At some point, every pasture or hayfield needs to be renovated. Although there are many useful approaches to improving a piece of land for forage production, some cover crops offer distinct advantages and disadvantages.
Rob Dowdle owns and operates Dowdle Family Farms in northern Mississippi, focusing on making quality forage for both beef cattle and hogs. For Dowdle, one of his favorite cover crops for improving land while making great forage is daikon radish. Also known as tillage radish, daikon’s long, quick-growing roots help break up the soil. “We use them a lot,” says Dowdle.
Dowdle places great importance on getting as much feed as he can for his animals out of the forage grown on his farm. “I’m always grazing something with pigs. There are times when 90 percent of their feed comes from pasture.”
One significant advantage to daikon radishes is the ease of seeding. Faced with hot, dry conditions this summer, Dowdle was still able to sow some low-producing fields to radishes and get a forage crop going. “The main reason we like to grow radishes is they are easy to seed,” he says. Now, Dowdle’s hogs are grazing on nutritious radish fodder. “Of course, brassicas are higher in protein,” he notes.
Eventually, a field of tillage radishes, disturbed by pigs, can be seeded to grasses and clover. Dowdle spends countless hours planning what seed goes where on his Southern farm.
One of the results of meticulously planning out the use of cover crops like radishes is Dowdle’s animals gain when they need to gain. He remembers one year when he really wanted to get a group of gilts to gain weight. He did it mostly with warm-season annuals like radishes. “Seventy percent to 80 percent of their nutrition came from forage and they still gained weight. They gained 50 to 60 pounds in two months.”
Different brassica, oat and mixed oat brassica status in mid-October. Photo provided by Masoud Hashemi.
Importantly, the land makes gains with crops like radishes too. In an agronomy factsheet, Cornell University Cooperative Extension states that tillage radishes can help break up compacted soil and can bring up needed nutrients from deeper parts of the soil strata. “Recent work in western New York indicated radishes seeded at the end of July or early August can uptake 100 to 170 pounds of nitrogen per acre, prior to winter,” states the factsheet.
The radishes winter-kill and eventually rot away, leaving spaces for spring rain to drain – drying the field more quickly and potentially allowing for a new forage crop to be sown more successfully.
Dr. Masoud Hashemi, the University of Massachusetts – Amherst’s team leader for crops, dairy, livestock and equine, sees advantages and disadvantages in using tillage radishes to improve pasture. Recognizing that tillage radishes can produce quality forage, Hashemi recommends using it in the weedier types of pastures. In cases of pastures that include trees and undesirable species, Hashemi would recommend the introduction of tillage radishes to improve forage. “That is absolutely fine,” he states.
On the other hand, Hashemi would recommend another course of action with more traditional, productive pastures that need some help. “If I want to improve a traditional pasture, I would add some cool-season pasture species,” he states.
Although Hashemi doesn’t discount the potential usefulness of crops like tillage radishes, he also emphasizes that the crop needs to be handled properly. “In order to introduce new seed into a pasture, you will have to mow,” he states. No-till equipment, often available for rent from local extension, will handle the job if the grass is short enough. “It’s fast-growing,” he says, noting that another issue to consider is the large percentage of water in the crop. “There is not that much dry matter.”
Teresa Steckler, extension specialist in commercial agriculture with the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, also sees tillage radishes as a crop with significant advantages and disadvantages. “They are going to bring up nutrients out of the deeper parts of the soil,” Steckler says about tillage radishes and turnips.
Winter rye interseeded into the pasture (viewed in late October). Photo provided by Masoud Hashemi.
Both Hashemi and Steckler state that maybe the best way to use crops like tillage radishes is to take a relatively small piece of land, plant it to radishes and use it to feed animals that need high-quality feed in the fall. “You may want to take 2 acres every year,” says Steckler, explaining that a small piece of land might be good for calves. “I would use those acres backgrounding calves,” Hashemi says. “In general, I would like to see separate land being used for crops like this” – rather than existing pasture.
Steckler notes than in many parts of Illinois, it’s crop farmers who use tillage radishes the most. They plant them for conservation purposes – trying to keep topsoil and improve fertility. “It would be nice if we could get the row-crop guys and the livestock guys working together,” she says. That doesn’t happen – crop farmers generally aren’t enthusiastic about livestock out on their cropland – because of concerns about compaction, she explains. Steckler thinks those concerns are largely unwarranted.
At Rob Dowdle’s farm in Mississippi, it’s not just tillage radishes Dowdle uses to improve pasture and feed his animals economically. He also plants turnips, buckwheat, sunn hemp and of course utilizes cool-season forages like clover and traditional grasses when appropriate. “One of the best summer forages is sunn hemp,” he says.
Hashemi thinks forage turnips have a lot of potential in a pasture because the majority of the plant is aboveground and animals don’t tend to disturb the soil very much to access the feed. “They are not really deep-rooted,” he says, noting that they do still have deep taproots that take up nutrients efficiently. He also recommends mustard, partly because it can kill nematodes, as can other members of the brassica family. “I would go with mustard,” he says. It packs a little more anti-nematode punch than other plants, he explains.
University of Vermont Agronomy Specialist Heather Darby sees quite a few Vermont farmers using tillage radishes. Some have subsoilers with an attached seeder. Others broadcast radish seed after dairy cattle have grazed the pasture close to the ground. Of the folks who broadcast, Darby says, “Where they do get radishes, growing it does improve pasture next spring.”
“Radishes are kind of a cool, multipurpose cover crop,” says Darby, noting that more and more farmers are using it to feed animals rather than merely improving the soil.
Tillage radishes – and other crops like forage turnips, mustard and buckwheat, can have beneficial effects on the soil, fight soil-borne disease and can scavenge nutrients. As tools to renovate pasture, they present potentially useful advantages. However, the details of each particular farm, ranch and piece of land will determine the part they play in producing productive forage while improving soil health.
Winter rye status in May. Photo provided by Masoud Hashemi.
