How to Rejuvenate a Pasture

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• published: 29 May 2014
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Justin Fruechte, Forage and Cover Crop Specialist at Millborn Seeds, discusses the steps to successfully rejuvenate a pasture. --- Justin Fruechte: Hello I'm Justin Fruechte, Forage Specialist with Millborn Seeds. I came out here tonight to show you about the step by step process when you have to rejuvenate a pasture. It's a common question we get a lot of times at Millborn: If you've got old sod-bound grass that's just unproductive, how do you make it better? And really in this situation, this is a paddock that I know was overgrazed and abused for quite a while. Mainly it was just used to turn pairs early on it in the spring. And what happens is you set back some of your good grasses and your undesirable grasses start to come in there. And they are undesirable now because I want to use it in a different way. What we have out here is predominantly Kentucky Bluegrass. There's a little bit of Brome out here but not much. It's just sod-bound. It's really compacted. There's absolutely no life left in this soil. We still have cow patties and sheep turds out here from the last couple years, so the biology is not working right out here. And the grass species just suck. So we need to do something about that and get something that's going to yield us more grass. 1) So what I did is about 5 days ago, I came in here and I sprayed it off with glyphosate. You can see it's starting to turn yellow. It's definitely not growing anymore like all the other paddocks around here. 2) Then in probably 2 days, I'm going to turn some ewes out here and really just let them graze it to the ground. I'm going to have so much trash and so much sod and roots to deal with here...this is really good heavy ground... 3) And I'm actually going to come in here and disc it up and start to work down some of that sod and clumps...and get that decomposing. 4) And then we'll come in here and we'll drill a more desirable pasture blend in here that can get us more forage quality and definitely more yield on these grasses. So we came back to this same pasture here. What I did after we sprayed it off and we had the sheep on here for a while grazing it down, is I did go ahead and try to disc this just to try to break up some of this sod-bound stuff. As you can see, we still do have some remnants of the root balls out here. I think what's here is probably fine. I know it didn't work up quite as nicely as I hoped. I had to run that disc over it a few times to get it to where we thought we'd get good soil to seed contact when we went ahead and planted it. What I did was I went ahead and broadcast the seed on here. 5) And I used Millborn's #3 Hay and Pasture Mix. Which is Orchard Grass, some Timothy, Tall Forage Fescue, Perennial Ryegrass, Meadow Brome, and Alaska Brome. A really nice mix of cool season grasses. 6) And then I also used some of Millborn's Falcata Alfalfa, which is a bloat-free yellow blossom alfalfa. I also used some of Millborn's Cicer Milkvetch and Millborn's Medium Red Clover. 7) So I broadcasted that on here and went ahead and used a Brillion cultipacker in effort to just punch those seeds into the soil. And I think when you start scratching around out here, you can definitely see the holes where that Brillion cultipacker went. And in each of those holes you can see a seed punched into the soil. So those are all cool season grasses and as long as we catch a little bit of moisture, we should be germinating within about a week and start to see some growth out here. So when that time comes, we'll stay tuned with a little bit more follow up. I'm Justin Fruechte, thanks for watching! For more information, visit http://www.millbornseeds.com/forage.htm