Division of Extension
The fourth Focus on Forage webinar in the 2026 series, Focus on Managed Grazing, features research updates on forage cover crop species and varieties, cover crop forage quality, and factors affecting the success of diverse forage mixes.
Maximizing your forage supply is key to having a well-fed, productive herd. One way to accomplish this is by identifying and incorporating summer annual and brassica forages in your crop rotation.
There are multiple ways grasses fit into a dairy system from field to bunk, whether seeking overseeding options, more resilience when applying manure, or more biodiversity in in-field ecosystems.
Increased awareness of ryegrass as a potential forage has occurred in the upper Midwest. Ryegrasses are excellent, high quality forage, establishing rapidly and producing good yield in the seeding year if cool (50 to 75°F) exist and adequate moist is available. Ryegrasses have low tolerance for water stress. Several ryegrass types exist and species within […]
Late-summer/fall establishment of grass is often desired in the Midwest. Most farmers do not realize how much fall seeding date affects the yield of the grasses the next year. We seeded six forage grasses at several late summer dates at three sites in Wisconsin (River Falls, Arlington, and Lancaster) over three years. Seeding dates were […]
The grazing movement is, both literally and figuratively, a grass-roots movement. Many livestock producers in the northern USA have recently moved from predominantly confinement feeding systems to grazing systems. Most of them use some form of management-intensive rotational grazing in which livestock are periodically rotated from one paddock to another, allowing the plants in each […]
