Month: May 2015

If the fiber digestibility portion of a forage analysis were a visual display, NDFd-30 hour (or 24, or 48) would be a photo snapshot, framing available details at a moment in time, while TTNDFD would be more like a slideshow or even a short video clip. TTNDFD adds another dimension to our understanding of how…

Chuck Schwab, et. al.  Department of Animal Sciences Cornell University, NY   “Starch makes milk” is an often heard statement from field nutritionists. This makes sense because starch (and sugar) feeding increases propionate production, propionate is the primary glucogenic volatile fatty acid, glucose is used by the mammary gland to produce lactose, and lactose is…

Palmer Amaranth – Penn State Palmer amaranth has been described as the “perfect weed” and “pigweed on steroids.” Its cluster of key survival traits seem to use almost every weed trick in the book, helping it evade management and thrive under most standard weed control regimens. Because of its development of herbicide resistance traits, it…

Last fall we prepared a field for our 2015 corn plots by planting a cover crop mix: We used King’s Vetch and Oats seeded @ 88lbs./acre and Crimson Clover seeded @ 22 lbs./acre. We no-till drilled these into the field after a second cutting of summer annual teff was harvested. We put the vetch & oats…

When weighing your options about when to rotate out of an alfalfa stand, the best advice is usually to quit while you’re ahead. Stand decline in alfalfa is inevitable; the tricky part will be discerning the point in the stand’s aging when you reach your threshold of profitability (ideally you’d rotate out before reaching this…