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Oats and Turnips
Dry-Year Grazing
Just Improved
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Article and photos by Curt Arens
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Turnips and oats growing together on a Nebraska
farm are providing forage for beef cows and calves over a longer
season than pastures...even in drought years.
Tim Nissen, a young northeast Nebraska farmer,
keeps his 85-head cow herd on this inexpensive annual grazing
system from early spring until mid-winter. He likes the labor-saving
idea of his cows harvesting their own forage for as many months
as possible. In late summer he even grazes his beef cow “harvesting
machine” in cornfields.
The upside of this alternative gazing system has
been low inputs, efficient utilization of labor, and the ability
to take advantage of spotty precipitation in drought years.
So successful has the grazing system been that
Nissen plans to convert more of his cropland to grazing and
expand his cow herd. He raises just over 100 acres of corn and
another 100 acres of oats. By using oats, turnips, and corn
as grazing crops, he has extended his grazing season and shortened
his hay-feeding period.
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One of Tim Nissen’s cows grazing turnips
late last summer during an extended dry period.
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Crazy Idea
It all started pretty much by accident in 2000 when
70 acres of his soybeans were completely hailed out in July. He and
his father, Victor Nissen, quickly searched for adaptable forages
that could still provide some production that same year on hailed
ground.
On the advice of Terry Gompert at the University of
Nebraska Extension, they skeptically planted oats and purple-top turnips
together. The idea sounded crazy to the two men, but as turnips and
oats emerged in late fall, they were able to graze 70 head of cattle
for 45 days. “We strip-grazed the cows, moving the electric fence
every week, allowing them to have a new patch,” Tim said.
“We had tremendous grazing that fall,” he
said. “We should’ve started grazing sooner in the year because
the leaves of the turnips froze, and the plants lost quality.”
He and his father were sufficiently impressed with the unusual forage
combination to try it again the following year.
Low-Cost Seeding
In 2001 they put 40 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer on
30 acres of cornstalk ground in early April and seeded the field with
four bushels of oats and three pounds of turnips per acre. On most
of that land they incorporated the seed with a rotary hoe. Some was
surface-seeded to be rained in.
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Cattle on a field of oats and turnips in a very
dry year.
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They hayed the oats before dough stage and grazed
out the stubble for two weeks. After a month of regrowth, from
early August to mid-September, they strip-grazed the oats and
turnips again, this time moving electric fencing daily, allowing
cows and calves new feed every day.
After three years of grazing oats and turnips
in different situations, Tim said he is sold on the companion
crop system. “It’s very versatile,” he said.
“Oats build the soil better than soybeans and provide good
early season forage. When pastures run short, the turnips kick
in and get the herd through the late summer grazing season.”
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Drought Forage
In the unusually difficult 2002 season, drought and
grasshoppers raised havoc with his turnips. Even so, he got nineteen
days of early grazing for his entire herd in June. After a few rains
in early August, while his own cows grazed standing corn, he was able
to take in nine cow-calf pairs from a neighbor and graze them on his
turnips.
Tim extends his grazing system by pasturing cows on
select paddocks of standing corn in mid to late summer, when ears
are set on the stalks. As a way to give pastures and annual forage
crops a rest, grazing corn provides a palatable, cost effective forage...and
the cows do most of the work themselves.
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Recognizing that cows on standing corn need to be limit-fed,
he crowds them together tightly with electric fencing, controlling
the amount of corn they are able to graze on a daily basis.
Free-choice hay is available for the cows while they graze the
corn to help prevent overeating of the corn.
Rotational Corn Grazing
After letting cows into a new paddock of corn, Tim works for
about a half-hour to install fence for the next day’s allotment.
To place the wire fencing at a new location, he drives through
the standing corn with an ATV, making a path for the next location
of the fence wire. He uses poly-wire electric fence and step-in
fence posts because they are easy to remove and reinstall in
a new area.
The cow herd is the lifeblood of Tim’s operation.
He plans to increase his herd to 110 cow-calf pairs. He also
uses a rotational grazing system on his native pastures and
believes he can get more grazing days per acre than ever before.
Cows are typically rotated around the paddocks,
allowing each paddock a period of rest before grazing it again.
Annual forage crops such as oats, turnips, and corn are just
part of the rotation, filling in the voids.
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Tim Nissen notes that cattle will eat both the
tops and the turnips if they can get them.
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Pencil Profit
The result has been an unqualified success for Tim,
who is most concerned with profitability per acre. Even converting
16 acres of former cropland to pasture has penciled out for him because
he is able to graze more cows on the same pastures for longer periods
of time. This extends the grazing season and reduces the number of
days he must feed the more expensive hay through the winter months.
Last year was a real test of his rotational grazing
system. The region had only 60 percent of its normal summer rain,
and still he said his pastures “looked great.”
Tim’s father started farming this land in 1956.
Tim began taking over farming responsibilities after his high school
graduation in 1992. He now farms 500 acres, including pasture land.
Real Value
His decision to remain on the family farm “has
to do with nature,” he said. “When you partner with Mother
Nature, it’s a special way of living. Society doesn’t place
a lot of value on it, but to me it’s priceless.
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Tim Nissen, left, and his father, Victor Nissen.
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“It all starts with the financial end,” he explained.
He mostly depends on his “85 friends” in the pasture
and the harvesting they do on his land to make a profit. He
has his cows calving in April and May, in an attempt to keep
birthing times in sync with nature’s way of doing things.
Calves are weaned in November, when they are placed
in his feedlots for backgrounding on a diet of hay, corn, and
oats. He markets his feeder calves through a local livestock
auction in mid-March.
To this young farmer, there is nothing better
than a pickup ride to check cows on his grazing land. Of course,
in his case, nearly all his crop ground is grazing land at one
time or another throughout the year.
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Tim keeps the bottom line in focus because he realizes
that a business mindset is the way to a long life on the farm. He
is accomplishing that in ways that also benefit the environment.
