Tag Archives: management of annual ryegrass

Nitrogen and Carbon – Two More Benefits of Annual Ryegrass

In the last blog post, we addressed the myth of annual ryegrass being hard to manage. Follow good control procedures and it is not an issue whatsoever.

Two other assets of annual ryegrass: it creates a savings in expenditures for nitrogen during the season, and it adds considerably to the organic matter in your soil, thus boosts your carbon uptake in the soil as well.

First thing: nitrogen is a key to production. In years past, when cultivation was more popular, nitrogen was increasingly important and expensive. Now, with annual ryegrass as a cover crop, you can actually plan on reducing your nitrogen input. Why? Because annual ryegrass sequesters available nitrogen in the soil during it’s growth. Then, when it’s terminated in the spring, the residue gives up the stored nitrogen, often just in time for the new crop of corn. In many cases, having annual ryegrass decaying in the field means reducing or eliminating the nitrogen boost in June.

Secondly, as the annual ryegrass roots decay (after the cover crop is terminated in early spring), the result is more organic matter, which means more carbon sequestered in the soil, plus more food for a health soil biology.

Finally, when the roots decay, it leaves the earth more pliable, easier for rain to infiltrate, and easier for corn roots to follow. Because annual ryegrass roots grow to depths of five feet and more, it allows corn roots to access that same depth, beyond compaction and into more nutrients like P and K.

It’s amazing that cover cropping, despite it’s proven benefits, is still practiced so infrequently. While it’s great to learn that in some states, 10 percent or more of farmers are using cover crops, it’s discouraging that upwards of 90 percent are still relying on older ways: deep ripping of depleted soils and adding more fertilizer than would be needed if cover crops were utilized.

The Myth of Annual Ryegrass as a Cover Crop

They say, “It’s hard to control annual ryegrass”. As myths go, it’s tame. They used to say that “stepping on a crack would break your grandma’s back.” They used to think that spiders were bad luck.

For 20 years now, farmers in the Midwest have been planting annual ryegrass every year and there hasn’t been one example of it “getting away.” There have even been cases where the management guidelines have been ignored, but a second application of herbicide took care of that mistake.

Why do myths persist long after their cautionary value has been used up? Maybe two reasons. First, it takes a long time to turn customs around. Humans have a suspicious streak that dates back to when Saber Toothed Tigers were stalking us for food.

As far as annual ryegrass is concerned, you can believe your neighbor or the old fashioned academic…or you can try it yourself and find out that with modern science, you can dispel this old myth. Annual ryegrass is not hard to control. Click here for more info. 2016 ARG as a Cover Crop – 4 page.

Despite all the success of cover crops, despite endless good media and countless field days, the penetration of cover crops is still less than 10 percent of Midwest farm acreage. Why? Because, as hard as a myth is to dispel, it’s even harder to change habits. And when it comes to tilling the soil, it’s a habit born of generational work in the field and the efforts of corporate chemical companies to continue selling fertilizer.

Annual Ryegrass as a Forage Crop

The Alberta (Canada) Agriculture and Forestry department encourages livestock producers to plant annual ryegrass as a forage crop. Here’s a link to the entire article.

In essence, they say that ryegrass and other annual crops provide flexible feed sources for livestock. Ryegrass has the advantage of being a quick crop to grow to extend grazing in the fall and/or spring. It can be used as emergency forage if alfalfa is killed during the winter. It establishes quickly and produces a lot of forage in a short amount of time.Of course, excess can also be stockpiled as feed.

When managed intensively, ryegrass can be very productive, the article says. It goes on to say: The fact that the crop has little or no dormancy makes it an ideal fall pasture as it continues to grow and maintain its quality well into the fall, making them useful in extending the grazing season.

In areas with very cold winters, annual ryegrass will often be eliminated by winter weather. But if it does winter over, it grows back quickly in the spring for continued use by livestock. But if the crop will be replaced by corn, for example, eliminating the annual ryegrass is imperative. Click here to review the proper management of annual ryegrass in the spring.

Annual Ryegrass, a Question of Dormancy Answered

Annual ryegrass seed, as with most other seeds, has a protective device that maximizes its chances for successful germination. But it’s important to know about it, so that you can successfully grow the cover crop and be prepared to deal with any dormancy issues that arise.

Most ryegrass seed, used for cover cropping,is spread in the fall, after corn and soybean harvest. Sometimes, the weather or soil conditions are not ideal for seed germination. So, in some cases, the seed will lie dormant until better growing conditions exist.

But the idea of cover cropping is that you have fields covered year round, so as to prevent water and nutrient runoff. Thus, having your cover crop germinate in the fall is important.

Newer varieties of annual ryegrass have been developed for colder climates in the Midwest. And yet, getting the ryegrass to germinate and establish can be challenging, especially in late harvest years with sparse rainfall.

Those in more northern latitudes of the Corn Belt are now going to interseeding (seeding the cover crop into standing corn in the spring, when corn is not yet knee-high – v 5 or so.) That can be done with high clearance equipment or by plane. This method avoids the perils of late fall seeding, though it does continue to require good seed-to-soil contact and moisture for germinating.

Oregon State University, a trusted research institution for grass seed science, has published a short paper about dormancy. It’s available on our website near the top of the list of Research links, and if you CLICK HERE you will find it easy to read and perhaps helpful.

The Right Chemistry for Annual Ryegrass Termination

As mentioned in the last blog post, terminating annual ryegrass is a crucial step in the management of this cover crop. Here are some tips for making sure it’s done properly the first time:

1. Wait until the ryegrass has fully broken dormancy from the winter.

2. Apply in the daytime, when the temps are consistently above 55 degrees during the day. Best results occur when the soil temps are above 45 degrees. Apply during the day so as to give the plant a minimum of 4 hours of daylight – preferably in sunny weather…NOT with rain predicted – to absorb the herbicide (glyphosate).

3. Don’t scrimp on chemistry – apply glyphosate at 1.25-1.50 lb a.e./a with ammonium sulfate and surfactant before the end of April. Coming back again is both costly and risky…annual ryegrass can build a tolerance to glyphosate and you don’t want to tempt fate. Get it done right the first time.

Follow label directions carefully with respect to pH and mixing order. It is important when adding ammonium sulfate, buffering agents or water conditioners that they be added to the full spray tank of water and agitated for 3-5 minutes before adding the glyphosate. This is to ensure that the calcium, magnesium, iron and other dissolved minerals in the water do not interfere with the glyphosate activity.

5. Early termination of the cover crop makes control easier and reduces the amount of residue into which you’ll plant corn or soybeans. Early control also facilitates soil dry-down, allows for significant decomposition of annual ryegrass residue and release of nutrients for uptake by the corn or soybean crop.

6. Some growers have found it easier to plant into the annual ryegrass first and then apply a burndown. Warmer weather conditions improve glyphosate activity and planting into green vegetation has been successful, and is often easier than planting into a “half-dead” cover crop.

Annual Ryegrass Burndown this Spring

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Benjamin Franklin’s quip is just as sound today as it was when uttered 250 years ago.

The reason annual ryegrass has NOT become a problem in the Midwest, despite heavy use in the past 20 years as a cover crop, is because those using it have been careful in its use…or have been able to recover from their mistakes without too much extra trouble or expense.

So, what can go wrong?

You let it grow too long in the spring before killing it with an effective “burndown” with glyphosate or other herbicide. Ideally, spray the crop before it gets to the “joint” stag (6 inches or so in top growth)

You try to spray the crop before all the grass is in active growth mode. It’s important to wait until it has fully broken dormancy, perhaps a week after you notice the first growth, and after the daytime temperatures reach 55 – 60 degrees, and nighttime temperatures are consistently above 40 degrees.

You’ve used a cover crop mix and thus the dates to spray become variable because each plant (annual ryegrass, cereal rye, vetch, clover) recover from dormancy at different times.

You spray once but don’t kill it all off with one application. At that point, it pays to be vigilant. Letting a cover crop recover from one application of herbicide can give it tolerance to a second application. Thus, it’s very important to pay attention to the second application, in terms of products to use, timing of the application and assuring that the second burndown is effective.

For more details, contact neighbors or a trusted agronomist. And by all means, check out this free information about controlling annual ryegarss, from our website.2016 ARG as a Cover Crop – 4 page

More Buzz about the Value of Cover Crops

“The good news is, soil will improve every year you grow a cover crop,” said Dan Towery, a crop consultant, and owner of Ag Conservation Solutions, living in West Lafayette, Ind.. “How soon you see measurable yield improvement depends on field history and what limiting factors, such as weather, are present in a year. For example, soils that are low in organic matter will benefit faster from cover crops.”

His comments are part of a longer article in the Farm Journal online. Click here to view the whole article.

Ken Ferrie is also interviewed for the article. Ferrie, Farm Journal’s Field Agronomist said “It might take many years to make big changes in soil health, but in some situations, you might see improvement (earlier than that.). For example, he cited a study in which annual ryegrass as a cover crop improved carbon content, bulk density and water infiltration IN THE FIRST YEAR!.

“As with any new practice, you’ll be eager to determine whether cover crops are having an impact,” Ferrie says. “Your soil physical provides a benchmark so you can follow up later and see if soil health is improving.”

Another farmer and rancher, Gabe Brown, talked about the benefits of cover crops in North Dakota. “You should use covers to address your resource concerns,” advises Brown. For the past two decades, he’s used cover crops to increase diversity, build organic matter, and improve water infiltration and the water-holding capacity of his soils.

“We look at each field separately and determine what the resource concern of each field is,” he says.

But make sure you choose a cover crop with a lot of forethought and advice from others with experience. Otherwise, you may be inviting failure or added problems. “Cover crops take more management, not less,” said Mike Plumer, who died last Christmas after dedicating 50 years to soil health and farmer education. “Farmers have to learn how cover crops react on their own fields.”

Plumer advised producers to start small with cover crops – perhaps a 20 acre plot or so, before “before incorporating on the entire farm.”

Trick or Treat – Annual Ryegrass as a Cover Crop Delivers Both

Growing a cover crop like annual ryegrass has immense benefits, as you have no doubt learned. Thus the “treat” this Halloween is in the form of tangible revenue that growers receive from annual planting of cover crops:

Improved soil conditions – without tillage, soil health continues to grow. With cover crops, that growth is accellerated
Fewer inputs – less tillage, fewer passes over the soil, less compaction and fewer dollars spent on fertilizers, like nitrogen
Deeper soil profile, opened up by the deep, penetrating roots of annual ryegrass, allows better access to moisture in dry years and migration of deeper layers of nutrients
More profit – when the soil is happy, crops are happier, and production increases.

The “trick” of annual ryegrass, as with any cover crop, is learning the details of new management techniques. The seeding of cover crops and the management of annual ryegrass in particular, in the spring, are very important. If managed poorly, annual ryegrass can become a pest, a weed. But as you learn the tricks, management becomes almost second nature.

For more information about growing and managing annual ryegrass, click here.

Annual Ryegrass and other Cover Crops – New Tips on Termination

Admittedly, this is late for the 2017 burndown season. And yet, it’s important to share while it’s topical…managing cover crops is a “growing” interest and we’ll keep an eye on posting an update early next year.

Mike Plumer is the key driver for this article, published a couple months ago by No-Till Farmer magazine. It was taken largely from a seminar Mike did at the National No-Till Conference in St. Louis, earlier in the year. Check out the whole article. It has great tips about managing burndown when the cover crop includes annual ryegrass in a “cocktail mix”. It also looks at the issue of annual ryegrass varieties, and how important it is to know the source of the seed. Different varieties emerge from winter dormancy, for example, which provides problems when trying to kill it in a timely fashion.

Finally, Mike’s discussion covers the subject of killing annual ryegrass once it has reached the “joint” stage or beyond, when control with generic glyphosate will not be enough. Click here to see the entire article.

Glyphosate and Monsanto Clear The Hurdle

An alternative health blogger known as Food Babe has been going toe to toe with Monsanto for years, trying to get traction with consumers on the dangers of glyphosate…Monsanto’s RoundUp.

She has postulated that glyphosate, even in minute traces per billion, causes cancer. But in a recent rebuttal from Snopes.com (an independent, myth-busting organization made up mainly of scientific journalists), they report that the scare tactics leveled by Food Babe are “FALSE”.

The federal EPA agency began looking at glyphosate in 1985, and by 1993 concluded it is carcinogenic. They talked about the herbicide’s ability to become waterborne and thus get into drinking water, as well as foods that live in soil exposed to glyphosate.

Since then, it was shown that studies linking cancer to glyphosate relied on concentrations of the chemical that were way out of proportion with amounts that are used in agricultural applications. Recent tests that show potentially adverse effects at lower exposures are also suspect, as peer review has raised questions about scientific methods and data validity.

In March of 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer said that glyphosate “may have some carcinogenic potential” but, the consensus among the world’s regulatory agencies, according to the Snopes.com article, is that glyphosate “is safe for consumption and non-carcinogenic at environmentally relevant levels.”

Consequently, the World Health Organization concluded: “Glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet.”

Click here to review the Snopes.com article.

Ryegrass Cover Crop

A Cover Crop that Builds Soil and Boosts Production