Cover crops can be used to provide additional feed for cattle, as well as to hold and improve the soil. What and when you plant may depend on your climate and growing season.

In North Dakota

Kevin Sedivec, professor and specialist of rangeland management at North Dakota State University (NDSU), says in his region it’s mainly late-season cover crops, which are often a mix of cool-season and warm-season grasses.

“Another option that’s often more doable and affordable is winter cereals like winter rye, winter triticale or winter wheat,” he says. “These are typically cheaper, for seed, than most cover crops and easy to establish. They don't require as much moisture in the fall."

Basically, those are the two options — winter cereals or a cover crop mix, Sedivec says. A drawback to winter cereals for fall grazing is they need moisture to grow. Without it, you may not get a lot of growth in the fall.

“Most of the growth is in early spring, which gives you something to graze in the spring that you normally wouldn't have,” he says. “We graze some of our winter cereals in the fall, but don’t get a lot of biomass at that time — maybe only 500 to 1,000 pounds (lb.) and a week or two weeks of grazing. This year, with drought conditions, we got no grazing, so it all depends on the year.”

A cover crop that you could plant a little earlier might be more ideal, depending on your cropping system, he says, adding that a really nice cover crop contains three or four plant species.

“The big push today is for multispecies cover-crop mixes that contain eight or more species,” he says. “This is great for diversity, but will also be more expensive.”

Producers are basically looking for something to feed — and don’t want to spend a lot of money — to reduce input costs.

“A simple mix I’ve used a lot includes a brassica — turnip or radish, a cool-season forage grain like forage oats or barley, and a warm-season species like a millet or a sorghum-sudangrass,” Sedivec says. “This provides a warm-season, cool-season and forb.”

Sedivec says he doesn’t like to add a legume when seeding a late-season cover crop.

“Most people want a legume, but that’s the most expensive part of a mix, and in summer and late fall legumes produce very little biomass,” he says. “They don’t grow quickly, so they are not cost-effective.”

While people want legumes for the nitrogen benefits, that’s not as important as the biomass produced, Sedivec says. “We want something that produces a cover for the land that can be grazed by cattle. You can do this for about $10 to $12 per acre, versus $20 to $25 with a legume.”

Full-season cover crops can be seeded in May or June, allowing a legume to pay for itself because it can produce more biomass, he says. “But to simply cover and protect the ground and feed the cows, you don’t need the legume. The three-way mix is a cheaper seed mix that is usually easy to establish and provides more biomass.

“It takes moisture to establish and grow a crop, and we don’t see this talked about enough,” he continues. "We can seed cover crops all we want, but see more failures than success if the moisture is not there.”

Unless you have a pivot irrigation system, it can be risky, he says.

“For fall grazing you can plant a forage oat-sorghum-sudan mix in June or July. When it reaches optimum growth and nutrient content, you can windrow and save it for fall grazing,” Sedivec says. “We did a study that showed this forage in a windrow rarely loses nutritional quality until it starts to deteriorate from winter weather. Once cut, these forages stay at that quality level over a 60-day period.”

This is one of the most cost-effective methods for winter feeding; you don’t have the cost of baling, hauling it and hauling it back out to the cattle.

“The only negative is that for the first week after cutting, those big loose windrows are at risk from wind blowing it around, until it settles,” he says. He recommends combining two or three small windrows into one big one to prevent as much blowing and to make it easier for cattle to find the windrow.

“We grazed through snow a foot deep on our windrows,” he shares. “In Canada they’ll have deeper snow on their windrows, but simply open those up, and the cows graze right down the row. They ingest quite a bit of moisture, too, and don’t need to drink as much water.”

In Michigan

Jeremy Sweeten has a farm and cow-calf operation in Michigan raising grass-finished beef, utilizing adaptive grazing and direct marketing. He also works as a consultant for Understanding Ag, a regenerative ag company, and has a lot of previous experience as a sales agronomist for cover crop and forage seeds.

“It all depends on your goal and what you want to do with a cover crop,” Sweeten says. “To graze cover crops, planning ahead is important, especially on row-crop acreage, because of chemical carryover.”

Sweeten advises graziers read chemical labels. Rainfall, soil types, pH, etc., all can affect carryover, so following label directions is crucial.

“You don’t want to seed the field and then find the outside two rows might grow, but everything else is dead,” he says.

For grazing, he says, a diverse polyculture or mix of cover crops provides more nutrient density and a more balanced diet for livestock. Diversity is important, along with the right mix for the situation. Don’t seed a summer annual in October for fall grazing.

Cover crops won’t be an option for everyone.

“We almost never recommend taking out perennial pasture to put in a cover crop. It’s hard to beat good perennial pasture,” Sweeten acknowledges. “Some people ask if they should interseed a cover crop into a perennial pasture to get more nutrients, but that’s a lot of expense to plant an annual into a pasture to compete against a perennial plant.”

Annuals are best-suited as cover crops, to cover bare ground and protect it from degenerating effects of wind, sun (that kills soil biology) and erosion until something permanent can grow there.

Species recommendations can be all over the board, Sweeten says, “but in a cool climate during growing season, generally we want a mixture of cool- and warm-season grasses — like cereal grains, summer annuals, sorghum-sudangrass, etc. — and legumes, which can be both cool- and warm-season species. This gives us the four functional groups.”

Every year is a little different. With a variety of species, some will do well even when some of the others might not.

“Our latitude here is 46° north. On average, about seven or eight years out of 10, summer annuals work well,” Sweeten says. “If we have a cool summer, the cereal grains shine and the summer annuals stall out.

“If you have too many brassicas (turnips, radishes, etc.) in a mix, it may not work as well,” he continues. “We like to keep brassica seeding rates between a pound and a pound and a half per acre. They are high-protein and high-moisture, and cattle can get pretty washy (loose feces). If they are scouring, they are not gaining weight.”