 task here and be mindful of everyone's time so we'd like to get going here welcome everyone to our junior beef webinar series our last one we've been doing this for five weeks and so want to welcome you and thank you for participating hope you have found each and every one of these sessions valuable over the last five weeks and look forward to seeing some new webinar series coming in next year so watch for those next year after the first of the year and we'll hopefully have some more coming out so I'm going to turn our program over to Tyler I one of our organizers of this event and he's going to introduce our topic tonight and our speaker and let him take over from here. Thank you Brian my name is Tyler Kralichek I'm the Ag and Natural Resources Agent in Burleigh County and I'm very excited to introduce Kevin Sedeveg he manages the central grassland station down there in Streeter and he has been one of the guys that at least I know I've looked to from a range perspective and I know there's a lot of people not just in North Dakota but around the country who've taken his advice because it is extremely valuable so without any further ado Kevin we're going to wrap up this series with with you talking about grazing readiness. Kevin before you jump in anyone that's got questions jump in put them in the Q&A section or the chat and we've got people online that will monitor those and ask those questions when it's appropriate tonight go ahead. Well thanks Tyler and Brian it is a pleasure to be on this evening my topic this evening is grazing readiness and for those of you who are in North Dakota or from somewhere else in the country these concepts of proper turnout for pasture based on grazing readiness are the same no matter where you're at in the state the country or the world plants grow the same no matter where you're at and they have the same kind of phenological growth that relates in terms of when they should be ready to be grazed or not ready to be grazed and so I want to kind of go through the concepts of of how grazing readiness works and what you look at when you're walking in a pasture to see when do you feel that pasture is ready to be grazed I do want to look a little bit at moisture as it may drive that impact especially in the spring or the fall and so we'll kind of go through these step by step and if you have any questions at all please I put in the chat and I don't mind if Tyler or Brian or somebody jumps in and asks that question while we're while we're having this conversation I have about a 30 minute slide presentation so there's plenty of time for some conversation if you sure have it so I do appreciate you being on today and I want to thank you for jumping on I don't remember me being a 17-year-old student in high school spending an evening on a webinar and I'm a little too old for that but but it is a I sure appreciate you jumping on today and taking your time to learn about not only the cattle industry but also the the fundamental base of the cattle industry which is grass and pasture so I'm going to share my screen here and and jump on this power point and let you follow along so if you should all see the the screen side with grazing readiness and as Tyler said my name is Kevin Sadovic I am the extension rangeland management specialist at North Coast State University and I'm the director for the grassland research station center which is located about south central North Dakota I've been doing this job for about 34 years and I've got a chance to see much of the US in terms of pastures and rangelands and like I say I think this talk should be pertinent no matter where you're at in the country so let's get into some grazing readiness discussion and when we talk about what dictates grazing readiness it comes down to a fundamental uh ideas of phenological growth stage and what that means is every grass reaches a level of development where it actually reaches a phase or a time period when you can actually go out and graze it without causing a negative impact on plant bigger or plant growth and it really is a function of temperature and day length so our plants really do follow that day length cycle and normally when we get to the end of the spring and summer solstice that's a time period when most of our cool seasons would have reached their peak phenology to a degree but a lot of that growth is based on temperature and we drive a lot of that you can actually look at how this occurs by looking at growing degree days and every plant has a growing degree day threshold where it reaches that what I call proper turnout for those of you who are involved in the farming industry whether you plant corn or beans or cotton or wheat or barley they also have the same kind of level of what is the growing degree day that dictates a three leaf stage or a four leaf stage or a boot stage or a grain development stage and our grasses are the same way and so they have this growing degree day threshold where they reach what I would call a grazing to a grazing readiness phase and so when you when you calculate growing degree days and I'm just going to do a little short snippet on this and I'll show you a publication that'll show you how to do this in a few slides but growing degree days are calculated by taking the maximum daily temperature for that day plus the minimum daily temperature for that day and creating an average temperature for the day so you divide by two to get an average temperature for that day then you subtract the base temperature for that grass to get the growing degree days for that grass period the example is typically going to make a corn the base growing degree day is 50 degrees for a cool season grass it's 32 degrees for a warm season perennial grass it's 40 degrees so for an example if you have a high of that given day of 62 degrees your low is 38 degrees you add that up to get 100 degrees divide by two you have 50 days you then subtract that 32 day base temperature for that cool season grass and you have 18 growing degree days for that day and you do that you add that up for every day after you reach the minimum threshold for so for the north dakota of the cool season grasses that's five consecutive days where we're above 32 degrees is that base and I'll show you that in the publication so we look at this if you look at the phenological growth stage for our introduced grasses and so in north dakota that would be like a smooth brobo grass or a crested wheat grass if you're in and Iowa would be timothy if you're out in the east coast it could be timothy or orchard grass or tall fescue those would be examples of introduced grasses that takes three leaves to reach a phenological growth stage where it's safe to graze that grass or it's ready to be grazed for native grasses so if you live in the western part of the us where we have native grasses are still common or dominant it's about three and a half leaf leaves for a native grass so like a western wheat grass or if you're a blue bunch of wheat grass if you're down south it could be big blue stem whatever that is it takes about three and a half leaves for to reach that stage and I'm going to show you how that works in an upcoming slide so when you look at at the amount of growing degree days it requires to reach this growth stage this is this is out of the publication if you just look at the top bar here where we have green needle grass where you want three and a half leaves as your proper turnout date it takes a thousand two hundred nine days on an average of growing degree days to reach that phenological growth stage and you can see how it varies by the native species some are much more quicker so it's only about 750 days for gray june grass but it's almost three thousand three hundred growing degree days for blue grama for exotic grass as you can see it's much quicker they grow much faster in the spring and so an intermediate wheat grass is about 655 growing degree days and so once you reach that threshold you should be at that phenological growth stage where it's ready to turn out to turn out to pasture so I want to show you why we have picked three or three and a half leaf stage as that point where you reach grazing readiness because they had to come from somewhere and obviously it come from science on looking at when these grasses are ready to be great to be grazed so I stole this or I borrowed this graph from pasture IO it's a website that looked at them creates some graphics for plant phenology and I'll walk you through this graph so the top part of the graph shows number one a grass in the one leaf stage and it has what's called a remnant leaf this remnant leaf is important when it comes to reaching right grazing readiness in the in the spring because that dictates when it when it grows in the fall so this is one leaf this is two leaves number three is three leaves and four is four leaves if you go back to the one leaf you have to think about if you learn this in high school how a grass grows and how a grass gets its food it can't just go to the local market and buy food to feed itself it has to produce its own food and if you remember it produces food from water and carbon dioxide and it takes energy to convert water and carbon dioxide into a carbohydrate or a simple sugar that the plant then uses as a food source when a plant is just coming up it does not have enough leaf area to capture energy remember it gets its energy from the sun so because it lacks the leaf area to capture energy and it captures the leaf area to take in carbon dioxide it has to rely on reserved carbohydrates in the root system for it to grow so if you look at the bottom part of this graph this is water soluble carbohydrate levels that is in the root tissue that that plant needs to grow in the spring and you can see how that how that water soluble carbohydrate reduces as that plant starts to produce leaves tell about three leaves to three and a half leaf stains where it's got enough leaf tissue to fully completely reserve or restore the carbohydrates back in that root system so if you're harvesting a grass at the two leaf stage it is probably the most susceptible to loss of vigor thus loss of forage production if you graze it at that time period so it's important for to understand why we want to wait to that three three and a half leaf stage so that grass can be as vigorous as it can possibly be to one withstand the grazing pressure but two to produce as much production as it can to support that cow herd or that sheep herd or whatever you're grazing that year you need to have that leaf area if you impact vigor so you do graze at that two leaf stage a loss of vigor means you have a direct correlation of a loss of forage production which means you won't be able to graze as long into the grazing season because you impacted that plant's growth so that's why we look at this three to three and a half leaf stage and we'll we'll talk about that but i want to show you what drives that three and a half or three leaf stage in terms of one moisture but also management and that will then dictate pasture turnout or grazing readiness hopefully you're following along and that makes sense so there's a publication we put out dr meham and myself put this out actually a couple years ago and it's called determining grazing readiness it goes through the the concept of the three and a half leaf stage it goes through how to determine graze growing degree days so you can track your growing degree days and see when you feel your pastures are ready to be turned out in the spring so those of you who live in the northern plains uh we have a lot of snow this year so temperature is going to be a a big driver in phenological growth stage this year because we're going to have a delay in temperature based on where we're at if you're most of the us is actually a bit cooler this year and much of it's actually a bit wetter but it gives you an idea how to follow along if you're interested in you can google determining grazing readiness for north dakota and this publication will come up so we talk about proper turnout in terms of grazing readiness but there's a secondary factor that will still drive grazing readiness and that's herbage production even though a grass may be at three and a half leaf stage if you don't have the moisture to create enough biomass you can tend you can still turn out too early because you'll be ahead of the grass's growth so production is still a driver and i still always look at that as a secondary driver on should i turn out or not in terms of production i'll show you what i mean so so point moisture tends to be this driver in terms of if you do have less spring moisture you will have less production even though you're phenologically ready to be grazed and and the rule of thumb is you want to turn out the cows ahead of grass growth so as that grass grows you want to be behind that grass growth versus being ahead of the grass growth so even though you may be at three and a half leaves if you don't have the production and you turn out at full stock the cows will be ahead of grass growth and that will then also impact vigor of that plant species which will impact production for that year so the two really do play hand in hand and i'm going to show you some examples how that works and then grazing history so grazing management by itself only has a direct impact on grazing readiness from what you do in terms of grazing the previous fall and i want to show you what i mean by that in terms of fall management how it impacts those remnant tillers so when you look at herbage production we're going to we already talked about the phenological growth stage let's look at phenol at herbage production this is a this is a smooth bromegrass grass that was that i measured in an ungrazed pasture from the previous fall so this picture was taken on may 10th as you can see i don't know if you can see my marker but this is that remnant leaf from the fall and then this is the first leaf right here this is the second leaf and the tall one that goes to about five and a half inches is the third leaf so we're at almost about three leaves at about five inches tall so the next picture is taken the same day in a different pasture that was grazed hard in the fall and if you look at this grass this is the same grass this is still smooth bromegrass but there is no remnant tiller or leaf from the previous fall so this tiller had to develop our start growth from a new tiller in the spring so the one thing you know is it's about two and a half leaves so it's a little bit behind but it's only about three to three and a quarter inches tall and remember plant height has a direct relationship to production so this pasture is going to produce less grass so you may want to so what we do is you're going to want to lay turnout so that grass can catch up to that five and a half leaf one so you don't impact plant bigger and so you can see how grazing history in the fall will have a direct impact on that grazing readiness in the spring in terms of when you can look at turnout so so we look at this amount of growth depending on grazing history and the moisture and I'm going to show you two graphs and I didn't I didn't another great graphic artist so I'm going to have to go through this with you so you understand what I'm talking about but I'm trying to show you on the blue line that is percent grass grass growth so on May 15th about 40% of that grass has grown if you look at June 14th it's about 85% and on June 30th it's about 100% of this grass has reached phenological growth stage of maximum production the green line is actually production so as you can see production mirrors the the growth of that plant in terms of percent growth and that the peak production in this in this scenario is 2,500 pounds per acre so the red bar term is looking at livestock grazing and turnout so a cow is going to consume about 35 to 45 pounds of dry matter a day so this tick takes about 35 pounds and you can see we turned out these cattle behind the grass growth curve so these grass the grass is growing ahead of how these cows are grazing they're going to consume about 35 to 45 pounds throughout the grazing season and this allows that grass to have the optimum bigger or growth so you get maximum optimum for production in this scenario so let's look at a different scenario where you're dry in the spring or that tiller is delayed because of what you did in the fall or you had a fall drought you have the same growth on that grass growth potential you turn out the cows ahead of the grass growth so you can see the red bar is now ahead of or on top of that green bar and that's just showing that green bar has less production as it's growing and the grass now the cows are grazing ahead of the grass growth and because they do that they end up consuming more than is available as that grass grows and what you'll find in the end is you produce about 25 to 55 percent less production because you lose vigor from those plants by grazing ahead of the grass basically you're hurting that grass the only way you can fix that is to bring in a grazing system move those cows off that pasture and allow for it to recover enough so that it gets the vigor back and that's where we talk about grazing systems as a ways to improve your management to enhance this growth we're not talking about grazing systems today but I want you to understand that you don't look at phenology but look at when you turn out those those cows based on where that grass is growing in terms of vigor I hope that makes sense I worked on this on saturday and just tried to figure out how to get it going so when we look at grazing history and moisture you know we can control grazing history so as a rancher you can dictate when you turn those cows out when you graze those those cows in the fall and how heavy you graze those cows in the fall heavy moderate light and how that may impact potential growth or vigor the next year what we cannot control of course is moisture and most of you if you're in the cattle industry you know moisture drives for its production moisture will make or break your year in terms of of how much production you can produce and how those cows are going to do on pasture so timing and moisture becomes critical and you probably seen this you know we could have a below normal precip year but if we get the range at the right time we can still have a bumper grass crop and still do very well in terms of forage production so I want to go through this timing scenarios for plant growth so you can understand how important it is in terms of of how we look at this grass and how we look at forage production so this is a graph that shows to your left bar is percent growth on the bottom X line is the dates of the year so we have April 26th up to mid November and the red bar or the red line is the growth of western wheat grass that's a cool season native grass and you can see western wheat grass is fairly low slower to grow in the spring but from June 1 to July 1 in the northern plains about 60 percent of its growth occurs at that time period and then it peaks out and then it senesces so all your grasses once they peak they're going to senes so they're going to lose leaf tissue as it matures out or gets older the dotted green bar is blue ground this is a native warm season grass found throughout the United States primarily in the western two-thirds of the country and you can see warm season grasses take more temperature so they're going to be slower to grow in the spring they do most of their growth from about mid-June to end of July they peak production in July late July into mid-August then they also senesce and then if you're lucky enough to live in the northern plains we have a grass called Kentucky bluegrass if you live in Kentucky you know it as well it's a fast growing invasive grass that grows heavily and from mid-May to basically July 1 and produces almost 100 percent of its growth by July 1 then it's senesces my point is here that that spring moisture in the month of May and June will dictate 80 percent of your plant growth for that year you will know as a rancher by mid-July in the northern plains if you're going to have a good year or a bad year and if you live in Oklahoma or Texas you're going to know by mid-May if you live in the east coast depending where you're at up and down you can dictate that based on how those plants grow so in northern plains we know that if we have good moisture in May and June it's going to be a good year if we have good rain in May through June or good moisture we're going to have a normal production spring and so normal turnout can be expected as long as that remnant tiller was left there from the fall so the second critical time period is actually in the fall and that fall rain produces these beautiful fall tillers those fall tillers no matter where you're at in the country is your first growth in the spring so you want to have fall tillers to speed up grazing readiness the following spring so if you do not produce a fall tiller either from a drought or you graze the way the fall tiller from heavy grazing you will see a delay in turnout the following spring because you don't have that fall tiller and I'm going to show you a really nice fall tiller this picture I took from South Dakota that says May 10th that picture was actually taken October 11th and that's a western wheatgrass tiller what we want to see in the fall is lots of tillers that will set you up to have a good spring in terms of proper turnout for range readiness so in the northern plains in 2022 we did not have a good fall we did not have moisture so we don't have very many tillers coming into this spring and I would I would expect in 2022 2023 in the fall in this spring sorry the spring of 2023 we're going to see a delay in grazing readiness one because we didn't have any fall tillers and two because we're probably going to still have snow into the land of May early June and so you're looking for those fall tillers to dictate that so what I want to show you here this is a graph that shows you that remnant tiller on the bottom so that's your remnant tiller that was created in the fall the previous fall and you can see your first and second and third leaf if you do not have that remnant tiller it has to produce a brand new tiller in the spring to produce those first and second and third tillers that takes about 10 to 14 days extra in the spring to get that tiller developed and so you will know in the fall you know as you as you become a ranch yourself or if you get in the cattle industry use that fall tillers to tell you to prep you for the next spring when you're going to look at proper turnout so i'm going to show you two examples here this is just a picture of western wheatgrass taken on may 9th of 2017 and this was an oliver county north dakota we had 101 percent of normal fall moisture so we had fall tillers and so if you look at the tillers here if you look at the peak here at about eight inches this plant's about eight inches tall it's at three and a half leaves on may night this plant is phenologically ready to be grazed on may 9th because one we had a fall tiller and two we have a vigorous plant stand that's actually barely productive and so you're really in good stage here on looking at proper turnout by this example let's go a year later on the exact same pasture in the fall of 20 2017 we were in a severe drought we produced about 40 percent of our precip we had no fall tillers so on on 2018 five days later on may 14th we were only three inches tall and only one and a half leaves have developed in this scenario so we're going to see a delay in pasture turnout one because of phenology and two because of moisture and so when you're walking a pasture in the spring and spring's a beautiful time to walk our pastures look for those three and a half leaves don't let the date be your driver look for the phenology to tell you where you're at if you got a good spring moisture you should be able to turn out at that three years for you to have leaf stage i hope that makes sense so i always get this question we got these fall tillers and i just showed you that we need those fall tillers for spring grazing you know can a producer graze these pastures in the fall and not have a negative impact on grazing readiness and production the following year and so our our great county agents in north dakota were kind enough to do some example do some data collection for us in 2020 2021 and 2022 looking at how grazing impacts these fall tillers and i'm going to show you four grass species so in north dakota smooth brown grass is one of our more common vigorous exotic grasses and all these bars are set the same way so the blue colored line is the overgrazed pasture the previous fall the red line is the take-off leave half pasture that so that's our typically proper turning proper grazing management the greenish yellow bar is our line is our moderate use in the fall and that purple bar is our rested cell and you can see what smooth brown grass where we graze at full use or overgraze it in the fall we did give up growth and some production till about mid-may and what was interesting on brome is it did almost make up at the end by in the may is one of them grasses that's resilient enough it could actually come back and do well what i would say on the brome if you have brome grass and you're going to this be true of also timothy or even fescue to a degree um if you did graze it hard in the fall i would delay turnout because your production is going to be slower in that first part of this of the month then you can turn out and it'll catch up in the month of june so our our great grass the blue grass which for those of you don't know what truckie bluegrass is it's our typical lawn grass but it invades most of northern plains and southern canada and it can make up 50 to 60 percent of our pastures this grass does not not like heavy fall use and you can see where we overgraze those pastures in the fall even take out leave half we gave up not only phenology plant growth but we give up about 50 percent of our biomass by grazing in the fall and so if you have a blue grass dominant pasture you're going to have to delay grazing by almost a full two to three weeks in theory to catch up phenologically now the downfall on bluegrass is it matures so fast you can't wait that long or it's going to get away from you but you just shows you how that fall impact uh impacts so if you looked at that moderate use and rested use they're virtually the same by may 21st in this example let's look at one native grass uh i don't think i got two native grasses this is green needlegrass the native grasses are more resilient and i know there's someone on from the east from the eastern part of the us uh the one thing about the eastern part of the us is most of our pastures are seeded pastures are not native range and so you're going to have more of the exotic grasses like i showed you earlier versus native pastures but if you're in the western us and central us where we have native grasses green needlegrass is very resilient whether you graze it take half leave half or monitor graze the rest of there very similar they'll reach the grazing radius about the same time unless you overgraze that pasture in the fall then you see we do give up production and we give up some vigor so we can graze them to some level but not overgraze them in the fall and that's also true of western wheatgrass western wheatgrass is our most dominant cool season grass in the northern plains in the western us and you can see it did not do well when we overgraze that pasture in the fall but you could graze it so my my rule of thumb is here on native grasses yes you can graze them in the fall but don't graze them very hard and you shouldn't otherwise you will not impact those grasses through that season and so as we look at to summarize the grazing readiness time period you know it's important to understand that mage uneranes is critical for productive pastures and good hay production and i know most ranchers have to put up hey that mage un period is just as important for hay production and you can also determine if you're gonna have a good hay crop or not a good hay crop when we look at fall moisture fall moisture will dictate next year's plant growth in terms of vigor and grazing readiness so do look at your fall period don't graze them very short in the fall if you're gonna graze them very if you do have to graze them short in the fall because of a drought no you're gonna have to defer those pastures the next spring till probably into mid mid mid-late June so it can recover from that event and then spring moisture or lack thereof will also impact production so that pasture turnout may still be delayed even though it may be phenologically ready due to the spring moisture so wait for that three and a half leaf stage and and if you grab the publication we'll show you examples what to look for what you're looking for three full leaves the three and a half leaf stage will look like you have four leaves so that fourth leaf will be about half as long as the third leaf that's your three and a half leaf stage the northern plains that's about mid-may to the end of may i would suspect in 2023 we're looking at closer to the end of may just because of the cooler climate that we've been in and the dry fall we had last year so grazing before readiness just if you want to look at in terms of cost to you if you go out too early and you can't get some deferment or some recovered rotation system no you're going to give up about 25 to 50 percent of your production potential by grazing too early my rule of thumb is and the northern plains for may one for every day you go out in the first part of may you give up three days in the fall in the middle of may it's two days at the end of may it's a one-to-one relationship so just think about how that may impact you into the following season and there that's my last slide I think I actually finished a little early so we should have some time for questions and I do want to open it back over I'll turn over to Tyler or Brian and see where we're at in terms of some chat or some questions Kevin thank you for all the good info obviously right now we're not quite ready for for grazing but you know looking at a year like last year you know once that that temperature starts to heat up you know what's kind of the critical temperature that you might run into when that grass is really going to start firing up for from a soil temperature perspective sure and it comes down to soil temperature Tyler we get up we are temperatures above 50 degrees you'll see it start to grow much more aggressively and for me it takes that 65 to 70 degrees before it really takes off and you can look at the growing you know I could what's funny is most ranchers don't follow growing degree days even though we have examples where they can do that it's amazing how many farmers do use growing degree days to track development of their crops and so it really does work hand in hand but I look for about 65 to 70 degree days for cool seasons where it really starts to get really starts to take off if you live in the southern part of the U.S. or even in the southern part of the eastern part of country it's closer to 70 to 75 degrees for our warm season crops and on the average our grasses will grow cool season grasses will grow optimum at about 75 to 80 degrees for cool season grasses it's about 85 to 90 well 90 degrees is kind of your optimum or maximum level and so once you get above 90 degrees then you start to see some losses or what happens is you'd evaporate more so the grass has to use more water to stay alive it's basically it's on air conditioning I know up here in North Dakota what are some different I guess grass species if you're trying to obviously talk about fall management you know if you're trying to start a new pasture what are some things that you would recommend in terms of a grassy blend are you talking for a perennial mix or annuals perennial so from the northern plains you know my favorite perennial mix is going to be western wheatgrass, green needlegrass, I really like Psydull's grama from my warm season and I'll put in some slender wheatgrass because it's a very aggressive seed they're still a native and I still like to put a little bit of a big blue in my stands if I'm in the western part of North Dakota I'll go with a little blue and maybe some prairie sandery depending on the soil type but you can get by with about a five or six-way mix that really gives you a nice data mix the caveat for natives is it takes 10 it takes about two to three years to get a stand established before you can graze it and so you have to be able to to plan that you that you have to wait that long to graze those pastures when you put a seed of mix in all right are there any questions from anybody looking at the chat I'm not finding anything at this point I see Jill makes a good comment on endon and for in the northern plate North Dakota we have an endon which is our North Dakota Ag weather network they do calculate growing degree days for you for a location and so it's a really cool tool you can use to to track growing degree days within your own area and what's what's important to understand in North Dakota is growing degree days can vary quite differently from Castleton North Dakota to Dickinson North Dakota and from Minot North Dakota to Jamestown North Dakota that that north south east west can be a difference of 10 to 20 growing degree days on any given day and so it will differ across the state so if you get a chance to use those resources I'm sure most states have some kind of resource that will track it for them and this is a great tool to use also in the chat if you guys are interested in any of the previous talks that we've had Brian did post the YouTube link to get onto those so you can always go back and watch those I'm going to launch a quick poll for you folks to fill out if you would please so while they're filling that out Tyler Jeff asked should there should we be trying to manage past years to reduce the amount of bluegrass and if so can we do that and Jeff that's a great question bluegrass is a dominant exotic grass that you'll find in North Dakota Minnesota South Dakota Alberta Saskatchewan even in the northern Nebraska Iowa it's become one of our most aggressive cool season exotic grasses the one thing about bluegrass is it's extremely resilient grass and so you can do some timing of grazing and if I was going to try and hurt bluegrass that fall period if you looked at those graphs you raise it pretty hard in the fall it impacts bigger than next spring so if you come back and graze it hard and in the spring you will reduce bluegrass the debate is is can you can you do that enough to actually have a long-term impact or negative impact without hurting your native grasses and I don't know the answer to that my gut feeling is you can't our native grasses are more resilient and so the management of bluegrass what I typically try to do is manage to use the bluegrass effectively but management so you also don't get it to increase you know our best tool to reduce bluegrass is really a combination of grazing and fire the northern plains is fairly fire is not common and so we try to do it with grazing alone and it's very difficult but the best pastures that are low in bluegrass are pastures that are grazed fairly hard in the spring and that means spring like May and June so if you do that that heavy grazing at that time period you will impact it but you can't do that year after year or you're going to give up a lot of production and you can't give up the production because you can't carry as many cows so there's a fine line of how to do that and how at what level you should do it in terms of numbers of years has a long answer to your question but hopefully it gets to the point Kevin this Kurt does hoof action early on in our grazing season when we're kind of waiting for those grasses to get get to that readiness does that help or deteriorate that pasture at all that's a great question Kurt and the answer is depending on the grass species so if you have a pasture with western wheat grass in it or or even even smooth roam grass in it that hoof action breaks those tillers and what they do is respond by producing more tillers so hoof action will increase the sod forming grasses at least initially they will but they'll do the opposite to bunch grasses so if you look at green needle grass crested wheat grasses falls the same level but it's a little bit tougher to get a negative impact they will actually have a negative impact on our bunch grasses like green needle and needle and thread and even a little blue stem and so if you do want to increase the bigger of western wheat grass you can use that hoof action to benefit it as long as you don't do it so many years in a row but all of a sudden you start to kill the western wheat grass does that make sense Kurt yes it does thank you Kevin you bet Kevin what's a good strategy I know there's all kinds of different topics about you know fine intensity low duration I mean what's what's your recommendation if you've got adequate pasture so when you look at the grazing systems and grazing systems in terms of how intense you should graze your strategies rotate every day every five days 10 days 20 days recovery the more you the more intense you graze the more uniform your grazing will be the more uniform your grazing is the greater potential you have to increase efficiency of regrowth so the caveat is is if you get uniform in graze in graze at a high intensity low frequency you increase efficiency of grass growth and you want recovery and you come back and graze that growth that plant growth the the caveat is is there's a threshold so the more intense you get as you start to do the intensity you get a big bang you get a big increase in efficiency but that levels off and so going from a from a 20-day rotation to a 10-day rotation to a five-day rotation it levels off and so there's a fine line I'm not a huge fan of really intense rotation because for what it takes labor because you got to move cows every day every two days it may take more fencing so you have more input costs I think you can do the same benefits by doing a rotation every seven to ten to 14 days the northern plains we typically recommend a 30-day recovery in the eastern part of the state and a 45-day recovery on the western part of the state and as we get into the summer we make that 45 and 60 so you see producers using the word regenerative ag a regenerative grazing they're using that concept of efficiency of growth by the more intense you graze but I what we've seen is and that there's some pretty good work on Nebraska that's looked at that if you get too intense you actually get way more hoof action or trampling effect and so you actually lose production that goes to the ground versus in the cow's mouth nothing that's bad you can use that rip that plant tissue to help with the soils but they found that that that what I call a mob grazing scenario is actually the least efficient in terms of actually intake by the cow how's that for a long answer good very uh explanatory thank you um another question is how can we determine stocking rates that's a you know that's a tough question because if you ask a rancher how is he going to determine stocking rate he's going to tell you well I know I've been doing it for 20 30 40 years I know what my stocking rate is um for a for a person coming into a new pasture or they're running a pasture um what I typically do is I look at the soil type the soil type will give you an average production for those ecological sites and then what I start as a rule of thumb is I look at if I produce 2000 pounds an acre on a on a pasture and you're going to consume about 500 pounds that goes through the cow a thousand pound is left for plant bigger and then you have 500 pounds that's just lost through natural senescent so it's about 25 percent harvest efficiency so that means 500 pounds goes to the cow cow consumes about 900 pounds a day it means it takes about an acre 1.8 acres for that cow for a month that's a quick and dirty way there's some great publications out there that kind of go through how to do that how to determine carrying capacity and stocking rate and so that's kind of how I do it is based on soil type ecological site and production when you get into grazing system that harvest efficiency of 25 percent goes up to 35 percent and 40 percent and so you actually get a higher stock rate because of that that's an answer that I can understand but most of the students probably don't understand what I'm saying and I'm sorry but that's what I would use is actually the soil type and the production potential and then budget 25 percent of it for the cow to consume and it's funny like you know Kurtz when I'm thinking about this you've been in a long time a lot of ranchers know what their stocking rate is on the average what what's what happened is especially in the northern plains we've gotten wet or at least we were wet up to 2016 we actually had a higher carrying capacity because of the wet cycle and then we tended to be under stocked because of that I think the the drought we've been in now for the last three out of the last five years has brought us back to reality a little bit and I think we're numbers are probably closer than we used to be and that was probably not where it used to be but at least it's a little closer are there any other questions out there from our uh participants I would like just one from a participant I feel guilty that I feel like I didn't didn't hit the target today at least based on the polls it looks like we got some response on learning something today you know I'm not seeing anything Tyler or Kevin oh we got one oh came over in the q&a Catherine could you define growing degree days again sure so growing degree days is a a calculation that determines um it's basically created from a formula to get to when you can determine how many days it takes for a plant to grow phenologically and so what you do for growing degree days is you take the maximum temperature for the day plus the minimum temperature for the day you add those up you divide by two and you get a number that's your growing degree days so if you want to figure out growing degree days for corn you would subtract 50 and that's what corn is for our grasses for cool system grass darn planes we subtract 32 degrees if you were in texas or oklahoma you would you would subtract 40 degrees for worms and grasses and so it's basically just an option to to determine when you're at a certain phenological growth stage that was developed and it was developed mainly for the agronomy sector of the industry in terms of agriculture but um the usda era station at a man dan took that data and and created the the growing degree days needed for the native grasses and there's a lot of grasses in the 1980s so it's actually about 45 years old now or 40 years old now when they developed that methodology so Kevin there is another question that popped up from from chance how can i tell if i have overgrazed my pasture or just full use that's a great question chance and and and here's how you look at if you overgraze the pasture so every grass has a growing point and so when you look at a grass the bottom leaf so you look for that bottom leaf and then the second leaf above it there's what's called an inner node and that node is its growing point if you graze above that growing point you did not overgraze the grass it is still actively growing so you're above the 50% use if you consume all of the leaves except for the bottom leaf and you may have got below the growing point then you graze then you have overgrazed that that grass so look for the bottom two leaves if both your bottom two leaves are intact you did not overgraze that that tiller if you graze below those bottom leaves then then you overgraze it so that's how you it's an easy way to look for it look for the bottom two leaves great question and that's true of any grass species doesn't matter what where you're at it's those bottom two leaves so kevin i'm going to follow uh chance up with that question i did not do a very good job managing my pastures i overgrazed based off of your latest description how long should i potentially expect to have that pasture recover what what what's the length of time for me it's usually about 10 to 14 days so what you have to do is you have to have a new tiller develop in the spring because you took it off in the fall your roots are still fine you know they have what they are unless you've done that for many years in a row where your roots have died back but if you only did it once your roots are still the same so the next spring it's about a 10 to 14 day delay so expect the 10 to 14 day delay in because that tiller is gone and if the temperature is cold like it's look might be it could be later on top of that but that's what to rule of thumb on the grasses is 10 to 14 days another one i just thought of for you kevin sometimes especially out here in western north dakota we have the uh a nasty thing that happens to us in the spring of the year uh called fire uh gets into our pastures and it's before we're even thinking about turning out uh what uh how do we manage that from that standpoint what do we need to do there to uh take advantage or manage the effects of a fire so if we get a wildfire like we saw last year we had some may bits of march we even had some February wildfires you basically did what you did in the fall you remove that tiller that bottom remnant leaf is gone so you're going to get a delay in growth that spring that the caveat is though because you got a black soil your temperatures now will be higher so you'll get a little compensation because you have more heat at the ground surface remember the heat the temperature drives growing degree days so you get a micro climate effect at the ground surface so you're going to delay in production but you get a little bit of bump back because of the heat of the timing of it what in the northern plains our grasses are so resilient we tend to the data has shown at a mild city montana as well as in north dakota that we don't have to wait a year to raise those pastures once they have a fire in fact in fact what we typically will do is wait for about I think the numbers we look at are about four to six weeks before you turn out uh on those fires on an average and we actually at the grassland station here when we burn we only wait about two weeks to do it because we're looking for a heavy disturbance on a large scale though we don't have other places to go it's more like four to six weeks depending on moisture scenarios another one just popped up in the chat following the wildfire aspect does the wildfire affect the root of the grass so that's a great question and it comes down to the uh the heat and the intensity of the fire and so if if the fire was hot enough and moved slow enough to where it actually got into the soil profile to get to the roots it can have a negative effect on that plant especially if it's a bunch grass if it's a bunch grass you may actually kill that grass if it's a sod former you will not kill it but you will delay it most wildfires are driven by wind and so we can we rarely get a heat a temp uh fire hot enough that actually gets into the soil profile and most times on the spring fires the soil is also moist so it cools it off so fast the the most negative would be a lightning fire in the middle of the summer and it's dry and if it's not wind driven you'll see the greatest negative effects on plant mortality into those scenarios plants will recover but they take time to recover them because if you get death loss what typically happens in the western part of the us is exotic grasses fill that niche so fast uh cheat grasses are more common example that comes after fires because you got a death of some grasses and these annual grasses come in and invade and take over those pastures well now we got questions coming in uh you got a q and a question from john when replanting a pasture is there a practice that is better than the others such as drilling the seed into the ground or broadcasting the seed and then harrowing it in or could the cattle hooves work the seed into the soil that's a good question and and the biggest rule of thumb when you think about in terms of plant development or plant growth is is the best is the greater your seed to soil contact you have the more success you'll have in terms of uniformity of germination and so i like it to be drilled in because when i drill it in i can put it in the soil i can then close that furrow and pack it so i can so i can get a really nice seed to soil contact if you if you broadcast it on and you harrow it in follow that with a packer so that you get really tight seed to soil contact that is the most important part no matter what method you use is you want to pack it as firm as you can to get seed to soil contact and then it has to rain so it also comes down to timing of when you seed it the best time is going to be in the spring when you got spring moisture the second best time and almost are almost really a horse apiece is a dormant seeding in the fall so if you seed in like october november when the ground's about to freeze you drill it in you can capture that spring moisture those are the best times because moisture is now not a limiting factor and you can get good seed to soil contact will answer your question i see faith has a question also she said if you get a spring frost how much damage does it cause the grass production and that's a great question in the northern plains where we are cool season grass dominant when those grasses come up they're fairly frost tolerant and so it has to get below 22 to 24 degrees before it actually nips the top of the leaf and so if it only gets to 30 degrees 28 degrees it's not going to affect cool season grasses if you're in the south where your warm season dominant like an indian grass or a big blue or a switch grass that will actually have a greater impact and what happens is the grass will actually freeze at the top as long as it doesn't go all the way down to the root it'll freeze part of the leaf the leaf will fall off and it has to produce a new leaf so you'll get a delay in production when you get them on the warm season so depends on the severity if it's just a frost you're fine it'll slow the growth because you've got less growing degree days but if it gets really cold then you'll see some death loss on the leaf tissue as long as you don't graze it while it's while that's happening it'll it'll recover in terms of production well i'm going to make call for last any last questions here we're going to wrap up here about 730 so any last questions if you want to get those into the chat or q&a section do that at this time again posted up earlier the where you can go to watch the previous webinar series or sessions over the last four weeks tonight's will be uploaded there as soon as that is ready as well so keep that link available if you want to go back and watch any of these webinar series so and scott just posted it again here so utilize that and so tyler anything you will have wonder if tyler had to step away for a second just for a second here so thanks again everybody for coming in we appreciate you guys not just tonight but the whole whole webinar series hopefully who are able to learn some good information along the way kevin thank you so much for got a little follow me here sorry but yeah no thank you so much kevin for coming in tonight and and talking about grazing readiness it was a lot of great information so thanks for everybody who got on and you know answer the polls and hopefully we'll get you some good information going forward you well thanks for the invite appreciate it well with no other questions I think we're going to wrap up tonight and thank you guys and for participating any questions reach out to us we're happy to help you whenever we can so thank you thank you kevin you're welcome see you have a good evening