S4E8: Q&A with the Forage Team! (Part 1)

Recorded: 11/17/25

In this episode, our forage team educators and specialists sit down to answer commonly asked questions about forage production. In part 1, they discuss establishing a new forage stand, fertility timing, and strengthening a weak stand.  

Hosts: Ryan Spelman, Justin Brackenrich, and Dwane Miller

Links:
Hay and Pasture Renovation Decisions
Soil Fertility Management for Forage Crops: Pre-establishment

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Transcript

Justin Brackenrich (00:18)
Alright everyone, welcome to another edition of the Agronomy Highlights podcast. Today I'll be your host Justin Brackenrich and I'm joined by kind of our rotating set of co-hosts, Dwayne Miller. Dwayne, how are you today?

Dwane Miller (00:29)
doing fine Justin. Thanks for asking.

Justin Brackenrich (00:31)
So today

we're doing kind of a different version of this. We've never done one live and in person and on site. So what we're trying today is common questions of the sub teams. At Penn State, what we have within the agronomy group are specific sub teams, right? So today we're going to discuss forages and all of the things that we have forage related. So what we've to done, Dwayne, is we put together a list of questions that we get commonly throughout the year and we brought in a panel of experts to help us answer them.

Dwane Miller (00:59)
got the whole sub team in front of us today and this is a real treat so we'll go around the table have everybody introduce themselves start over here on my right

Dr. Guojie Wang (01:07)
Hello, my name is Guojie Wang, the 4-Rig extension specialist in State College, University Park Region.

Stephen Cambell (01:14)
My name is Steven Campbell. I am the Agronomy Educator covering Butler, Beaver, Armstrong in Indiana counties in western Pennsylvania.

Andrew Frankenfield (01:23)
I'm Andrew Frankenfield, Agronomy Educator based in Southeast Pennsylvania in Montgomery County.

Ron Hoover (01:28)
And

Ron Hoover, I work at University Park, I teach a few classes, I get involved in all three phases of what we do at Atlanta Grant University, Extension Research and Teaching, and a little bit of part-time farming.

Zack Curtis (01:41)
I'm Zach Curtis. an agronomy educator in Wayne County working in portions of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Leanna Duppstadt (01:47)
I am an agronomy educator as well based out of South Central Pennsylvania and we do some farming on the side as well.

Host(s) (01:54)
Okay, so thanks everyone for the introductions. We have a really, I want to say robust group of people with a very diversified set of knowledge.

Dwayne, you want to get us started? What do you think we've got for our questions today? Oh my, we've got some great questions preloaded. And as always, we want to try to be informal. So if we go off on a tangent, don't worry about it. But we're going to start off with a pretty doozy for a beginner here. So if we get a call and somebody says to us, all right, I just purchased this farm, don't know much about it. Maybe it's great grandparents, grandparents, something like that. They asked me to come in, start to take it over.

Maybe it's full of weeds, maybe it hasn't been used in a while, maybe the neighbor's been cropping it. What are some first things that we should be thinking about if it's not really productive ground to get it back into production after a few years?

Ron Hoover (02:46)
I just had a field that I took on here a few years ago that was overgrown with a lot of different weeds. Actually had a little bit of crown vetch, a bunch of perennials and miscellaneous annuals to boot. first thing I always do if I take on something new is to get the soil probe out and get a soil test. I got to find out where my soil chemistry is. And then I proceeded to get on top of it with some herbicide. I figured that I wasn't going to try to put it into the hay crop that I would like to

see in it right away. I was going to rotate a heavy crop of sorghum sudan actually for a full year. We took a couple cuttings off. I've got a neighbor with some beef cattle. He came in and harvested, made some round-bale silage out of it and that helped get on top of the weeds. In the meantime, we found out that the fertility wasn't necessarily very good. Definitely needed some lime. We saw about getting some of that on. It wasn't the smoothest field. Everybody

wants to mow their fields and...

10 if not 15 miles an hour and it had a bunch of old groundhog holes that needed to be smoothed out. I did a little bit of tillage to get that smoothed out, incorporated the lime, got some P and K onto it. after about a year and a half of, and I should say some herbicide applications, it took about three applications over a year and a half to get it into shape. And actually I seeded it down here at the beginning of September this fall.

So it's pretty dry, we're looking pretty good right now.

Host(s) (04:14)
So

your ultimate goal was to get it established into a forage, right? So you mentioned about a perennial forage. Farming part-time, that's your goal, but...

begin with the end in mind, right? It's not gonna happen overnight and maybe not recommended to be able to say, all right, let's just go in there, let's round up and let's drill it and see what happens, right? You went in with an annual crop, multiple opportunities for some herbicide control, get some fertility in line first and then see that forage. So maybe Ron or someone else, like when you're looking at your tests, the first thing, and I agree 100%, we start with soil fertility, when you're kind of scanning,

that what are you keying into is there like a pH point that you're like I should probably remedy that before I do something else or is it phosphorus or potassium are these they're kind of benchmark numbers that can help us

Andrew Frankenfield (05:03)
I would say

what is your forage that you intend to plant? If you're looking at alfalfa, then we want to get closer to seven. You're doing tall fescue, orchard grass. I'm like low sixes, you're probably okay. You probably should bring it up, but it's not urgent. If you're in the fives, lime is the first phone call you're going to make to get that. So it sort of depends on what crop you're

Host(s) (05:22)
We

love to say it depends, right? But there's no one size fits all.

Andrew Frankenfield (05:26)
Right, so like are you, plan to till it? Well yeah, okay, well then get the lime one before tilling because then you've got that working into the soil and can activate it. Right, and in a long-term forest and you're not going to typically work that ground for many years after.

Ron Hoover (05:40)
And I think it also depends too on like what lime sources that you have available at your disposal and your equipment. For my situation, I was just starting to do this at home myself with a part-time farm.

I, you know, thinking about what's available to me, I don't have a lime spreader right off the hand. So I'm looking at maybe getting something from the conservation district or even looking at one of the local retailers that, you know, here in the county region to try to remedy that problem. And from the sounds of it, it looks like I only have pelletized lime as an option from working with one of the retailers. So I think that's another.

to also take into account as well.

Host(s) (06:25)
So if we want to put this kind of, you know, I understand it depends. We've got all these other scenarios. But if we start with kind of a clear progression, right, that someone could be listening to this and take it away from here, we start with a soil test, right? If pH is low sixes or sub six, we remedy that first. Ron or someone else.

next step then becomes mow, bale, till, know, whatever we need to do to get some of those old weeds under control. Is that our next move here? Great point.

Andrew Frankenfield (06:55)
Identify what's there, right? Inventory

of what are the species that are here? ⁓

Host(s) (07:00)
Get out your smartphone

app, start taking pictures and identifying plants.

Ron Hoover (07:04)
majority of the time when you have those fields that have been setting fallow, you're walking out and you're seeing a field that's full of marestail and goldenrod, like the whole thing completely covered. And then some of your woody species too have started to creep in. Multiflora, Multiflora, automala, those sorts of things. And I agree with the fertility being one of the first steps, but like that is a major step in control is getting out there and getting it mowed down, getting those woody species under control. Cause you're going to have to mow those down, give them a chance to grow back a little bit and then do an herbicide application.

And so, I mean, there's a step in there as well before you can even get anything established.

Host(s) (07:39)
Okay, so I'll have to start this like nine times to get us through all the steps, right? But we're looking at like a twofer here. We're going out where you brought up a great point. If this has been fallow or you just got it, this is likely the first time you've ever walked this field with any kind of detail. And so we're walking it for the first time, we're figuring out the smoothness that Ron mentioned, we're identifying species while we're out there, and we're taking our soil samples. So this isn't just, I'm going to wander around out here, I'm going to get one sample in the middle. You know, we want to get

a good representative aggregate sample so we can also kind of look at how this thing lays as a whole to help us make decisions.

Andrew Frankenfield (08:15)
make you back

up again. Please. about the soil type? Yeah. Look at a soil map and see what the soil types are there. Is it well drained? Is it poorly drained? That can drive your species that you might consider planting.

Ron Hoover (08:26)
Yeah, I mean, Andrew is going to be making a different decision based on what he's got down in Eastern Pennsylvania compared to what some of us out in Western Pennsylvania are going to be wanting to plant. take into consideration the fact of the soil type that you have. I got a question for everyone who farms in the group. Do you guys have rocks? I have rocks. was afraid Wayne County was the only place that had rocks.

Andrew Frankenfield (08:46)
Not like you.

Host(s) (08:53)
Come to Schuylkill, we'll show you some rocks too. ⁓

Ron Hoover (08:56)
Actually,

my little field that I just spoke of there a few minutes ago, it only took four helpers in about two hours to clean the stones off of my six acres. Well, that's the ones that you can pick up. mean, I don't want to get the ones I can't pick up. Oh, wow. We got a secret. OK, family secret. I'll entrust it to the ten of us in the room here.

An old trick from my uncle. My uncle was a mason. If you have larger rocks that you don't feel like digging up, or you can't dig up, you can actually get liquid dynamite and you take it.

Host(s) (09:31)
This

is university podcast. We can't be recommending people use liquid dynamite.

Leanna Duppstadt (09:35)
No!

Ron Hoover (09:37)
How are you going to a field that's full of...

Andrew Frankenfield (09:41)
wanna hear the rest of this.

Ron Hoover (09:43)
We used to use diamond all the time in the driveway. Well yeah, actually... Well yeah, right, it's no longer valid. Anyways, you take a hammer drill, just like a, you know, I don't know.

Host(s) (09:47)
In the 60s or 50s

Ron Hoover (09:56)
Milwaukee hammer drill or something you put a couple holes in it you you mix up this grout you pour it in the hole and you come back in the next day and it fractures off those layers of the rock and you cover it up and you never knew it was there and then now all of a sudden that $42,000 disk mower that Ron just bought he doesn't have to worry about destroying the cutting bar with a big old rock

Host(s) (10:18)
And joking, I think that's a legitimate point, right? Surface stone is a problem. And back to Andrew's point of knowing your soil type, if we are thinking tillage or something to clean that up, it's always best to know, do you expect to find bedrock close or surface stone or is it going to be more channery so you can get this kind of work through? I think that is a good point. So now we've walked through identifying soils, fertility, weeds, and just a general awareness of what's out in the field.

So then from that point, we've discussed mowing, baling, tillage, whatever we need to do to start controlling weeds and perhaps maybe removing some of this residue if it sat there and of grown. You get some of these CRP fields or something that's been out of rotation for 20 years. You got to start somewhere. So now that we've done some of this stuff, where do we go from here?

Ron Hoover (11:08)
hopefully you've already talked to your seedsman. mean, you've identified, probably have identified, you know, what's a fit, both from an agronomic standpoint, as well as, you know, what's your purpose for growing the forage that you're looking to seed is. Yeah, are you gonna do with it? what are you gonna do it? I'm make hay off of it, it turning into a pasture? And use.

Host(s) (11:10)
There you go. Great point.

And so I know Dr. G's done a lot of stuff with identifying your forage that fits your livestock species. So maybe you can talk to us a little bit about now that we're trying to make this decision, how does what we're going to farm play into selecting what we're going to see?

Dr. Guojie Wang (11:43)
Before we even do all the soil fertility, soil test and weed control, think the very beginning step is to decide what is the purpose of this farm, the new farm. You want to graze mainly or ⁓ produce hay or you have the hybrid ⁓ between the grazing and the preservation. Also, it on your animal species. It's on farm beef, dairy, sheep, ⁓

other species, those kind of objectives will dictate the forage species you want to select. Either it is a grazing, feurable or hay species or some other small ruminant species. So in general, for the Penn State, Pennsylvania, the whole state, you know, we have the popular species like Oetra grass, tall fescue as perennial cool season grasses. That's our backbone. It is very adaptive.

very productive, very nutritious, then you can consider some other legumes in this kind of mix, either for the hay or for the grazing pastures. But species selection is a lot of dependent factors. It's not like I can give you a species recommendation right away, rather than I will ask a lot of questions to make that kind of recommendation in the end.

Ron Hoover (13:03)
We're continuing with our it depends trend.

Host(s) (13:05)
Yeah.

Dr. Guojie Wang (13:06)
Okay.

Host(s) (13:07)
I think something you also need to think about, especially if you're coming out of a field that was in a farm that may have been in CRP, was that farm, were there fields that were aggregated together to put into CRP at one time and then all seeded at the same time? Do they need to be put back into contour strips of any kind? So working with somebody like your NRCS office, was there a conservation plan at the time?

need a conservation plan as you come into this new situation because I know in my area when CRP and CREP came out there were whole farms that once were hillsides that were contour strip that were now put in full blocks. If you're coming out of that you may need to be putting strips back in.

Ron Hoover (13:53)
Some people were really good at maintaining those CRPs plots of land and others maybe not so much because you're supposed to maintain such and such percentage of it, control invasives, but you know that that doesn't always occur for those.

Host(s) (14:06)
So it kind of seems like with a lot of these podcasts or a lot of the work within Extension, we can get you part of the way, but a lot of the onus is on you as a producer, right? I think G made an excellent point of before you start anything, you should know why you're doing it, right? Just because you inherited a piece of property doesn't mean you automatically need to jump in here with both feet and get started. So be thoughtful, work out your design, work out your plan, work through some soil testing, work through some observation, and shamelessly, we'll plug Extension, right?

local extension office, regardless of what state you're in, and reach out to them for other resources and advice that they may have to get you pointed in that direction. But I think prior planning, understanding the property, and starting with a soil test is kind of going to expedite that process to help you work with extension to come up with a I got a bunch of hands up. So you guys figure it out.

Andrew Frankenfield (14:55)
thing I just thought of is oftentimes these folks don't even have the equipment to do the work. So maybe you work with a local farmer to custom farm it or do this work for you. Get it established in the hay crop that you want so you can just work with hay equipment and don't have have tillage and sprayers. But just, you you don't always have to do all this work with the equipment that you need to purchase. There are people out there that you can work with other neighboring farms to do that.

Ron Hoover (15:22)
I'm glad Andrew said that. made me think of sometimes the limiting factor in getting a stand established isn't soil type or soil fertility, it's cash flow. You know, it's how much money do you have available? And that's where it's good to sit down with a budget or a production estimate just to try to get an idea of how much money you'll need when, because especially if you're starting out, it's hard to come up with five or 10 or $20,000 to sink in something all

once and it's good to just reach out to somebody to help you come up with a cash flow budget or a production budget to figure out what your financial needs are. That was going to be my point too, Zach, was just coming up with a budget, know, even going back to Dr. G's points of figuring out what you want that system to be, putting together some sort of budget to be a little bit more comprehensive plan before going in, you know. What's the saying? It's if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail.

So by all means, put together yourself a budget and kind of think through some of that before you go all in and dive all into the bottom.

Host(s) (16:29)
hole. Yeah, I like to think if you know you get the phone call at the office and it is somebody that hasn't done any of this before and you know it's kind of like going to the buffet line and don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach. know start small manageable pieces before you get yourself buried.

Ron Hoover (16:48)
My favorite question because I actually had somebody come in not that long ago said they got I think it was like 20, 10 or 20 acres or something like that and they're like I've got this property I'm not really sure what I want to do with it yet maybe some hay maybe get some sheep everybody wants to start with sheep because they're small and I was like that sounds great we can get one of the livestock educators involved and have a conversation and I said so do you have equipment or anything? Nothing. So like that was that was the first stuff we needed to work through is like you need to find some neighbors and we can go

from there but here's the test kit as you walk out the door because we can't start there.

Host(s) (17:22)
That's a good,

again, great first step. And we hammer that time and time again. If you get a question, you're not sure where to start, soul test is usually a step number one. I think that was a fantastic conversation around that first question that we have. Now, we're sitting here and we're two thirds of the way through November. All right, and the phone rings again, we get another question, all right.

I've got forage at home, whether that's, let's start cool season perennials. I've got orchard grass at home. Can we still fertilize this time of year? What should we tell them? Are we too late?

Ron Hoover (18:01)
.

Dr. Guojie Wang (18:02)
Yeah.

Leanna Duppstadt (18:02)
Dance!

Andrew Frankenfield (18:05)
Where are you located? Are you in northern PA and it's snowing or southeast PA where it's actually not that bad? Potash, you can put that on in the fall. That's a great one. NP and K combined, probably maybe not the best investment, especially with the current fertilizer prices. But if your soil test says you need potash, mid-November is not a bad time for that if the soil conditions are appropriate.

Host(s) (18:30)
So what about something like phosphorus, right? I mean, typically it's most cost effective to use something like MAP or DAP for your phosphorus. So, Ron, if you're sitting here today, mid-November, and you're looking at a low soil test P and you want to split these applications up, what happens if we put a little bit of those that carry nitrogen with them? Your neighbor's soil test.

Ron Hoover (18:49)
I never had low soil test piece.

But no, I I it's my understanding of So fertility especially phosphorus fertility or source of phosphorus. I don't know that anybody is Distinguished that one is better than another as far as you know fall or even winter application If it was really that low, yeah, you probably would need to get some out there You know kind of getting yourself set up for the for the spring, know the spring growth that will get started again late March to late April depending on where you are in

Pennsylvania. Most of my fields, again speaking from personal experience, I try to keep my phosphorus up, at least in the middle level, know, the moderate level.

and then for myself I just pretty much spoon feed all through the year. I put the amount of nitrogen that I need in April anticipating a ton and a half or two tons of yield along with the phosphorus and potash and a little bit of sulfur. Just a little bit after it's spring green up and then after each cutting.

Dr. Guojie Wang (19:53)
So for late fall, early winter fertilization questions, first, for some immobile nutrients like phosphorus, potassium, you can apply less leaching, less loss. But try to avoid nitrogen, any nitrogen fertilizers, because it will break those dormant perennial forages and regrow a little bit, cause a lot of organic reserves. It will get the winter kill, and since then, next spring. So first,

In the late fall, early spring, early winter, you can try to do something related to PK, but no end. Ask yourself why you put the phone to this point in November to consider the fertilization questions. You should do much earlier in the fall or next spring before the green up or right on the green up.

Host(s) (20:43)
So I'm thinking about this, like kind of compounding this question with our previous question, right? So say, say this person that called in, they called in September, October, right? And now we're looking at middle November and they got their soil test back and it's recommending that they put 150 pounds of phosphorus down as part of their soil test, right? And so from the economics we talked about that, it's probably not going to be feasible for them to come in there and put that much down at one time. So then could you start to look at this? Maybe we put a little bit out now and then

put a little bit in spring, does that play in and help with that system?

Dr. Guojie Wang (21:17)
Yes, for phosphorus you can do it, like the maintenance. Whenever the phosphorus fertilizer is cheaper, you can buy and apply to the field and maintain that optimum phosphorus level. You can split this fall and next spring to level these kind of economic bumps if the price you don't know. But that is only for those specific elements like phosphorus, less potassium, but no nitrogen.

Ron Hoover (21:44)
You guys are talking about it sounds like commercial fertilizer. My P and K is attached to nitrogen and manure. And I mean, I like to think sometimes about manure going out in the fall simply because it's typically a chunkier material like a solid, like a pen pack. And I figure, well, you know, if we spread it good now, we should have a good six months for it to continue breaking apart. So that way we're not raking it up, but we make, we make a horse hay that goes out to,

some people who don't like to see anything but hay in their hay. sometimes I figure the longer we can give it to actually break down. I would understand, I might lose some nitrogen from that. Hopefully more if it's in an organic form, that it's not susceptible to loss. But I think this gets to be a good time of the year to take a look at a solid manure application.

Andrew Frankenfield (22:39)
poultry manure, chicken manure. ⁓

Host(s) (22:41)
So I want to push

this maybe a little towards Leanna because she does a lot with our nutrient management sub team and manure and is, so if we are thinking about this and there's a trade off between losing nitrogen, why would we even consider putting manure on in the fall besides what Zach has said, like doesn't make sense if I just put it out in spring and be done with it.

Ron Hoover (23:00)
Well, for a lot of the reasons that Zach kind of alluded to was that I don't want to have manure in my forest, like in my pastures or in my hay fields, things like that. Granted, we have them in our pastures, but it does make it more difficult. Like sometimes you'll have some palatability issues or you'll have animals that don't want to eat it. Now that it's on, it needs a certain period of time to break down. So you'll have refusal issues. You may have some health concerns going on with that with livestock. You may end up with manure in the hay bales.

and that can cause all sorts of issues. So those things can tend to be a problem. Just a matter of making sure you're not over-applying to a point that if we do get a heavy rain or something silly like that, that you aren't having that kind of wash away. We talk about loss of nitrogen, but like bed pack manure, a lot of that has broken down and already pretty much been released at that point. But constant or continuous yearly annual manure applications

will give you that residual nitrogen as that organic form of nitrogen constantly continues to break down. So I mean you get that kind of bonus too if you do it on a regular basis. I'm glad you agree with me because it'd be kind of awkward to figure out right now that this philosophy doesn't work.

Justin Brak (24:12)
you

Host(s) (24:12)
What about

lime? should... If I didn't get to do it previously and I've got an established forage stand, I get my soil test done. boy, I'm a bad farmer. It's coming back at 5.7. Should I be putting lime on now? Yes. see all the heads are nodding together,

Andrew Frankenfield (24:31)
We almost say there's not a bad time to put lime one, right? You could even put lime one in between cuttings. Sometimes summer is more available because the trucks need a place to go. But in the fall now, there's more competition for acres for those guys to get to. So they're often looking for places to go mid-season. But anytime you can get that lime truck there is a good time.

Ron Hoover (24:50)
Sometimes it's easier too because you got that freshly mowed hay field. You got a place to actually dump it and start working from those piles to get it spread. There you go. ⁓

Andrew Frankenfield (24:57)
Our line gets custom applied. It just

shows the regional differences.

Ron Hoover (25:03)
But

the nice thing is, I mean, it's probably a perennial forage. There's plenty of stuff to keep it from washing away, whether it's manure or lime or anything. I mean, at least it doesn't, you're not losing it with soil or erosion.

Host(s) (25:16)
Yep.

So the last thing I think I'll add to this is we're speaking from the perspective of Pennsylvania, right? And our nutrient management laws and our nutrient management constraints. So again, Leanna would probably be able to talk to much more of that than I would. But if you're in a different state and you are planning to do fall applications of manure or winter or anything like that, it is really important that you're following your plan or you're at least recognizing the laws and the concerns of your state. We don't want to get anybody in trouble

and out of compliance. Okay, so we've wrapped up a couple questions. I think this is working pretty well. So let's go to my next one. This is one of my favorite topics because I think this one could maybe be one in itself is a 45-minute conversation because it's just so many things to peel back. As you get this question that kind of says,

I've been farming this field for a long time and I'm noticing my stands getting thinner. It didn't happen overnight, it's just been kind of this slow drawdown and now I'm getting half the hay that I used to or my livestock have half the tonnage to graze. How do I thicken this up? Should I go in? Should I oversee? Should I put a drill? What's the best way for me to thicken this up? And I think everyone in here has probably had this call at least a dozen times and I think there's probably 50 different

ways you can answer it. And I'm interested in what anyone's got that kind of goes in this direction.

Ron Hoover (26:44)
feel like everybody in the room is sitting here saying, when's the last time you did a soil test?

Why is it thin? What happened that made it thin out? Yeah, don't start. Don't go ahead and just plant something because you want to plant something. You need to figure out the why first because otherwise you're just gonna have the exact same problem. And I think this all comes back to the roundabout question of it depends, you know, really it was what it comes down to. How old is this hay field? What was your last soil test? You know, what is in it? What's your desired goals? I mean, there's a couple different questions there that I think I'm gonna start

with. How have you been managing it? I'm assuming we're talking about pastures and hay fields here. A lot of the concepts are the same. You're talking about mechanical harvesting versus animals doing it for you.

Andrew Frankenfield (27:28)
So in a pasture, if we're out doing a pasture walk, I'll take the producer with me and well, there's a frisbee method.

usually take them to like a manure paddy and you see the greener forage and you see all the types of forages that are in that pasture and I'm like look at the potential of your field with proper fertilizer and proper pasture management. You're overgrazed, your fertility is not there and because they don't eat there because there's manure there. said well bingo you need to manage, you are the one that has to manage these animals and there's not a miracle seed out there that will fix everything for you. You have to do some work yourself.

Ron Hoover (28:05)
You're saying

they probably can't be out on that pasture 365 days a year. they can't be continuously grazing it. You should set up some sort of system so that rotational grazing system so you can give that. You need rest. Rest is key. We don't go out and mow our hay fields every single day.

Andrew Frankenfield (28:09)
Exactly.

their lawn.

said you don't know your lawn every day, neither should your animals.

Ron Hoover (28:27)
That's an awful lot of work. ⁓

Host(s) (28:28)
you

Andrew Frankenfield (28:28)
And then

they say, it's September, I shouldn't have to feed hay. I said, we're in a dry spell. You have to work with what is happening in the field.

Ron Hoover (28:36)
I had producers feeding hay in August. It was just that drive of year this year. Well, especially the same thing with last year. It happens. Every year is different. You've got to be adaptive and work with it because, I mean, same thing with hay fields. We weren't harvesting hay fields as much as we did in previous years.

Andrew Frankenfield (28:52)
But I do

cringe a little bit when the guys like, you know, I'm going to take whatever, a second or third cutting and I'm going to go in with a no-till drill right after that. I'm going to put 15 pounds an acre of this mixture in. You know, I'm like, well, how much did you pay for that? Well, $5 a pound, $75, let's say. I'm going, that's a pretty big risk, right? I mean, you could put $75 into a lot of other products that I could give you a more likely return on that investment. But they're like, no, I'm going to plan it. We'll see what happens. And I ask them how did it come? Well, it looks a little better, you know, the next year.

It's difficult to establish a small seedling in an established stand already. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it's sort of like frost seeding. You don't always get the desired

Host(s) (29:32)
There's as much art to science as there is to some of this stuff.

Ron Hoover (29:35)
And your application rate is always supposed to be higher with that anyway, so it's just balance.

Dr. Guojie Wang (29:41)
To this

question, can think two directions. First, stop doing something wrong.

Host(s) (29:49)
You

Dr. Guojie Wang (29:50)
If you cut it too often, the stubble is too short, or the fertility is not right, especially soil pH, so stop doing something wrong. Just maybe salvage or improve the singing instead. The second direction is do something good. So maybe add some nitrogen fertilizers in the green up season in the spring can make those grasses or the legumes

tailored or branched. So it will, by the fertility itself, will make this stand, dense and even. In the last resource, you we have to consider some top point. We have to accept any productive stand will stand out gradually. That is just the reality for most of the perennial forages. So we have to consider some technology like Andrew mentioned the frost seeding in February, March era.

or intercropping, add more new seeds to the existing pastures or hayfield, or totally terminate that kind of land to start over again to take the benefits from the crop rotation or the genetics developed by those kind of seed companies.

Host(s) (31:02)
I was just going to say, I think some of the best stands that I get in would be maybe a dairy farm that has a very strict rotation. And then you get to some of these other producers that might be in a primarily a forage situation and how long has that hayfield been in production? Oh, I don't ever remember it ever being anything other than X, Y, or Z, orchard grass or fescue or something like that. And there isn't nothing wrong with walking into a field and saying, yep,

I think it's time. Let's rotate. Let's bring it back around again.

Ron Hoover (31:39)
know,

a couple years ago I got set up with a couple who had just purchased a horse farm in Monroe County. They were at the top of the Pocono Mountain, pretty thin soil. And we talked about different things about what they could do to increase their hay yield for their horses. And we took some soil samples and I think it called for about two and a half tons of lime. So they followed the recommendations and it was a pretty thin field. You know, not much there. was thin, poor yields.

I visited with them again this year and I'm sure many of you in the room have a similar story to this but I came back and just by adding the soil test recommendation for lime they increased their hay production by almost double so they went from almost 700 bales to almost 1400 bales. All they did was spread lime and I came back and I looked at their forage and they had tremendous amounts of orchard grass and timothy and all these forages.

is once they created this environment that was hospitable to all these forages, they just forged, they took off. And it's incredible how something so simple, sometimes you can see these species just express themselves so well just by taking care of these simple things. like we said, follow the basic steps and it adds up so quickly.

Andrew Frankenfield (32:51)
Yeah.

Host(s) (32:55)
When I was at WVU, I worked with the nutrient management specialist and he always reminded me that soils aren't a bank account. If you put in 50 pounds, you don't take 50 pounds out. And if it was that simple, we wouldn't see this kind of like slow deterioration of things. If you farm till October this year and you woke up next year and the pH was 5.0 or 5.7 or whatever, your potassium was down to 70, your yield would have dropped substantially and you would remedy that situation. But what happens is just this slow

incremental over time that it sometimes takes 10 years or something before someone looks at their notes of what it used to be and what it is now. And now you have this huge hole to dig out of, right? Because you've been, you know, my soapbox is, well, we put 200 pounds, triple 19 out in the spring, right? You're not applying a balanced fertilizer or you're not doing anything. And now we look at this soil test and it seems so overwhelming of how to get the lime and the phosphorus and the potassium to get it back to what it was 10 years ago.

Yeah, just to your point about understanding what that crop is taking off. My dad, you know, before my extension days and I didn't know any better, Ask them, so, you know, what are you putting on the Timothy Fields? Well, we're putting urea on. it any, any P, any, any, any K especially? No, you know, any, any salt? No.

So we started applying those some of those other nutrients and Zach you just mentioned, know Give it give it what it needs and it'll start to flourish

Ron Hoover (34:25)
Maybe Dr. G can help me because I'm still relatively new and I haven't memorized the entire agronomy guide yet. But what do our forages need per ton of removal for nutrients?

Dr. Guojie Wang (34:36)
Wow, that is, I don't know right now. But I think for phosphorus, we take off about 15 to 45 pounds per acre, and the potassium is about 80 to 120 pounds per acre. That's what I can calculate right now. But erase it if it's wrong.

Host(s) (35:02)
But that's in a year's time. Okay. Yeah, and I might be wrong too, but I was always taught like 50-15-50, right? I mean, as a general number, a standard rate per ton, per ton of harvest, A standard 50 or one to one for N P or N and K and then like a third of that was the potassium load. And that's what makes manure so hard to deal with in forage systems sometimes, as well as these everyone's favorite triple 19.

Ron Hoover (35:27)
So I guess what you're saying to really make this better is that I should probably get myself a good notebook and a pencil and keep track of what my yields are. Is that what you're? Morning cells. Do you reckon?

Andrew Frankenfield (35:40)
or an Excel spreadsheet, however you want to.

That's

a valuable tool, right? I started doing that a few years ago and I can look back at how many tons per acre or bales per acre did that field produce. You got the weather factor, but you know, then you can look at how much fertilizer did I apply. I keep track of that too. As we were talking, I was thinking, you know, we talked about what is the cost to farm an acre of hay and well, you know, maybe I won't push it too hard. You know, I won't fertilize so much so I'll cover twice as many acres as I would need to.

if I fertilized and followed the soil test recommendations, the cost of producing poor quality hay can be even more expensive than good quality hay that yields well. So knowing your numbers is important when it comes to that. So I'm happy this person wants to increase their forage yield, but you certainly have to invest and put back what you're taking.

Host(s) (36:32)
So we talked about NP and K and I just want to visit the other the other nutrient in the room If you will sulfur real quick, well, we took well, we'll about NP and K Hey years ago. We really didn't think about it too much. We had we had sulfur deposition from acid rain, but This was another one where our orchard grass at home just wasn't wasn't doing real well and We were applying

straight urea, know, no sulfur in it. We started applying some ammonium sulfate urea blend and boy did we see a response from that. any ballpark guesses, what should a person be applying here for sulfur?

Ron Hoover (37:13)
Yeah, we're not, the research isn't calling for a whole lot of sulfur to be sufficient. And so now we're not talking about something that's really gonna break the bank. I know in my personal situation, I usually put about eight to 10 pounds of sulfur out at green up. And then for each of those subsequent applications of fertilizer, after each cutting, about five to seven, maybe eight pounds again, it almost always shows up as ammonium sulfate. So I'm getting some nitrogen with it. Again, these are pretty much straight grass fields.

So need the nitrogen, I'm getting the nitrogen along with the sulfate.

Host(s) (37:45)
So it might be about 15, 20 pounds somewhere over the course of a year.

Ron Hoover (37:50)
I think that's what

I'm hearing or what I'm is being asked for. And when you get your blends made, mean it's not like getting that extra 2 to 3 percent of sulfur is that increase in the cost by $100 a ton, right? No, it's just that I look at it as fairly cheap insurance and maybe I don't need two or three pounds, but to put out the extra five or six just to make sure I'm sufficient in sulfur, the folks that really study fertility a lot more than I do talk about how it's

fairly soluble and so if we end up with a real wet spring like we did this past year that the chances of losing some of that into the the soil profile you know just like we lost some of the nitrogen with all that wetness in May and early June to have a few extra pounds out there was probably you know good planning.

Dr. Guojie Wang (38:37)
So the optimum sulfur soil test level is about 20 ppm. If it's lower than 10 ppm, you absolutely will see yield improvement if you add sulfur. So a soil test, let's do a very quick calculation. Soil test is 8 ppm. So the difference is 12 ppm. Use that 12 multiplied by 2. That is 24 pounds of the sulfur you needed to apply to reach to that 20 ppm level.

But if your sulfur level is around 15-18%, you might not see a significant yield increase for sulfur.

Another thing is if your soil you want to maintain the sulfur level, the rule of thumb is nitrogen-sulfur ratio is 10 to 1. So if you add 20 pounds of sulfur, you can add 200 pounds of nitrogen. By that kind of calculation, it's applied with that kind of fertilizer blend.

Host(s) (39:37)
So one of the things that I, again, like maybe I'm not right in this, but people call and we're having these discussions and the conversation comes up about like sulfur, boron, zinc, their relationship to forages. my first question is, what is your pH? What is your soil phosphorus? What is your soil potassium? Right? If you've got

I mean, maybe this is wrong, but if we have very low macronutrients, right, our NP and K aren't being managed, a pound and a half or two pounds of boron isn't now all of a sudden going to jump us, or 20 pounds of sulfur isn't going to go from one ton to three tons of forage. How do we put that in, hopefully that's right, but how do we put that in perspective of kind of stepping through this process of meeting the plant's needs first and then kind of go into this next level of, you know, micronutrients to

some extent.

Ron Hoover (40:25)
One thing I looked at this year is I took a pasture plot and you because you're hinting at this idea of the most limiting factor.

Host(s) (40:34)
Sure, right, and I'm also hinting at the idea that people kind of latch on to the most relevant or current or sexiest research that they read on the internet and they're like, you know, let's get 200 pounds of AMS out here, let's go fix my problem.

Ron Hoover (40:47)
I mean I've adopted the idea too that if you can't afford the 200 pounds of N and 100 pounds of P and 400 pounds of potash on a low testing soil, there's nothing wrong with breaking it in half or thirds. I mean I'm not saying, you don't want to put out all your nitrogen requirements and leave the other two, but I don't think there's anything wrong with taking all those numbers and breaking them in a half or a third just to make it a little bit more digestible.

adjustable on your bank account.

Host(s) (41:17)
But you would do that before then you start implementing the 10 to 1 ratio of sulfur to N, N to sulfur.

Dr. Guojie Wang (41:23)
Or we can go back to the basic law of the minimum. We will identify the most limiting nutrients. so your pH is too low, maybe ag lime is all you need right now, or you can't afford. The next limiting factor for most of the perennial grass pastures or hayland is nitrogen. Pay a closer attention to your field color, the grass tillering capacity, the grass development and the yield.

If the grass is very yellowish looking, very thin, maybe adding nitrogen is the next important step. Then you can gradually correct the soil fertility based on the law of the minimum, the most limiting factor. Before you get there, maybe finally you will see boron is needed, especially for legume forages.

Host(s) (42:13)
And we can't dismiss or forget that weather, sunshine, rain, all of those things can also be limiting factors with our cool season forage production.

Andrew Frankenfield (42:22)
So we can't ignore the fact that fertilizers much more expensive than it was a decade ago. Right. But with your comment about weather, you know, we had some fields that didn't get fertilized after first cutting and some that did. And we had a dry spell, you know, fairly dry this summer. Well, those fertilized fields made a made a yield that was economical and worthwhile going after some of those others did not. So we always been playing, wow, it didn't rain enough. You know, well, did you give it the fertility day?

That's Right, so we're cognizant of the expense of the fertilizer, but you know you have to feed these fields if you're going to get something back and if you're trying to bale a quarter ton an acre, hey, that doesn't, that's about the break even point or so. You know, if you're going out there for less than 10 small bales to the acre, you're probably just running your equipment for not getting any return there.

Ryan Spelman (43:16)
Thank you for tuning into this Forage Q &A episode of the Agronomy Highlights podcast. Dwayne and Justin really had a great conversation with the rest of our group and it went a little longer than we expected. So we're breaking it up into two episodes. So that was part one of our Forage Q &A episode and tune in next week to hear part two of that conversation. And that part of the conversation, they'll talk a little bit about late fall, forage cuttings, spring fertility.

and talk a little bit more about reseeding a forage. So look forward to that and thank you for tuning in. We'll see you on the next one.