Oat hay?

[freewheat]

Tell me about how to grow, and harvest oat green feed. Hay crop is looking iffy, and I booked some haymaker oats to try on a piece.

Thanks.

[food4u]

We used to let them reach the late milk or early dough stage and cut them with a mower conditioner. Then bale and stack as soon as they were dry.You have to pick the bales immediately or they get very hard to handle once they really dry out.

[grassfarmer]

Need to be careful timing the cutting - seen lots cut with a haybine/discbine where the conditioner knocked almost all the heads off. Real GREENfeed cut early can make really high quality feed. Seems more and more guys are selling straw with mature grain in it and calling it greenfeed.
Hope for some 30C weather when you are drying it as it can take a while if you have a big crop. Should be a good market for it this year if you are planning on selling.

[perfecho]

Cut my swath grazing a little late last year.....they left the mature, yellow stalks more than I wanted to see....
Believe the earlier timing would be beneficial.

[grassfarmer]

I have a friend who does swath grazing really well - seeds late, cuts late and always gets really green high quality feed. He always comments that his cows wouldn't dig through deep snow to get to straw the way a lot of guys do swath grazing.

[freewheat]

Well thanks for the info. What about seeding rate and fertility?

[food4u]

Have 160 acres of winter wheat, does it make good green feed if taken at the right time????

[smcgrath76]

Need a soil test to figure out fertility. Tough to make a blanket recommendation without prior history and a frame of reference. One thing to consider on later seeded stuff is that if you use a lot of N and get a frost, your chance of nitrates in the feed goes up.
Generally your leafy yield will go up with a higher density seeding. We usually seed 2 to 3 bu per acre, but use a mixture of barley, oats, triticale, and fall rye. This year we are going to try adding some hairy vetch as an N fixer in one half of the drill to see what happens.