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Is Wasted Hay the Best Way to Build up Fertility?
by LuAnn Rolling, NRCS District Conservationist
We have all heard that unrolling hay and feeding it is a good way to build fertility in poor areas of pastures. While this may be good advice if hay is used efficiently, due to concentrating manure and urine, according to Jim Elizondo from Real Wealth Ranching, some producers have mistaken this for building a fertility program based on wasteful hay feeding.
According to Elizondo very poor soil will be evident when seedlings require fertilizer to grow well. “This means that humus is generally very low, and no stored nutrients are in the soil to help the seedlings establish.” He goes on to explain that soil humus is your soil’s real fertility, and unlike available nutrients, it stays around for a very long time.
“Let’s start by defining that humus is the stable fraction of organic matter that cannot be further degraded by the action of microorganisms. This also means that organic matter, while valuable, is not all humus but only a fraction of organic matter is really humus. We need to remember that soil life is always digesting organic matter and this is the reason why it fluctuates while humus is more stable.”
Elizondo says that we have been mining humus that was formed a long time ago and we must start building up humus in our soils to achieve soil health and much higher and cheaper production. “Humus not only is a moisture, microorganisms, and nutrient reserve or storehouse, but it also warms up soil faster in spring and keeps it warm longer into the fall. It also buffers pH and releases nutrients on demand which allows for a much higher quality forage for your livestock than with synthetic fertilizers.”
Back to unrolling hay, Elizondo says hay is a very expensive fertilizer. He states the important thing is to know that the extra growth from unrolling hay is from the humic acids released when the hay decomposes as there is very little real humus produced, per acre, when trying to fertilize with expensive hay.
He feels that with today’s beef and hay prices it makes much more sense to have the hay used as feed, with as little waste as possible and to grow more humus by avoiding overgrazing and increasing the leaf to stem ratio of your grasses through controlled grazing. He says that forages contain oil which increases when photosynthesis is enhanced by high leaf to stem ratio.
When doing correct total grazing and all plants are consumed close to the ground it also means that the stems are consumed, and this allows the regrowth to be much higher in leaf. “I know that many insist that leaving residue is good for the plant but, the stems left behind by a lower efficiency harvest continue to respire depriving the plant of the energy needed for a vigorous regrowth of leaves,” Elizondo said.
His conclusions are:
1. Good quality hay is best used to feed livestock.
2. Not all organic matter is humus.
3. Most humus, our soil’s real fertility, is built by the decomposed bodies of microorganisms fed by root exudates.
4. The amount of humus created, per acre per year, depends on the leaf to stem ratio of the forage and the length of the rest period.
5. This leaf to stem ratio is wholly dependent on the type of grazing and the type of grazing or harvest efficiency determines how long is the rest period.
