If you’re looking for perennial crops to winter-graze, tall fescue is “the gold standard” in Missouri, says Rob Kallenbach, University of Missouri extension forage specialist. “Tall fescue is the one that can be stockpile grazed, where basically we accumulate forage growth from mid-August through the end of the growth cycle in autumn and we can graze it through winter,” he says.

Perennial ryegrass is his next choice. But this grass doesn’t have long-term persistence in the humid areas of the U.S. and doesn’t have as much growth as tall fescue in autumn. Orchardgrass, he adds, would be his third pick for late-autumn or winter grazing. “There are limitations to all of those in terms of forage quality, not so much on the protein side as on the energy side of the equation,” he adds.

“If you want higher quality, use some annual species,” Kallenbach says. The most widely used is winter rye or winter wheat. “Winter rye can be seeded for forage towards the tail end of August to the first of September in this environment. And if we would grow it in autumn and graze it through winter, its quality will be substantially over any of those perennial species that I mentioned.”

Wheat is another good annual grazing crop “We get a lot of winter pasture on wheat in the High Plains but it could be used in the more humid regions as well.” Annual ryegrss can be used from the Missouri River south, and in the entire southeastern U.S., triticale, a cross of rye and wheat, works, too, he says.

For information on stockpiling fall and winter pasture, download
www.ca.uky.edu/agc/pubs/agr/agr162/agr162.pdf. To learn more on stockpiling tall fescue, visit
http://forages.oregonstate.edu/is/tfis/book.cfm?PageID=366&chapter=15§ion=0.