 Today, I'm going to discuss preparing for a drought. My name is Leigh Ann Dillard and I'm the Forage Extension Specialist for the state of Alabama. In Alabama, most of us experienced a drought last fall. So why should we care and prepare for a drought now? This has to mainly do with the fact that the better forage management that we do, we reduce the stress on our plants. This makes them more resilient to future droughts and hopefully prevents them from being completely killed in extended droughts. These forage management is going to include proper soil fertility, rotational grazing and leaving our higher plant residue when we are grazing. Plants that are not regularly stressed will have deeper roots that make them more able to access water as the water table falls as well as nutrients and also have carbohydrate reserves in the roots that will allow them to continue to grow even in unfavorable growing conditions. So obviously, if irrigation is available, this will be a great tool to help us in preparing for a drought. Now, typically, irrigation is not economical or even possible in forage or hayfield because of either the topography of the field. A lot of our fields are not as flat as row crops making pivots very difficult or they're just really expensive. But as you can see in this picture, some situations like an Assad-based rotation, pivots are available and this is really useful to help us during a drought. There are other systems called pod systems that are more friendly to non-flight topographies. What example would it be a K-Line mini irrigation system? This is a system that we've been doing some research on down in South Alabama that uses a flexible hose line sprinkler developed in New Zealand. As you can see in the video, these pods are basically just that, they're sprinklers and they're very small and can be moved using an ATV or even a truck or some other type of small piece of equipment. They have different costs depending on the pod systems on how much it would be. They would be really useful for small acreage, really large acreage say 100 acres or more. You would need to string more pods together but it could be an option that is a little more economical than pivots for producers in that situation. Now for most pastures in hayfields, irrigation is not an option for a variety of reasons. So the first thing that we should consider is when we select our species and variety during pasture establishment. There are pros and cons to all forages as there's no golden ticket in the forage world. But if we are concerned about drought, that should be something that we consider when establishing forages. For example, the hayagrass has really good drought tolerance. However, its forage quality is lower than that of other warm season perennials like rameetagrass. Rameetagrass can withstand droughts but it will have large decreases in yield. So you have to weigh the pros and cons of having the higher quality, higher yielding rameetagrass compared to the lower quality, lower yielding but drought tolerant vaheyagrass. This is really going to be dependent on your management goals. If you have questions about how you go through the selection, the pros and cons of each, feel free to reach out to us at Alabama Cooperative Extension. Another example for those of you in North Alabama would be tall fescue. We typically don't have droughts when tall fescue is growing. However, if you are grazing your tall fescue in the summer like many people in North Alabama do, you will make it more susceptible to drought because it's already stressed because it's so hot. So when we do have a fall drought like we did last year or an extended summer drought like in 2016 that extended into the fall, we actually can see our tall fescue stands die. So this is a time where we have to really weigh our management as well as our species and variety selection. I would say though when you are establishing forages, all forages, regardless of their drought tolerance, will need water during establishment. So during a drought is not the time to establish any pasture. The proper soil fertility is the first hurdle in making sure that we have a very happy forage stand. Maintaining soil fertility is important and we should soil test every year in hayfields and every two years in pastures to make sure we're maintaining proper fertility. You can submit samples to the AU soil testing lab here in Auburn and they'll give you recommendations for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium based on the forest species you're growing. For those of you not in the black belt, liming is also very important. This is something that we tend to ignore but our soils in the coastal plain and Piedmont and mountain areas are very acidic. Adding the extra stress to our forages by having acidic soil will also reduce their ability to perform well during drought scenarios. It also makes certain nutrients unavailable which means all the fertilizer that you could be applying could be not available to the plant because the soil pH is not appropriate. So soil testing is very important. Right now in 2020 we have that the soil test is only $7 a sample and I can guarantee you you'll save much more than $7 by having proper liming and fertility for your plants. So weed management, this is an ongoing struggle for most of Alabama. Unfortunately in our climate it's great for growing plants whether those are plants that we want or we don't want. So just like forages weeds will develop defense mechanisms to survive droughts. So it's important to control the weeds before the droughts. So during a drought the weeds are not actively growing just like any other plant they don't have the water they need to be able to grow. Most herbicides if not all herbicides require an actively growing plant to be able to have their chemistry perform in the plant. Products are always going to be more effective when you use some favorable growing conditions. So if you do have a weed problem the best method is going to be mechanical control or mowing to clip that back and then once the weeds are actively growing you can consider using an herbicide. Now using the correct herbicide is also very important. So if you have any questions again please feel free to contact anyone in the Cooperative Extension Animal Science and Forge team and we'd be glad to help you. So in my opinion grazing management is and continues to be the most important management decision and use of time that we can have in any of our fields. Now I use the term grazing management a lot of these are also going to apply to harvest management in hay. So but I'm going to use the term grazing because we do see a little bit more need for management shifts in grazing. So most pastures in the southeast are continuously grazed much like the picture you see here where you have very little forage available and this is because in a continuous grazed pasture cows will over or any livestock for that matter will over graze some areas as you see here and will under graze others. They're allowed to select. They have a buffet of options and they're always going to go for the ice cream and avoid the broccoli. Now in rotationally grazing we don't give them the full buffet. We limit them to only part of it so they're going to be more likely to choose the non desirable or the less lower quality forages and graze more uniformly. This also allows proper rest compared to continuous grazing because in continuous grazing because of the over grazing most plants are grazed every two days. This doesn't allow them enough time to recover from the grazing of the cows or other livestock. When rotationally grazing the rest period would usually be 15 to 28 days similar to the period of time that we suggest cutting for hay. So we won't want to have our cattle in the pasture continuously. So not only does this prevent over grazing but typically we say the roots of a plant are the same height as the above ground biomass. So allowing them to grow taller allows the roots to grow deeper. This is of super importance during the drought because it allows them more access to water, the stronger the roots the more the plants will be able to access any water that's available. This also increases forage use efficiency. So not only is it making the plant stronger but it increases our efficiency. So as you can see here in continuous stocking the animals are going to defecate and waste and trample 30 to 40 percent of the pasture which means only 60 to 70 percent will actually be taken in. In a slow rotation so they're in a paddock for a week or more you can increase that all the way to 50 to 60 percent. In a moderate rotation where we're moving them at least every week they're going to consume 60 70 percent of that pasture. So we've pretty much doubled at this point the amount of grass they're actually going to be consuming and strip grazing which is a very intense management system like where in dairy systems they may move them twice a day you're going to get 70 to 80 percent utilization. So not only are you increasing your plant's ability to handle the grazing and reducing the stress you're actually of the plants they are able to have a higher grazing efficiency. So it's a two-fold reason why this is going to help us deal with drought stress. This has been told to me before and I believe it wholeheartedly that the largest return on investment in a livestock system is grazing management. Grazing management it doesn't matter what your species you're using for your forage or the livestock you're using by focusing on grazing management we can increase the efficiency of our system without any changes to anything else. So in a situation where we may have a drought and you've done all the right things but you still don't have any forage available we have a couple of options one would be emergency forages these would most likely be summer annuals but again our droughts are typically July August maybe in September they may go as far as October but typically that's the scenario we're talking about. So these would be great options summer annuals grow really fast they can be grazeable in as little as 45 days they're high yielding and moderate quality. These include things like sorghum sudan grass, cow pee, pearl millet and crabgrass. Of these the most drought tolerant grasses will be pearl millet and crabgrass compared to the sorghums and sorghum sudan grasses but as I mentioned earlier they still need rain to establish so you could not plant these during the drought and expect to have that emergency forage this would be something we would plant on say five ten percent of your acreage every year and have the option of either harvesting it for bailage or hay if you don't need it or grazing if you do need it. So again make sure if you want to use emergency forages that you are thinking about establishing them prior to the drought start. So we have been conducting a summer annual variety trial in clanton for the last couple of years now this is by no means saying that the forage varieties here are better than others these were just the ones I was able to get my hands on and see so that we could plant them so there's there's this is completely you know irrespective of that but I wanted to show you just to give you an idea of some of the yields we're seeing of many of the majorly used summer annuals. So as you can imagine the sorghum sudan grasses sorghums and pearl millets have been out the best performing grasses that we've seen compared to say the brown top and Japanese millets which are not actually forage millage but can be used and have been used as forages in the past. Now I will say our crab grasses were kind of moderate in production I've seen crab grass production much higher than this and I've seen it much lower as well crab grass tends to be one of those that's kind of a little finicky so at this particular project it did not outperform the millets and sorghum sudan grasses as a seasonal yield but they're they do have quite a variety in yield performance. All of our legumes did pretty well you can see iron clay, cow pee, lab lab and sun hemp. I will say that in general these three are not very grazing tolerant. We harvested these with a forage harvester we did not graze them so that we could measure yield so I would imagine in a grazing scenario you're going to see quite a reduction and forage yield but you can see here is the potential of a possible forage yield. So another thing to think about when in a drought scenario is nitrate poisoning. So even if a plant is still growing or still I guess grazeable not initially growing it can accumulate nitrates. So nitrates in the rumen become nitrites go up into the bloodstream and actually reduce oxygen affinity for red blood cells and so the animals will fixiate from the inside out. So this will happen in drought stress forages where they continue to take up nitrogen but since they're not actively growing they store those as nitrates. It's favored when you've had high nitrogen fertilizer applications which is one reason we don't suggest fertilizing over fertilizing summer forages but especially during a drought period on top of that if you do fertilize during a drought the plant's not growing and so it won't be able to access the nitrogen. You can actually test your forages for nitrates you can send a sample to the AU sole forage testing lab and we can determine it. If you have forages that suspect to having high nitrates we suggest waiting seven to ten days after the drought ending grain and this is because during that seven to ten days the plant will start to grow again use up the accumulated nitrates turn them into protein and it should no longer be of concern. Again you can do the test though if you are concerned. Now there are certain plants that can be nitrate accumulators and I've listed them here sorghum, corn, sudan grass, sorghum, sudan grass, hybrids, soybeans, fescue, promyla, and bromide grass but in a drought scenario a lot of times our animals if they have limited forage resources will actually consume weeds as well. So it's also important to consider there are certain weeds that are also nitrate accumulators. Our pig weeds, smart weeds, glam quarter, Canadian thistle, rag weeds, nitrates, and steaming nettle. Typically things we don't worry about but in a drought scenario because the animals are hungry they could consume these. So something just to keep in mind. So we've kind of talked about what to deal with with a short-term drought maybe a month or two where we might be getting a little bit of rainfall but we're still in a moderate drought. But for those of you especially in North Alabama you remember in 2016 we had a six plus month drought. I'm originally from Northwest Georgia and so I know what my father went through dealing with this drought that seemingly would never end. So in this scenario we want to make sure we still want to follow what I've said before knowing that likely we're not going to have any forage to graze. But if we follow what we've mentioned before in a proper management we're hopefully going to keep the plants from dying during that drought. So in this scenario we want to once the forage is consumed we want to use a sacrifice pin to feed hay and supplement. We don't want to allow them full access to the pasture because this will continue to stress the plants and will end up killing the plants and causing you to have to completely do a pasture renovation. If you have limited hay resources you can limit feed your hay to reduce intake and increase utilization right so that you're able to kind of divvy out your hay. When the rain returns and the grass turns green our first instinct is to be able to turn our animals out. But once it starts to rain fertilize and wait. We want the forages to fully recover from the stress of the drought before grazing and harvesting and this is going to depend on the forage and how much rain a lot of factors. But even though when the grass turns green just like in the spring green up you know we see it green up and we want to put the cows out there we want to give it a couple of weeks to grow and de-stress before we add the stress of grazing animals. So hopefully we won't have killed the plants during a severe drought. So for more information on any of your forage related questions please feel free to email us at alabamaforages.albern.edu. You can also access our website at alabamaforages.com or contact us through Facebook and Twitter. We have a monthly e-newsletter if you would like to get our monthly e-newsletter to learn more about our forage research, our upcoming meetings and other information related to forages email us at alabamaforages.albern.edu