GRASS IS NOT A WEED

One of the less desirable legacies of the "no till" generation in progressive farming is the basic concept that "grass is a weed".

No till -- the ubiquitous minimum tillage process that burns off all green growth (previous crop and weed growth) with a "RoundUp"  application, allowing planting without tillage shortly after spraying with a specially-adapted drill or planter, first took over soybean planting several years ago, with over 75% of soybean acreage now planted this way.   Since then, the innovation has been adapted to the  planting of corn, and the seeding of alfalfa.

"No Till" as a mechanical concept was heralded as a great device for eliminating soil erosion that occurs from wind or rain action on plowed or disked ground.    It also found favor with farmers who saw the elimination of tillage as a great time and fuel saver, allowing them to complete planting of ever-larger acreages within the spring calendar for maximum length growing seasons.

"Round Up" is a glyphosate compound, developed to kill grasses and broadleafs both, with no soil carryover in the years following application.   The "no carryover" character of "Round Up" (which is a trademark of the Monsanto Corporation) was an incredible boon to agriculture, given the increase in environmental activism which had linked Atrazine and other popular conventional herbicides to the ecological degradation of ground water and native streams providing farm field drainage.

Only problem-- "Round Up" kills Grass.    And the broad "grass" species actually encompasses a majority share of the crops we grow: corn (zea mays) is actually a "grass"--, wheat, barley, oats, rye, spelts, hybrid crosses like Triticale, are all "grass"-- and then you have the favored edible grasses themselves: brome, timothy, orchardgrass, bluegrass, fescues, ryegrass, ie, what progressive ag had increasingly called "horse and beef cow hay".

So to get around the problem of "Round Up"s effective killing of the grass spectrum, biotechnology in the form of gene insertion (what the industry now calls "traited varieties") offers "Round Up Ready" genes, that plant breeders inserted first into corn, to avoid the setback of stunting of corn planted within a "No Till" framework, and then into alfalfa.      

GRASS FEEDS MOST OF THE WORLD

Outside of the USA, most of animal agriculture revolves around grass, as the basic forage for all ruminant species, including cattle, goats, water buffalo and sheep-- the world's milk producers.    Grass is also edible by non ruminants like horses, pigs, and free-range poultry that have adapted to grass habitat.   Llamas, alpacas, camels, elephants and rhinos all eat grass.    One some level you could say the entire animal and human race lives on the conversion of grass to milk, meat, and four-hoofed rides.

"Grass" is nature's bandaid to a scarrable earth.   Nature abhors bare ground, due to erosion and evaporation, and will cover it with grass wherever the soil fertility and seed availability promotes it as a solution.   In the absence of grass fertility or seed, nature's second choice is the woody-stemmed weeds, and in the absence of disturbance by man or beast, trees follow the weeds that follow the grass.    It is an ascending cycle. 

Grass as a specie has a tremendous usefulness in that it captures and stores sunlight energy in a digestible fiber structure that ruminants and adapted non-ruminants can absorb; it also produces digestible protein, and its tissue will contain mineral elements necessary to life that its roots draw from the topsoil and subsoil.   It is a consumer of nitrogen, thus is an able recycler of the urine and manure of all animal species dropped on the ground surface, as well as the soil nitrogen that the companion legume species (alfalfa, clovers, trefoil, peas) will release from root nodules.

As grass plants mature, the store of energy and protein and minerals contained in the plant are transported to the seed head, and concentrated there, leaving its carbon residue within the stalk ("straw") which in earlier times was a primary cooking and heating fuel.   Thus, if the vegetative grass was not consumed by any animal prior to maturity, its seed could be harvested for animal or human consumption after maturity.    "Grass" is a very thrifty species of plant-- with little extra preparation it can be stored indefinitely and retain its nutritive goodness.

THE RETURN OF GRASS TO THE CATTLE INDUSTRY

In the petrochemical farming era, usually dated as starting from the end of World War II and expanding into the present day, we replaced back-breaking hand labor with mechanical devices in agriculture, first as electric lights and tractors, later with milking machines and feed conveyors and harvestors and all other equipment which runs on petroleum.   But we did not stop there-- we also replaced the mechanical cultivation of weed-sensitive row crops with herbicides and pesticides.

The labor and fuel savings of crop chemicals we great at first, influencing farmers to switch much of their pasture acreage to corn and soybeans.    The entire feeding industry for farm animals became the province of corn first, alfalfa second, soybeans third-- the acres of pasture and the rotated fields of small feed grains declined.   "Corn was King" to cattlemen, and "Alfalfa was his Queen" in the eyes of dairymen.

But as suburbia pushed out into the river bottom land surrounding the cities, and dairying was forced further abroad, the utilization of more erodable acres sent dairymen seeking out those who still remembered pasturage, and the more highly developed grass varieties from pastoral lands like Holland and Denmark were discovered.    Prior to the recent oil price surge that has sent all petrochemical farm products (fuel, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides) into ever-higher price orbits, many dairymen had chosen to liberate their cows from a labor-intense confinement and return them to the land to harvest their own feed and haul their own manure.    They seeded cropland back to grass, and the cows moved outdoors to eat it.    For those who grasped all the nuances of this change, dairy farm profitability returned dramatically.

But this is where it runs up against "no till".   The best high energy grasses require a higher level of organic matter in the soils-- the capturing of all the sunlight requires more dense seedings in the pastures-- the trapping of all the dew and rainfall and snow fall requires a more spongelike soil structure.    "No Till" is not providing all the soil building elements that you expect from a process that is promoted as "conservation tillage and erosion control".    It is not building us a better soil-- and the proof is found in areas like N Indiana, where "No Till" was pioneered and where crop yields have fallen after continuous No Tilling, and where "Round Up" resistant weed varieties have already been identified in as little as seven years' continuous use.

THE CONUNDRUM OF RETURNING TO TILLAGE WITH HIGHER FUEL PRICES

You will likely ask-- "How can I afford to go back to tillage when No Till saves me so much fuel?"  Beyond that, is the argument that the "traited" seeds have the highest recorded per acre yields.   But the answer is more complex than a single input cost or a single measure of crop bushels.

Andre Voisin indicated that it can take a soil structure seventeen years to rebuild after tillage.  As a pioneer in modern grass culture, he was in favor of establishing perennial mixed pastures that could be managed by rotational grazing with surplus grass harvested by machine and stored for winter and drought periods.      

Under perennial seedings, the plant species competition sends roots deeper into the subsoil as well as more densely through the topsoil.    These root channels create pathways for nutrients moving both down (as nitrogen) or up (as absorbed by plant growth) but the main impact of a growing rootmass is in its water holding capacity.     With rotational grazing, the vegetative mass of the plant is eaten off by the cow prior to seeding, thus the plant forces itself to regrow and feed the root that matched the eaten leaf.    If eaten too low (ie, losing the bottom leaf on the stalk, which enables photosynthesis capture of sunlight energy) the attached root dies, and adds to the organic mass decomposing in the soil, feeding the microbes and insects that also carry off any decomposing bits of matter on the soil surface (urine, manure, wind-blown seeds, chaff, dead carrion, etc).   Apparently, left untouched, this mass can reach its maximum productive capacity after seventeen years of lying undisturbed by plowing or chiseling.     

This does not mean this soil is not being tilled, however.   A growing microbial population invites a growing worm population, to burrow up and down, bringing slag from the surface down into the soil and subsoil, creating channels that store rainfall, aerating the roots of plants (most desired plant structures do require some oxygen), digesting material and expelling it in a more root-friendly form that adds to available plant food supplies.

The reality is, however, that a well-developed soil contains tons of feed elements that will allow us a superior yield from an annual crop.    So "crop rotation" enters the picture, as a procedure that allows us to harvest some of nature's stored bounty.    The demand for annual crop production appearing profitable, leads to periodic tillage of established forage acreage, and the forage crop needed for our animals is rotated to the land requiring rejuvenation from prior annual crops.

So while tillage breaks the soil formation cycle, it releases soil nutrients to a crop, and also has the crop rotation advantage of knocking back any accumulating parasitic insects or plants that perennial management allowed to accumulate.    

For the farmer with animals, the insertion of perennial forage acreage into his farm means the percentage of his land requiring tillage annually is small--and the necessity to protect tilled acreage from erosion also remains proportionately small (perennial forages are the protection against soil loss that nature designed for us).

WHAT NO TILL MAY BE DOING TO SOIL

Why have crop yields fallen where continuous No Till has been used?    First, for the same reason  crop yields can fall on continuously tilled fields-- it does not totally prevent erosion of topsoil, as most of the soil remains exposed between rows.   Even when prior crop residue is left on top of the soil, it is not anchored to the soil (as it might be from incorporation tillage) and is subject to rain, wind and sunlight degradation, rather than immediate microbial action.

Second, with row crops, and annual travel of heavy machinery across the soil surface, and all crop residue left on the soil surface, compaction still occurs.    The topsoil is buried under a layer of decomposing residues, acting like a blanket, absorbing much of the nitrogen-fixing rainfall-- the only residue returning to the topsoil is the root masses left behind by the crop harvested, which take added nitrogen to break down.   The subsoil is never reached by living root mass, as the annual crops do not live long enough for its roots to effectively reach subsoil minerals.

"No Till" is the latest in techniques that keep farmers thinking in monocultural crop terms.  It may be safe to say that it is a practice followed more by "crop farmers" than "cattleman farmers", as the production of animal manure does require incorporation of manure by some form of tillage (even the injection of liquid manure by industrial sewage machinery is in effect a partial tillage of the fields incorporating the fecal residues).     The only manure form that future legislation may allow for surface spreading is going to be compost, where the nitrogen runoff and odor issues are neutralized by the prior composting process.

Under No Till, the temptation is great to go corn after corn after corn.   You have "Round Up Ready" traited seed, that is also "Root Guard" (corn borer resistant) traited seed, and you just fertilize at a level calculated to feed the crop to the desired yield.   If you can afford the inputs, recently estimated by MSU extension as reaching $600 per acre for a target 200 bushel yield, you will harvest a crop (all you need is a $3.00/bushel price to break even, thus a $4.00/bushel price contract is a $200/acre profit).     With monocultural cropping, you only need a single set of the farm equipment that matches your crop-- whereas with crop rotation, you may need multiple sets of either planting or harvesting equipment, and of course, different storage and transport.

But a continuous crop year after year allows for all its predators to congregate in your soil and in your field.    You may have the anti- corn borer trait, but how about all the other insects and animals attracted to corn?   As the heavier corn root mass accumulates as a decomposing mass in the topsoil, is added nitrogen required to break it down?   (We tend to just fertilize the crop, not the soil processes underneath.)    How about the weeds that face the same herbicides every year, can they mutate to develop resistance to a constantly appearing challenger?   That has occurred with prior herbicides (and pesticides) and will occur with "Round Up" also.

Basically, what started out as topsoil is gradually relegated to a subsoil status, and the soil ends up layered in the same way a compacted field with a hardpan denying roots access to the subsoil functioned in Grandpa's day.    The new topsoil composed of mostly plant residue with no active microbial population (we did spray with Round Up, plus we have all these traited genes that kill off known predators and their fellow travelling organisms) is inadequate as a crop supporting medium, being relatively unformed (the topsoil and subsoils we farm took hundreds if not thousands of years to form as a continuous biological process).    The logical conclusion is, this is not a "sustainable" production practice guaranteeing maintenance of soil fertility and crop yields both.

IF YOU HAVE CATTLE, IT IS TIME TO RETURN TO GRASS

There is nothing inherently good or bad about corn or soybeans, if you have animals to feed, except as consumers and research scientists are increasingly concluding that grass-fed animals may be healthier, and the food products derived from them healthier for us as well.

If you wish to read up on these issues, follow all the links you can find on the internet (if you like to read, consider Michael Pollan's "the Omnivore's Dilemma" as a good summary of all you will find affecting the consumer views of agriculture today).   But the main point is, we got into "No Till" to conserve soil without sacrificing yields, but it was a technology based upon relatively cheap petrochemical fuels, fertilizers and sprays.    Now we find the petrochemical price increases have increased more than crop prices, thus sustaining high yields from them is less profitable.

Crop rotations requiring tillage to incorporate residues and manures, within a feeding program that is reoriented to focus upon higher energy forage feeding, away from heavy grain feeding, is more profitable under today's changing economics.    More than anything you do, it allows you to return to "biological farming", away from the progressive "chemical farming" that is coming under attack from both consumers and input costs.    Instead of crossing every acre you own every year with a No Till planter and No Till drill, you can farm 25% of your acreage and generate the same income at less external input expense, leaving 75% of your acreage in perennial forages and single pass minimum till annual forages.     What you might lose in per acre bushels, you will gain in a more nutrient dense animal feed harvested. 

It all has to do with sticking to a simple design:  the Sun is our energy source, the Grass is our solar collector, the Animals are our "conversion factor".    What you spend now on chemical inputs to insure a harvest on 100% of your land, you can now divert 75% of that cost into other unmet needs that would improve your farm (a better way to handle and process manure as a crop nutrient, for instance).

THE JOE GRIESER METHOD

Joe is a relatively new dairyman, started part time at Clarksville MI with 20 cows on a 20 acre farm, renting nearby cropland converted for pasture, buying most of his grain.    He moved to Lakeview to an 80 acre farm, has grown his herd to 40 cows, rented enough land to now grow all his feed.    His herd is managed under rotation grazing.    This year he grew 14 acres of corn for silage (using a Masters Choice high digestible variety) and planted an additional acreage for crib corn as his grain feed base, also growing spelts as the next ingredient.

Joe read that extension bulletin "what it costs to grow corn right" and decided he could not afford to grow corn that way as a new farmer and expanding dairyman.   So here is what he did:  (a) put all his winter manure on his oldest pasture, (b) plowed up his oldest pasture, to incorporate the winter manure, (c) spread 100# ammonium nitrate, (d) disked it once, (e) planted the MC corn, (f) cultivated twice after emergence, (g) stepped back and watched it grow.   Measuring all costs, he has $200 per acre in that corn field.    County yield is 100 bushel, so if all he got was county yield equivalent, he only has $2.00/bushel invested.    The interesting thing was, viewing this field in late summer, after the rains stopped, and all his neighbor's irrigated corn was curling, Joe's field is deep green, uncurled and healthy.    Why?    Because it was a rotation crop, not a year after year, continuous corn on corn, grain yield focused crop.    This corn will make silage, and it will test 12% protein, rather than 8%, because, instead of being "traited", its breeding focus was on being a high quality animal forage and a healthy plant, and it grew on soil that had a higher level of organic content than any of the neighboring fields.

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(Mich Livestock Service is a Dealer for Byron Seeds, which is a Distributor for Barenbrug high energy grasses, Kingfisher forage alfalfas, and Masters Choice high digestible corns, as well as all those hard to find small grains and forage brassicas that the Weaver Brothers of Byron Seeds have sourced all across the country) 

We are sponsoring a Byron Seed winter meeting at Elsie MI (Tyler's Diner on Main St) Tuesday December 9th from 10am to 3pm, including a buffet lunch.    Please RSVP to our office: phone (800) 359-1693 to reserve a seat as space is limited.     There will also be a Byron Seed meeting this winter in western Michigan, as well as many locations in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio.