With the bustle of harvest and most pasture weed control measures completed for the year, fall may seem like a fine time to ease up on pasture management. But for Andrew McCrea, that’s far from the case.
“We like to use the fall season to evaluate our pastures, and start making plans for the next year,” says McCrea, who runs a fifth-generation crop and cattle enterprise near Maysville, Missouri, with his dad, M.L., and 16-year-old son, Luke.
Throughout the year, 400- to 500-pound calves, mostly Missouri-sourced, arrive at the farm, located about an hour northeast of St. Joseph. They’ll spend about five months grazing a dozen or so bluegrass and fescue pastures as calves. McCrea supplements the steers’ diets with distillers grains and silage in the winter, but he doesn’t like to feed hay.
“Pasture should be our lowest cost feed source each year, and a little proactive planning in the fall can go a long way next spring,” he says.
McCrea considers the following questions each fall and jots down notes to help him plan for next year:
- Which pastures were treated this year?
- Which pastures should be treated next year?
- Were there any new or unexpected weeds?
- What was the weather like and how did that impact the forage quality this year?
- Is there anything that went really well this year, or any areas for improvement?
“It’s easier to have a plan going into next year and make adjustments, than to wait until spring and then try to decide what to do,” McCrea says. “We try to take a step each year to make our pasture management program just a little better than the year before.”
The McCreas have relied on Range & Pasture products from Corteva Agriscience and its legacy companies for more than 30 years. The portfolio of products available to manage pastures has grown significantly in that time, which has provided McCrea more options to further boost forage production.
“When we first started out, we would use one product to treat all of our acres, and that worked well for us,” he says. “But now the portfolio has expanded, and there’s more opportunity to match the products to the pastures for even better results.”
Fall can be an ideal time to spray several weed and brush species. Blackberry, sericea lespedeza, tropical soda apple, thistles, and biennial and winter annual broadleaf weeds are all susceptible to foliar applications in the fall to help set up your pastures for a clean, fast start next spring. By keeping weeds at bay, soil nutrients and moisture will go to grass when the growing season begins.
Keep reading to learn more about the products the McCreas have added to their pasture management program at Corteva.us/McCreaFall25.
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