🌾 Around the Fencepost Episode 11 Guest John Winchell Expert, Jacob Leach Wet Meadows Seed

Well, thanks for having me. It's always good to catch up with you and I know we've talked before and been through things for a few years now and it's always nice to catch up with things. And I think with my travels anymore and as much as I travel, probably to my wife's dismay, I get out and see a lot of things. I was just in Ireland a couple, like three weeks ago and did a bunch of talks across from the southern end of Ireland to the northern end of Ireland and it's just interesting to see how they handle grasses and some of their strengths and weaknesses and some challenges and opportunities really that I see. But it's so nice to be able to get across North America, see different forage types and see different things and be able to kind of pull little pieces out of one area and try to put it into another and see if things work. And I guess, you know, with me, forage is, you know, I got the three Fs. I've got faith and family and forage. I think those three are kind of what I live by. And I'm a self-proclaimed forage geek. I couldn't love forages any more than I do. And I think I've been fortunate enough to listen to some really great people along the way, some of the godfathers of forage, if you will, and be able to learn from some of them and be able to actually pick up the ball and maybe work on some things that most people aren't accustomed to yet, but probably will be talking about in a few years. And that's kind of what drives me. I internally want to be the best forage person that I can be. Hopefully people gravitate that and I can learn as much from other people as they learn from me maybe.

Yeah. And you know, you look at, I worked a little bit on the monogastric side as well. And when you look at those diets and you talk to those nutritionists, they're still difficult to balance. But when you look at a pig diet or a chicken diet, I mean, they don't have that ever-changing forage component there. They're getting soybean meal, corn, and enzymes and minerals and vitamins, and pretty much for the most part, those are going to be pretty consistent. But when you go and jump into the ocean of ruminant nutrition, it is an ever-changing battle that you're a lot of times chasing. And I think as a nutritionist, I think every good nutritionist probably thinks that they have the best diets in the world. And I work with so many good nutritionists in my role now looking at different diets and looking at forages and being able to translate forages and forage quality and how it fits into milk production. And I used to think that I could outbalance any forage that you throw at me. But the problem is with that when you tell a customer, 'Don't worry, I can balance around it.' I'm not saying that it purposely does that, but sometimes it can make the producer not be in charge of their own forage. It makes the forage in charge of the producer. And sometimes they'll think, 'Oh, their head says, we better go mow that right now.' Their gut says, 'Oh, no.' Or their gut, sorry, their gut says we should mow right now, but their head says, 'Oh, let's let it grow another week so we can get a little more tonnage out of it,' not realizing that NDF inherently increases by 3/4 of a percent a day. So, if you wait 5 days, I always use the analogy all the time as if it's a Wednesday and it's a 10% chance of rain on Saturday and you know it's getting close to being ready to harvest and your gut says to harvest but your head says not to or you go get out of the tractor, go in to talk at lunch with the forage prevention department, which is obviously sometimes your parents, your grandpa, your brother, your uncle, sometimes it's you. You talk yourself out of doing that, trying to get that little tick of quantity, but then you start losing that quantity because it's a running total. It's just going to get worse. It's not going to get better typically. And so I think, you know, once you start to figure out that realistically you're in charge of the forage that you're making, I know weather is a big component of that, but I think we can work our way around weather. Sometimes we don't feel that we can, but I think there's a lot of times we can go a little early, lose a little bit of tonnage on first cutting, but often times we're going to make that up with second cutting because if you think about, for us in New York, the last week of May, first week of June, we always usually get a decent amount of rain in a one-week period. A lot of my really successful farms are harvesting, losing a little bit of tonnage up front, but gaining that quality. And then that rain comes through and then we get heat and water accumulation which grows the second crop better. And all of a sudden when those guys that waited for the rain to go through make their first cutting that is huge and probably doesn't ferment as well, doesn't feed nearly as well, and then you have two cuttings of really high quality feed that almost equate to what they're making in that single pass, you've actually made a lot better feed, and you've set yourself up for each subsequent cutting in the future. So, a lot of times I really try to work with consultants and my customers and dairy farms on knowing what their forage samples say and what it actually means to the operation as opposed to just looking at numbers. Because once I think farms embrace how forage quality impacts their farm and they are really in control, it's not, 'Boy, that nutritionist can't make my feed work. I don't know what's wrong, but he just can't get my cows to milk.' To be blatantly obvious and maybe is a little bit controversial. A lot of times when I hear people say that, questioning how good their nutritionist is, a lot of times I can go back and look at their forage quality and say, understand what you're saying, but sometimes we got to look at ourselves in the mirror and whether it's weather related, sometimes it's patterns that I think we get into as individuals, I think we've got to make sure we make the best feed we can, especially with margins on how they are in the industry. We've really got to do a really good bang-up job on trying to make the best forage we can because when we do that all of a sudden things become easier.

And I think I've made as many mistakes if not more mistakes than most people probably on forage both as a nutritionist and in this role as well. And I still feed herds because I feel it's really important to still work with farms because I think as a supplier you lose that edge. And I think it doesn't matter if you're in a sport or anything else. If you don't keep practicing what you're doing, you're not going to be as good at it. And I think it's important to make sure that you've got that. But I think it's also critical to be able to just take a look at forages and be able to try to figure that out. And that's why a lot of the herds I work with, I'll take a look at their five-year forages, their corn silage, their haylage, their whatever forage, whether it's a cover crop or sorghum. I look over a five-year period at their forages, and I split them up by season, sometimes by cutting, and then I'll look over a 5-year period and say, 'Okay, after five years, here's the trends. Here's what your farm does. You can make great quality feed and I can think of some 100-pound herds that make great quality feed, but sometimes it's going to be a tad wet and they're going to suffer on the fermentation side.' So then you can work with that herd and say, 'Okay, here we're making a little bit too wet haylage. It's getting away from us. It's pushing fermentation the wrong way and let's reel it back in and maybe wait a little bit more. Look at not mowing the whole farm at once as opposed to mowing what you can.' And there's a lot of different little nuance things that I like to try to work with that kind of help that farm be successful. And then I like to look at the weather of that individual farm and look at the weather history because you can start to figure out channels that you can get yourself into. And maybe the forage you're using isn't necessarily best fit for the ground you have or the climate that you're in. Maybe there's a completely other option that we could look at or maybe even mix a little bit in to kind of spread our risk around a little bit or spread our risk around which is more important. So, I don't know. It's a lot of things through the years and I think we always can do a better job with what we're doing. And it just sometimes it's a simple idea that you might have heard it 10 times from your nutritionist, but then I roll in from wherever I am or wherever I've been and I say a similar thing and maybe phrase it a little different or show them local information and they're like, 'Huh, yeah, that makes sense.' But there all along. One of my favorite quotes that I use quite a bit, it's not so much people don't really need to learn as much as they need to be reminded. So sometimes that's the equation as well.

I think if we maybe tried triticale or rye or maybe wheat, I'll use primarily triticale and rye as kind of a base to start off of. I think years ago, some people might have tried it. Grandpa might have tried it. Dad might have tried. You can throw sorghum into this. We could talk a whole hour about just probably sorghum and some of the mistakes I think we've made and still make on the sorghum side to make it not successful. But I think with the resurgence or the importance of not only the cover crop benefits, but the way that these feeds can feed and I kind of use it as an analogy of, for example, my wife, you know, she likes barbecue. I like barbecue except it's great when you go out to eat, but when you're at home with the big family that I have here with four littles under 12 and she wants the food right away. So, she wants her chicken cooked in 400 degrees as quick as it can get off so she can feed them where I like smoking meat. I like barbecue that I use. If you think about these cover crops, the two most important things, and if you follow the Kilcer Bible of forage quality, you know, when you look at how he's done it, there are two things that are critical. Planting time and nitrogen on these cover crops. And to me, planting time is critical because if you don't get that in earlier, you're not going to get that late-season tillering. You're not going to get that growth in the spring and it's going to be a nice lawn in the spring if you plant and follow corn for example. You can do that and it won't be as good. But to me, when you look at the way these cover crops are, these fall forages, they grow in cooler weather and they love cool weather with some moisture. So, think about fall. Fall is cooler and moderate temperature rainfall. It's slow and long and slow. So if you think about barbecue and meat, it's low and slow. Low temperature, long period of time. If you think about the fall, that's what the fall is. Then a lot of times, depending on what part of the US you're in, think of the north, east, midwest, west, Canada. We go through a winter where things go dormant and then they start back up again. But the spring is this continuation of low and slow. Those forages are cooked low and slow. And that's why a lot of times everybody almost universally will admit that first cutting feeds better than any of our other cuttings. And it's primarily because of that thought process. It hasn't had that heat stress. It's been cooked relatively low and slow, grows low and slow. You're going to have that increase in digestibility because heat is not going to typically increase digestibility unless you're talking droughty corn and if you get heat and no rain obviously it's going to be super digestible corn but you're not going to have much tonnage of it. But when you look at grasses that's why these cereal grains, these triticale, these rye grow so well because of the timing they're put in and then also the quality. If you follow the kind of the program that I like to work with and have learned from for years, it's going to be higher digestibility than corn, than BMR corn silage. It's going to be 16 to 18% crude protein, if not 20% crude protein, provided we put enough nitrogen on it. You're going to have a NDF between 45 and 50 for me. Grasses, critical, rye, wheat, sorghum, multi-cut sorghum, all of these, you're going to want that NDF to be at minimum 45, at maximum really 50-51. Once we get past that, we start approaching where the head gets too close to the boot and then we start losing that digestible part of that feed. And that's a critical thing to understand when you go into situations where we mow really early. If your NDF is under 45 for a grass type of forage, and I'll throw triticale and rye into that as well. If you get under that 45, it turns into what I call a runaway train forage where there's really no hold to it at all. There's not enough fiber there. And I see that a lot in the UK, in England and Ireland. They make these gorgeous, gorgeous centerfold type of forages where you look at them and they're like so gorgeous, but there's a lot of times no hold to them at all and they just are so fast and that really, you know, we have to have some sort of hold in that forage. So to me, I think with triticale and rye primarily, it's made such a big dent in how we feed herds. And if you look at Maryland and Pennsylvania, they've been doing it for years and years. I've started to introduce it into the Maritimes into Nova Scotia. I've worked with it more way north of Toronto up around New Liskeard in Canada where they didn't think they could grow it and we find ways where we can grow it and find situations where it works and then they start feeding it and they find that it feeds better than any other feed that they have. And I think that's a critical part because if you look at triticale or rye that's harvested at the right time, it feeds cooler in the summer than some of other forages that will feed because it's more digestible. The cows can utilize it better without having to try to break it down and utilize it. They can utilize it really easy. And a lot of times my guys now are looking at it to feed in June, July, August if they make it right because it feeds so well. And cows transition better and actually seem to have a little bit less issues with heat stress because of how digestible that feed is and how well it feeds. So to me, it's a critical part of what we do. And then that also goes into the big picture because I like to be a big picture guy on things to a certain extent. And I might get too inundated with some details at times, but a lot of times I'll find and I go on farms and we talk about corn silage and a lot of times we're planting longer day than probably what our ground traditionally needs. And a lot of times that's because we're told, well, you know, we're getting a longer fall. We have more Indian summer, longer falls. We can stretch our daylength on our corn out past where it can be. I don't see it as much of an issue with your area because you have a lot of daylength, but I do see it in Tennessee, Kentucky as well where we probably are planting a little long day corn for our silage. But I see it a lot in the Northeast. And we're planting too long a day. The temperatures go down. It's t-shirt weather in the day. It's sweatshirt weather at night. And corn is a 50-86 product. It don't like it under 50 and it don't like it above 86. And if you look at that, that's why we plant longer day corns in some situations. They're 10 to 15 day relative maturity too long and their neighbors are chopping and they're waiting because the corn is sitting and sitting and sitting until blight takes it and sometimes frost will take it. But to me more of a blight issue and then we start losing quality. We start gaining the amount of mycotoxins. We lose digestibility. We lose starch. We lose starch digestibility. And what we should be doing is right-sizing our corn, shorten it up a little bit so we can fit rye or triticale in if that's something that they decide to do. And once you do that, you'll find that if you right-size your corn and that triticale will fit in, you'll find that the window of when we should maximize our quality and quantity on our cover crops fits really well with the day length of corn of how long we should plant corn for our individual farm. And then all of a sudden you get this marriage of those two and you get higher quality corn silage and then you're still getting that really good cover crop that's helping you through the summer. So I think there's a lot of opportunities that I think maybe are in front of us that we just don't really see because we're used to doing the same old thing.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I haven't seen enough of that forage. I mean, I think if you look up at the Northeast and the Midwest, a lot of we've been using, you know, a few varieties primarily, trying to use those shorter day varieties like a Gainer 154 for lack of a better term. We've, I've seen that a lot up in the northeast. I haven't, I guess give me a little more of an example of the facultative triticale because I guess honestly that term I haven't seen as much of and that maybe that's something to learn.

Yep.

Yeah. And you have to still dance with the girl that brought you and I think there's times when our forage, depending on the situation you're in, but I guess I will say one universal thing whether it's looking at grasses in Costa Rica, France, the UK, Canada, the US, it all remains the same. So if you look at this and think of this as a blade of grass or triticale or rye and say this is the boot, we've all basically used flag leaf as our early warning detection when it's flag leaf stage, Feekes stage 8 versus 9, flag leaf opens up. When the flag leaf opens up typically the head is right here. I'm going to talk a little bit more on digestibility and I'll come around to that same point, but on a lot of the modern forage samples, everybody looks at 30-hour NDF digestibility. So, in other words, that NDF, which is basically the measure of fill for a cow, neutral detergent fiber. The higher the NDF, the less the cow's going to eat. The higher the NDF, the later the feed, the less the energy density. The lower the NDF, the more she's going to eat and the more she's going to digest. And there's digestibility, it's going to all digest at different rates. So, a lot of times we've been looking at 30-hour digestibility, what it basically how it works in the cow within that one day, that NDF. I'm starting to look a lot more over the last five or six years at UNDF, which is basically the undigestible NDF. So in essence, it's what we're putting in the gutter or we're spreading in the field of that NDF. It's what she's not using. And I want to maximize what she's using. So I'm going to, and then there's a 12-hour that I look at a lot as well. NDFD12 that most people don't even look at at all. And to me, that's critical because that shows how vegetative and the explosiveness of that forage. Because if you think about the head, don't worry about the flag leaf for right now. And I'm probably going to be struck by lightning on this, but for our traditional guys out there, just hang with me for a sec. As that head increases and goes up towards the boot, feed quality drops. We know that you're going to maximize quantity once it's headed out. And that's fine for beef cattle depending on what your situation is. But if we're looking at lactating dairy cattle, what happens is that head starts to rise somewhere between two and three inches from when the head comes out of the boot at heading, that 2 to 3 inches. What's going to happen is that plant is going to all of a sudden trigger what it's going to do and it's going to actually put more lignin on, put more structure on because it knows it's going to reproduce. It could care less what we want to do with it. It wants to reproduce. So, it's going to put on structure so she don't lodge or fall over. So, what'll happen is that 12-hour, which is the real digestible, fragile part of that forage will drop really, really fast because that plant is transitioning. So, a lot of people watch and pay attention to flag leaf, but honestly, if you look at the flag leaf to head ratio, which is new math way beyond this conversation, but you'll find that as that head climbs up and gets within 2 or 3 inches of that boot, that is about maximum where you're going to get quality and quantity together. And it doesn't matter if you're in, like I said, Costa Rica, New Liskeard, Ontario, the Maritimes, England, Ireland, Western Canada, Western United States. If you hit that window right there between 2 to 3 inches of the head coming out of the boot and just split the stem and look at where that head is, you are going to almost never go wrong. Because let's face it, grasses, cereal grains, they're all going to do the same thing. They're all going to head out. And if you can control that by manipulating this, then you're in good shape. Because by the time that flag leaf is all the way out and rolled tight and she starts to open up in the flag leaf stage and starts to get to that stage 9, the head is already here and you've already transitioned that plant to have gone the other way. So, she's already rolling down the hill. And that's going to affect fermentation. It's going to affect quality. And I think some of these simple things are so important to what we're doing. And I think once we start to figure that out and kind of grasp it a little, that kind of wakes us up a little. And instead of in the spring sitting in the corn planter trapped in your tractor because you've got to get the corn planted, that's the most important thing in the world. And you look over at the rye field or the triticale field or the grass field and you start seeing heads and you're like, well, you know, we still got 50 acres of corn. And we'll just let that grass go. And if you figure that's a, if you've got a 70-30 mix of corn silage to haylage, whether it's triticale and rye or grass, and you let it go a little longer, there's a large percentage of that diet where you're losing protein, you're losing digestible fiber, and you're gaining UNDF, a lot of those things are going to go the wrong way. So to me, I think no matter what kind of variety you have, whether it's rye or triticale or any of these others like a Koga type of rye, when you look at all of these other things in grasses, they're all going to head at certain times. We were talking about this a few days ago. I have farms that haven't probably seeded in years, and they have a lot of what I'll call native grasses. And a lot of times those native grasses are going to head out a little earlier than some of our modern, more recently planted forage. So I have guys that work with that system really well. They feed it really good with nitrogen and make sure that they're putting out that nitrogen and then also making sure that they're harvesting it at that right time for that forage. And I think that is really kind of the key to what we're looking at is harvesting at the right time no matter what the forage is. Because I can look at plots between multiple types of triticale or any of these other crops and you look at them and you start looking inherently there is going to be differences but it all comes down at the end of the day if you have that NDF at 46 to 48 to 50 NDF for that grass, triticale, or rye you're always going to make really good feed and sometimes you'll find one in the plot that's 51-52 NDF that one is maturing a little earlier for whatever reason. And I still look at it the same way where if you look at rye and triticale and that's why a lot of the trend has been mixing those together. And here's another sacrilege part that I'm going to get struck by. But I don't like to see those mixes as much. Some guys like to say it's going to cover things and going to be a little bit early, a little bit late. But when you think about rye versus triticale, rye is going to be ready about 3 to 5 days earlier than what triticale is going to be. So, a lot of times, you have to make sure that if I have guys that have rye, they're starting with their rye a few days earlier by looking at splitting stems, walking into the field instead of doing a drive-by, looking at that and saying, 'Oh, the rye is a few days ahead of that triticale,' and then they know they can come into the triticale. The other thing that I tell people to do that my best herds do, my herds that consistently are those lucky herds in every county that I don't know how they get things, I don't know how they make that much milk. I don't know how they harvest their feed. I don't know how they do that. They're just lucky and their neighbors obviously. And the biggest thing that I see is they're getting out there and getting it harvested at that time. That's really critical. And for rye, you're going to be a little bit earlier and you're going to be a little bit later with triticale. And I find with rye, a lot of guys like rye because it's cheaper, a little more winter hardy. But the further north you go, and I hopefully we'll have some people that'll listen from further north. A lot of times rye being inherently 3 to 5 days earlier than triticale. A lot of times when you go further north into Canada, the rye is ready before we're ready and the ground is ready. And when we have that, they always say, 'Well, I don't know why we can't get our rye to feed like it should.' It's because we're really a little bit behind on all of that. So I like to look at individual farms and say okay what are we doing successfully, what do we have. If we have alfalfa that works really well and doesn't die off, I think sometimes we stay with alfalfa. A lot of times I like to see some corn silage, some triticale or rye, and some alfalfa and having those three together seem to work very well because you're getting your energy from corn silage, you're getting that intake from corn silage, you have that energy density there. And then you take that triticale and rye, if you're harvesting at the right time, you're getting a lower UNDF, a lot of digestibility, good crude protein. And then when you look at the alfalfa, you're getting a lower NDF. It's a little more friendly for lack of moisture in the summer compared to grass. You're getting a lower NDF and you're getting higher crude protein with that alfalfa. So, you're getting a little bit of the best of all three worlds there. And that seems to work very well. Well, and then you're spreading your risk as well. I know that was a long-winded question and not even answering that question, but to me, I think those things are vital.

It's a master class and I was definitely not concerned about that.

Yeah. And putting that mix together is such a big part. And you said this, like you're not as big a fan of mixtures because when you were talking about trying to make sure you keep your hay fields, I'm a big proponent as somebody selling seeds. I love selling mixtures. And we finished up spring and dad started on a fescue field at the same cut. All at the same time, he finished one field, went to the next field, and started mowing his fescue and went straight into it. Well, that was a mix that I put together that had an earlier maturing novel endophyte tall fescue and a later maturing because I know it'll start going and I wanted to gain that extra couple of days. So in that sense, I see the value. But when you're talking about especially on those winter annuals, you definitely run into that where it gets wet and then you're stuck.

They're over there making yard salad because there's no alfalfa left.

Yeah. Is there anything on this year, which you guys are still, I assume you guys should still be chopping up there or finishing up kind of getting to that?