Berry’s Picks

Harvesting Small Grains for Forage

There are thousands of acres of small grains grown in the county for forage production, both hay and silage. While all the rainfall has been wonderful and will make a huge difference for us this summer, it has not provided a good window to get these small grains harvested. Small grain harvest is more often than not determined by the weather, like this year spring can be a tough time to get the crop up or even the ground dried enough to harvest for hay or silage. When you are able to work around Mother Nature small grains do offer the potential for extremely high-quality forage. Even when you have to harvest it later than ideal, the forage does still hold decent quality. Depending on what you are feeding, sometimes quality can be higher than is really needed. There is of course a trade-off between quality and quantity.

Table 1 above shows yields of oats at different growth stages. Table 2 shows quality data for same oats at different stages of maturity.