Hay field

Bruce

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Might be worth contacting the county extension agent once the house is yours. s/he can assess the hay fields and make recommendations.
 

greybeard

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Johnson Grass Hay
They don't fertilize
1st cutting 8 round. bales
2nd cutting 4 round bales
400 to 600 pounds per bale.
8 acres in hay
They will find somebody to take care of them for me until I can sort it out....
Thank you.
JG is a horse of a different color compared to the forages previously mentioned. It is not native to this country--it was imported specifically for cattle feed.
Johnson Grass in much of Texas makes good forage and some very good hay, @ about 3--maybe 4 round bales per acre with adequate moisture but it has to be managed properly for a number of reasons..
Since prussic acid has already been brought up, we'll look at that first. JG is a member of the Sorghum family of plants, and most sudan and sorghums can produce prussic acid under the right circumstances, and contain high nitrates in times of stress. As someone else said, under "drought conditions", ...but not exactly. Sorghums are nitrate heavy in stressful conditions. It's generally during the recover phase that you have to worry about prussic acid. During drought, there's little growth, but if rain comes, and greenup follows, the conditions have been met for prussic acid. Same with fertilizing, which probably accounts for why it hasn't been fertilized in the past. You fertilize a field of JG, rain comes and growth takes off--again, prussic acid formation conditions are met. Or, Fall comes, first frost in North Texas forms one night and the JG kinda wilts, turns a dark color and is again stressed. Warmup occurs the next few days, growth resumes and again, those PA conditions are met. Rule of thumb is not to graze it between first frost and first hard freeze. (first hard freeze kills it back and cattle won't eat it anyway) When drought stressed, and rain follows drought periods, wait one week after the rain before allowing cattle to graze it.

That's the scary part, but it's no worse than managing forages such as tall Ky-31 fescue for instance, and there are millions of acres of fescue growing, grazed fed and baled every year, inspite of the endophyte ergot possibilitiess--you just have to manage it. JG is the same way, except instead of endophyte, you watch nitrates.

Baling should be done at about 30-36" in height. It will easily grow up to 4 ft high, but much over 30-36", it becomes stemmy and tough. Around here, it's baled just before or at boot stage and your's will probably produce hay around 8% protein with no inputs at all--other than mother nature's rain.

Grazing it... One of the downsides is you cannot graze it really hard. If you do, you just won't have any. That's one of the ways people get rid of it--over stock it with cattle. They'll keep it eaten down and it will simply die out.

When I was young, we bought thousands of sq bales of JG out of the Trinity River bottoms and never had a problem and the cattle loved it.

There are some little test strips you can get to test for prussic acid and a chemical eye dropper test for nitrates and they do work as far as revealing the presence of PA and nitrates but they don't indicate how much. Most plants, including all bemudas can have prussic acid, but most are at a very low level, and letting hay cure for a month after baling releases the PA gases.. No amount of curing tho, will get rid of high nitrates in hay baled after a hard freeze or between the frost and hard freeze.
 
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