfalfa mixtures which we did not apply nitrogen throughout the evaluation as we expect the alfalfa to provide that nitrogen component for growth. Now, when we get into the harvest management we after that first year so in that first year of establishment we do recommend that you harvest that first cutting at a 25% or later bloom stage. That's just to really allow for root growth carbohydrate reserves and to really get that alfalfa component to the best advantage that it has to be strong. After that, all of our harvest occurred at the 10% bloom stage and we harvested on a 28 to 35 day interval throughout the three years of the evaluation. Once the bermudagrass treatments broke dormancy we then also maintained that 28 to 35 day harvest interval for the bermudagrass only treatments. Right before harvesting we would mow in the evening at about 6pm the night before we planted to rake and bale this product. The reason we did an evening cut is because those sugars accumulate in that forage throughout the day. If we think about how photosynthesis works and as those sugars are accumulating up into the plant that's gonna help, higher sugars is gonna help with that fermentation process. And so we do cut the evening before. The next morning we begin by doing a microwave test to test moisture of that forage and once we reach that target at 55% moisture we raked and bailed that forage product. We would then move those bales immediately to an individual bale wrapper and we would wrap those bales and usually this occurred within a four hour time period but definitely all within one day. Now when we think about alfalfa bermudagrass mixtures you know in a perfect world you would have 50% of both components and nothing else in the stand but the reality is that we are dealing with a cool season and a warm season forage and so what you look for is an ebb and flow relationship of these two species together and that's really, that is what we saw. So when we start to look at the botanical composition of these stands, we can see that in that 2016 time period that that alfalfa component was there but it wasn't very strong. Now again, this is linked to having a February time planting and so it was still in the establishment phase during that first year but we can also see that we had some significant weed presence in 2016 and that was really due to some of that drought and lack of rain that we had in those summer months. However, the weed present was predominantly crabgrass which is a high quality forage to add into that mixture so it really didn't affect our nutritive value of our product. However, when we looked into 2017 you can see that we started to have that ebb and flow relationship in those early months when Bermuda grass was still dormant. We did have that dominance of alfalfa in that March and April time period and then we also started to have an extra cutting in that October time period with that alfalfa and as well as maintaining a very strong stand and then this continued into 2018 and we see that we really have a lot of that alfalfa that we're looking for and we're still having pretty strong alfalfa stands in those early months. The other caveat is that after we got out of that establishment year of 2016 we were able to maintain a greater than 30% stand of alfalfa and if you're looking at grazing research or pasture productivity you're thinking about incorporating a legume we recommend having a 30% or greater stand of legume to counteract that or to make up for that nitrogen component as you aren't applying commercial nitrogen to these treatments. So just looking really quickly and overview of the Baylidge data we did find after the three years of the evaluation that the advantage really was to that mixture by incorporating alfalfa into the Bermuda grass we were able to increase the number of harvest having on average seven harvest throughout the growing season so you were almost doubling the number of harvest that you would be getting off of that unit of land. Of course that then correlates to increase in the tonnage per acre produced and so you were able to increase the overall tons per acre again on that unit of land and once we got out of that 2016 season and into the second and third year of the evaluation you really started to see that separation in that quality with greater quality crude protein TDN and RFQ for those Tipton 85 and alfalfa mixtures compared to the Tipton 85 Bermuda grass alone and for this reason then we believe that the incorporation of alfalfa into your Bermuda grass can be a successful approach to improving yield and quality on that single unit of land. Now a question that we get from a lot of producers is how long is alfalfa gonna last and particularly in this project it's in a bailage production system and so while the bailage evaluation itself was from 2016 to 2018 we are continuing to harvest these plots in bailage production and we do have and we are continuing them out until we believe that the stand is no longer a viable option and so we're very curious to see how long this is gonna last. So as I mentioned we would continue harvesting these bailage plots but another question that we got from producers is what about another legume option other than alfalfa, you know, can this system be successful with maybe a clover option? And so for us we decided to use red clover. Barduro red clover will grow, can grow much into the summer months and we've been pleased to see the production of that red clover. While it is a biennial forage it does act as much like an annual so it does require establishment each year but really just looking at the yield and quality comparisons of the two. And so we took those 1585 Bermuda grass only plots and we interceded them with Barduro red clover in the fall of 2019 and 2020 and so we only have some preliminary data to share for that. But looking at last year's production we did see that you did get a higher tonnage per acre if you were utilizing an alfalfa Bermuda grass mixture in comparison to a red clover Bermuda grass mixture. However, 2019 is a hard year to do comparison on as you can see we only were able to harvest the months of March through August. Once August hit we were in that severe drought and we really didn't recover from that for the remainder of the season until our next cutting in March of 2020. So we are gonna continue this out for a second year as well as run quality analysis by each harvest to really see what the comparison is and to answer that significant producer question of Ken red clover or another clover option worked successfully in this mixture with Bermuda grass. So we're very excited to see what those results are. Now a large focus of my research program is doing a grazing research and trying to figure out all the different applications of these alfalfa Bermuda grass mixtures. And so we did implement a two year grazing evaluation where we were utilizing alfalfa as a nitrogen source within a grazing system. In this comparison we had tipped in 85 Bermuda grass that we either applied no nitrogen or applied supplemented nitrogen or we had alfalfa Bermuda grass and grazed by stalker steers. For this evaluation we have established Bulldog 805 alfalfa in October of 2017. We did plant this on a seven inch row spacing however for future evaluations we are gonna use that 14 inch row spacing as we really see a decrease in the shading effects and competitive advantage for both species on that 14 inch row spacing. Our Bermuda grass treatments that received nitrogen received 80 pounds an acre of calcium ammonium nitrate which was split applied twice per year per season. And then at least once throughout the growing season when we started to see a lot of excess wheat material or overgrown material that animals were selectively grazing around we did do a vegetative reset with mechanical mowing. For this evaluation we used four to five weight stalker steers and we rotationally grazed two acre paddocks that were split into three sections and each section was grazed for a seven to 10 day rotation which would allow for about a 14 to 20 day rest period per section. Another interesting component of this evaluation is we used a completely temporary system and so we were using a lot of that grazing technology that we recommend to our producers. And as you can see in the top corner picture we have our different paddocks that are separated using temporary fencing technology. We also had our waters on sleds so each time that we moved the animals we moved our waters into each new section our mineral feeders as well as temporary shade structures were removed for each section. So we were doing true rotation or true intensive management of this evaluation. Looking at our total days of grazing looking at year one as you remember 2018 was a very wet year in 2019 or year two was a very dry year. And so as we look across through there we began grazing in May of each year but in year one we were able to get 122 actual days of grazing and in year two we were only able to get 87 days of grazing due to that drought that excessive drought that we had in 2019. When we look at our comparisons we did do this by periods or by the different months because we started to see that there wasn't a really big difference in our average daily gain other than those early months and then that later time period in that 2018 but there's really not a lot of difference when you look at the average daily gain. However for this evaluation we used put and take stalking. So we were able to add more animals to the evaluation to help to control the forage allowance or maintain forage allowance across the three treatments. And so that's when we really started to see that big difference and looking at the gain per acre we saw an improved gain per acre when utilizing alfalfa for mutagrass mixtures compared to our mutagrass only treatments. And then really significantly we started to look at that stalking rate because we had much higher stalking on those for mutagrass and alfalfa treatments. And so looking at the average seasonal gain it was significantly greater on those for mutagrass and alfalfa treatments. And so what this translates to is the ability to stalk more animals or produce more pounds of product per acre which is significant when looking at southeastern forage production systems. And so for this again we said that the advantage went to the mixture and we conclude that alfalfa for mutagrass mixtures are a viable option for our southeastern stalker cattle producers, especially those that might be looking for reduced dependence on synthetic nitrogen sources. However, we did notice that the rest periods really were not long enough to sustain the forage productivity and the animal performance during those drought years. And so we do need to have some adjustment to what those rest periods or grazing recommendations are. So that led to another study that was going on simultaneously with this grazing evaluation. This was a USDA NIFA supported project with the University of Florida, Auburn University and the University of Georgia where we were working to develop grazing recommendations and on-farm decision tools for management of these alfalfa for mutagrass mixtures in the Southeast. The goal of this project was to look at differences combined harvest height and harvest frequency to provide the best grazing recommendations for optimum forage production. And so if we think about that and then you consider what we were looking at the mott curve here, we're not looking for the opportunity of greatest yield total or the opportunity of greatest quality but we're actually looking for what that optimum is or how can we best efficiently, most efficiently utilize these systems. And so by focusing on the combination of both stubble height as well as the rest period or the harvest frequency, we're hoping to be able to figure out what that optimum is in terms of yield quality as well as stand persistence. The data that we're gonna be presenting today is from four of our locations in Georgia and Alabama. We had two Northern locations, Crossville, Alabama and Watkinsville, Georgia that were interceded with Bulldog 505 Alpha Alpha. And then we have our two Southern locations when shorter Alabama and Tifton, Georgia interceded with Bulldog 805 Alpha Alpha. And all of these were evaluated for combinations of harvest height and harvest frequency of two, four or six inches and two, four or six weeks. Now, if we look at the botanical composition really quickly of the Northern locations with that Bulldog 505, we can see that we had a successful establishment of Alpha Alpha in those locations. And early on we do have a significant contribution of Alpha Alpha. However, we start to see that the Alpha Alpha component midway through, especially in that two week time period starts to significantly decrease and by the late part of the season we saw that there was essentially no Alpha Alpha in almost all of our treatments. And unfortunately, we did only get one year of data from our cross-valab and then Watkinsville, Georgia locations. If we talk about the weather we have to consider the fact that in that late fall and winter time period we had a very wet, very cold winter and Alpha Alpha does not like to have a wet feet. And so we do think that that contributed to the stand persistence of that Alpha Alpha component. However, we were able to run a linear regression to determine what that optimum point is. And that's what we're really looking for is what is that target point where harvest height and harvest frequency cross to optimize our forage yield. And so from our 505 locations we determined that that was at four weeks and four inches. And so that would be the recommendation. However, again, we only got one year of data in this location. But when we started to look at our Southern location at our Bulldog 805, we started to really get some good data, some strong data. And we see again that we had a significant Alpha component early in the season. We started to get into those warm summer months and we start to see a decrease in the Alpha. Late in the season, again, that two-week harvest is just too, even at any height is just too frequent for those stands. However, going into our next year after, so this was late in the season, late fall and we allowed for rest until that spring time period, we really see that that Alpha component starts to come back pretty strong. And again, those two-week harvest start to be detrimental on that stand. But we start to see a really good strong stand of Alpha and Bermuda gas mixtures. And then again, looking for that optimum time period, this is again two years of data and look at that harvest height and that harvest frequency and that optimum time period for four-inch yield is again at that four-week four-inch height. And so both locations confirm that allowing that 28 to 30 days of rest that we recommend really is gonna get us to that optimum stand persistence and that optimum quality. If we started just talking about the quality and looking at the relative forage quality and this is just from our 805 locations in the southern locations over the two years of data, but you really start to see just a separation. Again, that two-week time period and then that six-week 15 centimeters. So this would be the effects of overgrazing versus undergrazing even. And although you have more Alpha presence still in those six-week plots, we do see that that is steamier, more mature material and that does have an impact on our overall quality. And so we feel pretty confident in our four-week four-inch recommendation for optimization of that stand. Just to give a better visual, I know a lot of data numbers doesn't really tell you a lot. So we took these pictures at a single four-inch four-week plot throughout the study. And so September of 2018 was the end of our first year at our Tipton location. However, in January, when we went back, we really started to see that Alpha component coming back very strong, although in September, we thought we'd taken it all out. In May, you see that there's a significant amount of Alpha as well as that winter wheat annual ryegrass, which is still a high quality forage and so in pasture. You can still graze that pretty successfully. And then at the end of our season, our harvest season in 2019, again, you see that good mix of Alpha and Bermuda grass that you're looking at at those four-week four-inch plots. And so we feel pretty confident in these evaluations and the conclusion that giving, allowing for that full 28 to 30 days of risk is really gonna help to optimize that yield and that quality. And as we saw from the grazing study that the three weeks just really wasn't long enough. And so what then is our next step? So we have submitted and successfully received funding for another Alpha, USDA, NIFA, Alpha system, and Alpha seed and Alpha forage systems grant. And so we're looking to implement a project looking at different forage system management strategies and developing those best management strategies as well as looking at some of the social impacts and concepts for expanding Alpha into the Southern forage livestock operations. And this again is a project with the University of Georgia, Auburn University and the University of Florida. So the objectives are to evaluate the use of different Alpha Bermuda grass mixtures simultaneously in different varied use systems. And this will be in two locations in Georgia and in Alabama. We're also working to develop an economic analysis and to expand on our economic tools that are available to help producers make more informed management decisions for their own operation. And then another interesting thing that we're doing is we're trying to identify with the barriers or to the adoption of Alpha Alpha in the Southeast among our stakeholders. And so we really need some input there to determine what really are the challenges of the barriers keeping producers from establishing Alpha Alpha. Just to kind of show you what we're looking at from the varied use systems. We are implementing three different treatments. These are all simultaneous right next to each other so we can see side by side comparisons of the different management strategies. And so we are looking at a cut system which would be harvesting as hay or baledge throughout the entire three years of the project, no grazing on those particular paddocks. Then we have our gray system where we only utilize grazing after that first clean off cut for that first year in that first year of establishment and we are gonna utilize rotational grazing. And then our cut and gray system and in the cutting gray system we are gonna utilize both harvest management through baledge production as well as grazing. And so from this we believe that we can develop true best management practices as well as expectations for our producers under the varied use management systems. But to do all of this we need your help. And so we are developing a producer survey to determine what the barriers are to Alpha Alpha adoption. And so I'm hopeful that you will be willing to answer these questions and be very open with us because we really want to know what those barriers are. And we're also looking to do some producer on-harm research collaborations. And so if you have an interest in doing that please feel free to reach out to myself for Dr. Kamalanex and as we are planning to establish some locations in Georgia, Alabama and Florida as well. We do have some additional resources. You can find webinars, previous webinars from 2018 and 2019 on the southeastcataladvisor.com website as well as our full Alpha Alpha in that mixing it up with Alpha Alpha in the South workshop conducted at the American Forage and Grassland Council meeting in 2020 in South Carolina. And that's available at that YouTube link. If you are considering planting Alpha Alpha we have an Alpha Alpha and Bermuda grass checklist. You can download this off of the southeastcataladvisor.com webpage and this is a good place to just start if you're considering Alpha Alpha integration into your system. And so kind of go through this checklist and make sure that you mark all the boxes or determine what barriers might be for you not establishing in the upcoming season. And so with that I thank you for your time and we are very excited about the potential for Alpha Alpha integration and expansion in the Southeast as well as providing practical and applicable research data and information for our producers. If you have any questions my contact questions my contact information is available there on that webpage. And with that I will thank you for your time.