Best Grass for Cattle Grazing

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Photo courtesy Chelsea Green
Choosing the right grass is crucial to raising the highest quality livestock.

What is the best grass for cattle grazing? Learn about types of grass, growing habits, and how to select the right grass for your livestock.

Perennial and annual grasses, legumes, and forbs all have different growth habits, and growth habits also vary even within the grasses group. Understanding the differences in how plants like to grow helps us design grazing systems that encourage plants to thrive, build healthy soils, and produce quality feed for livestock. Here, I’ll present an overview of plant types and growth habits.

Grasses

Grasses include annuals, which live for just one season, and perennials, which are plants that live for more than two years. Let’s start with the perennials, and discuss the annuals later.

Perennial pasture grasses include both warm- and cool-season grasses. Cool-season perennials like to grow during cool, moist conditions, so they will be most productive in the cool times of spring and fall. These plants will produce most of their forage dry matter at the beginning of the grazing season. Some cool-season varieties, particularly in locations with hot dry summers, may go dormant for a period of time during midsummer. Warm-season grasses, by contrast, grow best and are more productive during hot, dry midsummer weather. Warm-season grasses can produce very high yields of forage for both grazing and harvested feed in the heat of summer.

  • Updated on May 24, 2022
  • Originally Published on Nov 3, 2016
Tagged with: browse, feeding livestock, forbs, grass fed, grasses, grazing, Legumes, pastured livestock
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