Considerations for a Cover Crop Forage

By Amos Johnson

At the 2024 Midwest Covers and Grains Conference, dairy farmer Daniel Olsen – owner of Forage Innovations – led a session on using cover crops as forage.

According to Daniel, starch and protein are easy to add to an animal’s diet if needed – simply buy more corn or soybeans. These ship and store very efficiently, whereas digestible fiber is bulky and takes up a lot of space. Because of this, Daniel says, “The most important thing that we can do is grow more pounds of digestible fiber per acre.”

The following is excerpted from Daniel’s presentation. (Note: the excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and to match our house style.)

On Why He Advises Against Alfalfa

“The thing with alfalfa is that it doesn’t have a lot of fiber, and the digestibility of that fiber isn’t great. It contains 18% digestible fiber per pound. That means most of the fiber you fed the cow is not digested in the rumen – just made a lot of expensive manure.”

“If we take that alfalfa out and replace it with triticale and sorghum-sudangrass or a cocktail mix that’s higher in fiber – something with around 52% fiber and about 30% digestibility – that almost doubles the amount of digestible fiber. If you want to do grass-fed beef, if you want to feed your animals less concentrate – less purchased energies like shell corn – that’s a really important step.”