Overthinking problems (pastures)

One of the risks of swimming in a scientific and analytical environment is that we almost always make "problems" harder than they need to be.

Protein in corn

Finding strains of corn that are high in protein is an item that is high on my list of tasks for tuning-in a subsistence garden.

The ideal corn would be disease and drought resistant, productive, be high in lysine and have more than 6% oil and 10% protein. To the best of my knowledge, the perfect corn does not exist.

Your eyes are not lying. This experiment started in 1900 and is still going on today. From a starting point of about 11% protein the high level is about 30% and the low level is about 2%. Most modern hybrids average between 6% and 8% protein.

There is ample evidence that corn is very responsive to selection for protein percentage. The University of Illinois has been running a VERY long-term experiment where they have been selecting and inbreeding for both high and low protein and oil. It is called the Illinois Long-term Selection Experiment.

Commercial grain elevators use near-infrared light to measure protein percentage of a sample. That technology is out of my reach. What to do?

The answer was as plain as the nose on my face. The reason that the corn stalled out on the low percentage leg is that protein is required for the seed to germinate and push a green shoot out, into the sunlight.

The low-tech way to measure protein is to plant a large number of corn seeds (that weigh the same) in blow-sand. Then irrigate with a nutrient solution that has everything the corn need EXCEPT nitrogen. The seeds with the least protein would stall out soonest. The ones that kept growing were the ones highest in nitrogen. Transplant the Yao Mings into the nursery row and destroy the rest. After all, you didn't want the kernels of corn, you wanted a breeding population of corn plants.

Simple.

Fertilizing pastures

The best way to fertilize pasture is to manage your animals so you don't need to.

That is a great plan except your property might have been mismanaged in the past. Selling hay off the property is a passive way to turn a few dollars. However it exports large amounts of nutrients off the property.

Of course, it works the other way too. You can BUY hay and use it to supplement the feed you grow. Feed it out on the pasture where you want the poop-and-pee.

Lime and Fertilizing, Part II

It is easy to get caught up in industrial grain-production thinking. It is the default.

The tempation is to test your pastures in a bunch of places, lime-and-fertilize per the recommendation and then plow or disc the lime and fertilizer into the soil. Then plant "improved" seed.

This is a recipe for disaster on slopes.

The other shortcoming is that we have already determined that animals move nutrients around. How do you ensure you are not pulling samples from a favored animal loafing spot? Or from a clay-shelf exposed by erosion?

This experiment was run on a patch of 4000 square-feet or 1/10th acre. The "white-stripe" treament was spread kitty-corner to avoid an area where hay had been fed in the lower-left quadrant.

Would it serve your purposes to take a smaller area and run an experiment? Spread a wide strip of fertilizer and spread wide strip of lime perpendicular to the fertilizer strip. Choose application levels that are highly likely to show a response IF they are in short supply. That will give you a "Control", "Fertilizer", "Lime" and "Lime + Fertilizer" experiment. Sure, it will take a couple of years to assess the results but the results will be real.

Or you can get fancy. You can run a strip of potash and partially overlap it with a strip of phosphorous and then run the perpendicular lime strip across the "K", "K" + P" and the "P" strips. Just be sure you have markers and good records because I can pretty much guarantee you will not remember what you did, and where, in a couple of years.

You will notice that I did not include nitrogen in the experimental design. The reason is that clover will fix the nitrogen at no-cost-to-you if you manage the pasture to make the clover happy. Why pay money to add something if you can get it for free?

The other thing is that grass LOVES nitrogen. The grass will grow tall and shade out the clover. That is not the preferred outcome.

"But Joe, it takes years, even decades for lime (and K and P) to percolate through the entire rootzone"

True story. But in general the impact is most strongly felt by the newly germinating seeds. If you don't have strong recruiting classes you will not have mature plants. The mature plants...well, they have deep roots and they have shallow roots so they can still "mine" the nutrients before they percolate deeply into the soil.

Final points on grazing for clover

White clover is not a tall plant. If the grass is tall enough to cover the shoelaces near the toe of your boot it is tall enough to shade most of the white clover. That is when you want to send in the grazing animals to give the grass a hair cut.

You will have areas get ahead of your animals during the spring/early-summer flush of growth. Resist the tempation to speed up the rotation, rather let some of them get ahead and then cut them for hay. Let different paddocks race ahead each year so you are not always cutting hay from the same paddocks because you will be stripping them of nutrients.