Winter Pastures

As fall nears we are over-seeding some winter annuals into our Bermuda grass pastures to provide our cattle with winter forages. Our goal is to provide grazing opportunities while our bermudagrass is  dormant and unproductive. Plus we'd like to reduce our hay consumption and the amount of feed we feed during the winter months. Additionally adding winter annuals to our pastures reduces erosion and helps keep the ground firm and provides good footing to the cattle during the winter. 

To accomplish this goal we drilled annual Ryegrass at a rate of 30 lbs per acre at a depth of  1/2 inch. We chose the Fria variety of ryegrass because of its hardiness. 

For a small farm like ours we would not use a seed drill often enough to justify the cost of owning one. Fortunately, our local NRCS office offers the rental of a drill. We rented this drill and paid per acre to use it to drill some of our pastures. 

A few of our pastures are too small to get the drill into and for those we used a small seed spreader mounted on the back of our gator to spread the seed in these areas. 

When we began over-seeding we needed to make sure that the summer forage was short enough, but luckily for me the cows had eaten it down and I didn't have to mow it. Otherwise I would have had to clip this pasture off to within a couple of inches of the ground. 

We ended up planting these pastures the last week of October. That would be ordinarily have been too late, but we have had an exceptionally dry fall here in West Tennessee so the seed probably wouldn't have germinated had I gotten it in the ground a month ago like I should have.