October 7, 2016
CapitalPress.com
7
Tucking in grass seed ields for the winter
By BRENNA WIEGAND
For the Capital Press
Grass seed growers, like
most farmers, know a successful
crop has a lot to do with what
happens directly after harvest.
Several things are taken into
consideration when putting a
grass seed ield to bed for the
winter.
First, there’s cleaning up the
post-harvest mess, said David
McCready, senior agronomist at
Wilco in Harrisburg, Ore.
“Grass seed straw and resi-
due is removed by baling and/or
lailing and redistributed to even
things out,” McCready said. “If
irrigation’s available, especially
on dry, low water-holding soils,
people often irrigate post-har-
vest, either to keep plants alive
or for overall crop health.”
A soil-residual herbicide is
usually applied to prevent or
eliminate germinated seedlings.
“The biggest single thing are
volunteers from the crop we just
harvested,” he said. “The most
eficient harvest operations can
easily have 200-500 pounds of
seed that didn’t get in the tank.”
Slugs and voles are perennial
pests but grass seed crops rarely
have problems with insects.
Growers will apply fall fer-
tilizers as needed, based on soil
testing and experience or use
a balanced fertilizer. From the
advent of GPS — global posi-
tioning systems — and a desire
to manage ield inconsistencies
and use sustainable practices,
the industry developed new
variable-rate technology that
creates application maps for in-
dividual nutrients. With variable
rate, soil only gets what it needs.
Lime is commonly applied
to balance pH and calcium lev-
els as well.
“Our typical tall fescue farm-
er has to put a 1-ton application
of top dress lime about the third
year on a ive-harvest rotation,”
McCready said.
Potash is necessary to offset
its removal with the straw. In
quoting an Oregon State Exten-
sion Service article, McCready
said a ton of tall fescue straw
contains about 30 pounds of po-
tassium.
“It takes 50 pounds of muri-
ate of potash to replace what is
removed,” McCready said, add-
ing that straw yields run 2.5 to 4
tons per acre.
“We used to hardly remove
any potash, especially when we
burned ields, and now the ma-
jority of it seems to be baled,”
McCready said. “A lot of people
don’t realize how much is re-
moved in the straw. We’ve just
kind of mined the soil and sud-
denly we wake up to the stark
reality that where we used to
have good soil tests (and) now
we don’t.”
Management of weeds, wa-
ter, pests and soil are a perenni-
al concern to most farmers, and
each crop and location requires
a different regime.
Courtesy Wilco
Senior agronomist David McCready and Scot Solberg of Wilco
consult at a lime application. Managing soil fertility is one of many
post-harvest tasks.
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