Project Overview
Commodities
- Agronomic: hay
- Animals: bovine
Practices
- Animal Production: feed/forage, grazing management, grazing - multispecies
- Crop Production: cropping systems, nutrient cycling, nutrient management
- Education and Training: on-farm/ranch research
- Farm Business Management: agricultural finance
- Production Systems: organic agriculture
Proposal summary:
Sunn Hemp has recently become a popular crop for grazing. Very little research has been done on making it into hay. This project will involve planting Sunn Hemp, inter-seeded with millet, in the spring. The hay will be evaluated for yield, quality, and nitrogen content. The nitrogen will be analyzed to determine whether it was fixed from the air or came from the soil. After the hay is harvested, the land, with the millet and Sunn Hemp residue, will be grazed by cattle. Number of grazing days will be recorded. Overall, this project will seek to evaluate whether Sunn Hemp is a profitable nutritious hay to sustainably work into a cattle grazing system in the north.
Project objectives from proposal:
One objective is to measure the yield of the crop per acre. We will measure amount of biomass per acre of hay and amount of dry matter of hay per acre.
An essential objective is to analyze the quality of the hay. We will get a standard nutrient analysis of the hay through Dairy One in New Y
A third objective is to determine the amount of nitrogen in the plant and where the nitrogen has come from-- the soil or the air. Dr. Garzon will be instrumental in helping with this aspect of the project as he has done this before with Sunn Hemp and other crops. Know how much nitrogen Sunn Hemp is able to fix from the air will give us a measurement of its usefulness as a hay crop in a crop rotation system.
A fourth objective will be to measure the amount of nitrogen in the soil before planting the Sunn Hemp and after making the hay. Because of the realtively short duration of the project, the difference in nitrogen levels may not be large but it will be useful to know if the crop residue increases soil nitrogen.
A final objective will to be to measure grazing days of the hay land after harvest of the Sunn Hemp hay. The hay crop will be inter-seeded with millet. A group of ten adult cows will be put on the land after harvest and the number of grazing days available on the Sunn Hem residue/millet will be recorded and compared to a grass pasture at the same time of year.