Lots of farmers and ranchers are planting the new hybrid varieties of forage brassicas and other plants in the cabbage family. With their high levels of protein and energy, these forage brassicas show fast emergence and rapid regrowth, and they can give consistently high yields with multiple grazings, even in the face of water stress and cold stress.

 
Everyone knows a livestock producer who’s lost animals to bloat. Because of the risk, some folks flatly refuse to graze their stock on dense stands of clover or alfalfa. Others kind of shrug, saying they’ve rarely lost animals and don’t worry about it much. So … what gives?

Let’s enter a very strange world. Dark, silent, microscopic, underground. The soil – on which our crops and forages depend – is a veritable Amazon jungle teeming with thousands of species of animals and plants and something that’s not quite either: fungi.

Fiber isn’t fiber isn’t fiber. Lots of folks talk about fiber – doctors, teachers, marketers, nutritionists – but there are different types of nutritional fiber, and fiber digestibility partially depends on the species of animal consuming it.

It was a phone call that I didn’t want to receive. On a pleasant evening in June, a neighbor rancher – someone I’ve known for many years – phoned to ask my advice about some baleage.

We’ll focus on the selenium accumulator plants that thrive in arid regions – the toxic plants that distressed Marco Polo, the toxic plants notorious in cowboy movies for causing “blind staggers” and “alkali disease.”

Sorghum-sudangrass is a C4 (warm-season) annual. It can easily grow 10 feet tall and yield more than 5 tons of dry matter per acre during the hot summer.

We all use the term crude protein to describe nutritional value without much thought about it, as if crude protein were something that has been around forever, like pi or I Love Lucy.

Many years ago, in a college course on toxic plants, I learned about the popular ornamental houseplant dieffenbachia, also known as “dumb cane.”

For years I’ve recommended a very simple diet for ewes in their lambing jugs: a few pounds of alfalfa pellets in a tray hanging on the side of the pen. Nutritious, convenient and waste-free.