These three management decisions can help boost your income on your spring annual crop by $50 to $100 per acre.

The first $50 is super easy

If you normally plant Jerry oats for your spring forage crop, you can improve your bottom line by $50 with one very simple step: Plant improved forage oats instead of Jerry oats this year. Same weather, field, fertilizer, labor – same everything – except the seed.

According to the four-year oat trial average at Rockville, Indiana, there’s a 15% yield gain by using improved forage oats rather than Jerry oats. That’s about 217 more pounds per acre of digestible fiber. Based on soy hulls priced at $252 per ton (reported in November 2021) a pound of digestible fiber is worth 25 cents per pound. Although improved forage oat seed costs more than Jerry oat seed, by planting Jerry you reduce your income per acre by $54.25 – just because you “saved” about $15 on seed in a normal year.

Thanks to the market upheaval of the last two years, the price of common Jerry oats this spring is within a dollar or so of what  improved forage oats will cost. So this year, you can save only about $2 on the purchase price to wind up losing $54 if you plant Jerry. So plant improved forage oats this spring instead of Jerry, and you’ve got the potential to make around $50 more per acre.

Thanks to the efforts of oat breeders, we’re now looking at experimental oat varieties that are yielding up to 38% more than common Jerrys. That means that, hopefully, by 2024, you can realize gains of $100-plus per acre just by ordering different seed.

Gain another $50 through proper management practices

What do I mean by proper management practices? Plant on time, keep good fertility and harvest on time.

Plant on time

This point can make the difference between $200 worth or $400 worth of digestible fiber per acre. "On time" is as soon as possible in the spring. If you have enough nice weather to dry out your fields, go for it. Have your drill waiting.

A cool-weather crop, oats must be planted before April 15 in the Midwest to reach their full potential. Plant a month earlier if you want quality grain. Almost every year, there’s a short window in early March during which fields are fit to plant oats. Planting in that window has yielded my best crops. In a late, cool spring, I’ve planted oats in the first week of April and had excellent yields. But in the years when we have a hot, dry May, oats really suffer if not planted early.

Ultimately, we have a wide planting window, but the harvest date seems to run into a brick wall. The last five years, our planting dates varied from March 10 to April 11, while harvest dates varied by only 12 days in early June. Interestingly, the first two weeks of planting-date variation moved the harvest date no more than six days, but moving the planting date to the fourth week (the second week of April) pushed the harvest date back another six days.

Besides limiting yield accumulation due to less growing time, my data suggests that the more growth that happens in warm weather (because of late planting), the higher the fiber content and the lower the fiber digestibility, limiting the potential income even more.

Keep good fertility

Plan on 1.5 units of nitrogen (N) per growing day (figure from plant date to early June). Add 1 pound of sulfate sulfur per 8 units of N to improve N efficiency and maintain crude protein integrity (less nitrates, more amino acids in the forage). Maintain base saturation calcium at 70%-75% on the soil test for better fiber digestibility; this helps keep the potassium-calcium balance, especially in heavy manure-use situations.

Dr. William Albrecht wrote that potassium makes fiber (trees love potassium) and calcium makes quality fiber. Both are a growth nutrient, and small grains are a luxury feeder of potassium. For this reason, maintain potassium levels at 2.5%-3% minimum base saturation, but avoid excesses and maintain calcium.

Here again, sulfur is essential to keep calcium available and maintain that balance, especially in organic situations where no acid fertilizers are used. Keep sulfur in the very high range on your soil test (varies with different labs, so check your specs).

Harvest on time

Have your mower ready; it will make all the difference. Start walking the field daily in the last week of May. Slice the stems; you can see exactly where that head is and how many leaves still have to come out. Flag leaf stage makes super quality, but letting it grow until the boot is swollen still makes high quality. Once the head starts peeping, quality drops like a rock. Depending on heat units, swollen boot is around three days after flag leaf.

Check your forecast and take it early rather than late for high-quality dairy forage. Know your target quality. If you want heifer feed, you can let it get more mature and likely increase yield by almost 25% with acceptable quality for heifers, if chopped. Cutting at 3 inches will help keep forage off the dirt, lower the risk of ash contamination and improve air flow, allowing for easier hay-in-a-day management for best energy retention.

Spread out your harvest window if you feel you can’t handle all the acres in one day. Forage spring barley is a good option to spread out your harvest window since it normally comes off the last week in May. It has significantly higher digestibility than Jerry oats, and, on a four-year average, has yielded $25 more digestible fiber that is certainly more palatable than oats.

What’s next?

If you like the benefits of spring annuals but don’t like planting silage corn in mid-June, never fear. The middle of June is plenty of time to raise a full 25- to 30-ton crop of high-energy forage sorghum and still have time to plant a crop of fall triticale for another bumper crop the next spring.

With quality seed and good management, your spring annual crop can be the best this year.