Early season pasture management and weed control is essential now

Early Season Pasture Management and Weed Control- this has been, by all cattlemen’s reckoning, the worst winter in memory. It rained all October so that little or no ryegrass was planted. The ryegrass that was planted never had a single good day of weather for growth. What seemed like a good amount of hay in September ran out in January. Cattle have been cold, wet and stressed since the first week in December without a break. These cows have begun to calve without much extra flesh or body condition. As a result, we now have a lot of thin cows, with nursing calves and few body reserves to call upon. Still, the cool weather hangs on and the warm season grasses are late in emerging and growing. 2010 may be a year in which cows are very late to breed back for next season. Poor body condition, or thinness, is the most common reason for failure of cows to breed back and complete an annual calving cycle.

What can you do? Many producers have used up their good options. There’s little hay left. Concentrate feeds are expensive and difficult to feed to large numbers of cows in an effective manner. The time and labor requirements are great, but for some they are the option of necessity. Regardless of how you got your herd to survive to this point, getting the earliest and maximum production from your warm season pastures is essential. This will mean investing some money into your pastures for fertilizer and herbicides.

Research has shown that weeds rob you of production and reduce the quality of your pastures. An application of early spring fertilizer will stimulate Bermuda or Bahia grass to early production. A spring application of a recommended broadleaf herbicide is more effective in weed control than a summer application. By fertilizing and removing the competition early, pastures are productive earlier and longer.

Anyone who has bought fertilizer recently will know that the cost of plant nutrients is still expensive. This is true of all plant nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potash). It is more economically critical than ever to make sure that the forage grass is the beneficiary of the fertilizer rather than weeds. Controlling pasture weeds will increase the efficiency of a fertilizer application. A study conducted at the Texas A&M Research Station in Overton, Texas compared a spring application of 2,4-D plus fertilizer to a plot that received fertilizer but no herbicide. When harvested, both yielded similar tonnages of total plant matter. However, the plot without herbicide produced more tons of weeds than grass.

Many plants that grow in our native pastures also have the potential to poison cattle. Most of the time these plants will be in a pasture for years and will never be eaten by an animal. If the cow doesn’t eat it, it can’t hurt the cow. However, certain conditions such as drought, overgrazing or starvation will cause cattle to consume plants not in their normal diet. A hungry cow will eat lots of things that it normally wouldn’t.

Curiosity will cause certain individual cows to sample toxic plants. Calves are born knowing that they have to eat, but not what to eat. They learn this by observing their mother and their herd mates. A group of young heifers or steers, confined alone, will often experiment with eating plants not in their normal diet.

How sick the cow becomes could depend which plant it eats, how much it eats, which part of the plant is consumed, growing conditions of the plant, age of the animal and many other factors. To be safe, try to learn which plants are potentially toxic
and how to recognize them.

Plants that have shown toxicity to cattle include: pokeberry, jimson weed, bracken fern, cocklebur, horsenettle, nightshade and perilla mint. Two common toxic weeds are sicklepod and hemp sesbania (coffee weed). All parts of the sicklepod plant are toxic whether the plant is green or dry. Hemp sesbania (coffee weed) has most of the toxin in its seeds.

Cattle tend to eat hemp sesbania most often in late summer, fall and winter when forage grass is scarce. The coffee senna plant is very toxic, but fortunately is less common in our area. It resembles sicklepod, but its seed pods are straight and flattened. Perilla mint is a small plant that tends to grow in pastures, along roadways and around old home sites. It often shows a distinctive purple coloration on the underside of the leaf. Perilla mint is often consumed by “curious” young animals.

We have many excellent pasture herbicides available to us. Identify the weeds that you have present. Determine which herbicides are labeled in their management. If applicable, select the least costly per acre herbicide that will effectively control the weed. As in the management of any pest, proper timing of application is just as important as which pesticide to use. Always read the label and follow all instructions and restrictions when using any pesticide

Most ornamental plants are toxic to some extent to farm animals. Some common toxic The most common cause of poisoning by ornamental plants is by accident. The homeowner will prune back a yard plant or remove some of its limbs. If the limbs or the foliage is thrown over the fence into the pasture, a curious cow will often try to see what it tastes like. It only takes a mouthful of oleander or lantana leaves to cause real problems to a cow. To be safe, treat all ornamental plants as if they were toxic to livestock.