The Moos Room™

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Joe: Well, welcome to The Moos Room everybody. The OG3 is here and we are trying to feature Bradley in this episode. He hasn't been talking enough. We're going to try to make him talk most of this episode. How are you feeling today, Bradley?
Bradley: If you want me to talk, I can talk all day long.
Emily: Did you do your warmups, Bradley?
Bradley: Exactly. I did, talking a lot to students this morning, so I'm ready to go.
Emily: Lift the tip of the tongue.
Joe: Tip of the tongue.
Emily: Good. It has been a while since we really heard from you in earnest, Bradley. I'm really excited and we're going to talk about something that Bradley just absolutely loves, so I'm really looking forward to it.
Joe: We're diving into Kernza today and we're going to talk a lot about Kernza and grazing. We might have some questions on some other things because I'm pretty interested, it's getting a lot of traction right now. A lot of time in the news. We figured it was a good topic to cover this week and Bradley's the guy. He knows about Kernza.
Bradley: By no means am I an expert at Kernza, but I have worked with researchers and we've done some grazing projects with Kernza here in Morris. I know enough to be dangerous.
Joe: That's perfect. That's the perfect amount for this show. That's what we want. We want to be just [crosstalk].
Emily: Danger is our middle name.
Joe: Danger. Let's start real simple. What is Kernza and why are people excited about it?
Bradley: It's a perennial crop, so we talk a lot about winter cover crops and keeping continuous living cover on the land. This is one of the crops that's been able to do that. Plus it's perennial so you do not have to keep planting it every year like a lot of the other cover crops that we see, rye, wheat, [unintelligible 00:02:06]. It's a perennial cover crop and that's why it's gained a lot of traction here in the Midwest.
Some of the other big reasons are that it has a deep root like alfalfa, so it goes way into the ground. It can search for groundwater that's much lower typically than what annual crops are. It can be a little more tolerant to drought, stress, and some of those environmental factors as well.
Joe: I've seen pictures of the root system. Someone has carefully and meticulously pulled it out of the ground and they're standing there with it, holding it, the plants above their head and the roots are touching the ground.
Bradley: It's fairly deep and one of the thoughts with Kernza is to help with environmental issues. It prevents nitrogen leaching in the ground into the groundwater. The roots can basically capture a lot of that nitrogen and help with the plant. That's one of the big reasons that people are using that is to help with environmental sustainability on the land. We all obviously need to do a better job at that. Maybe Kernza is one of the crops that's able to do that.
Joe: It's a grass, Brad, and it's a wheatgrass, right?
Bradley: Yes. They would call it intermediate wheatgrass is the generic name. Kernza is the trademark name from The Land Institute that's been breeding some of this. The University of Minnesota also has released a variety of Kernza but intermediate wheatgrass is what it's called. It's the old ancestor of wheat. You can use it for many different things. It's a grain crop, you can let it grow. It grows about five to six feet tall. You can harvest the grain. The seeds are really small, maybe about half the size of a wheat seed, and yields are less than what you would get with wheat today.
It's a different kind of grain crop that can be used for breads, cookies. There's some stores in Minneapolis that are using it for beer. They're brewing Kernza beer. General Mills has been looking into Kernza for some of their cereals and some of their grain needs. They're very into Kernza as well. There's many different uses for it.
Joe: One of the interesting things with Kernza that I've seen for sure is that we have Minnesota-based companies that are really getting involved. General Mills being one of them. There's a company called Perennial Pantry that sells Kernza flour. There's a lot of involvement in the state already. That kind of interest and that being local might be of interest to some of our listeners too. The ones that are in Minnesota at least.
We've talked about it being a grain crop a little bit, but what does it do on the feed side? What can we do with cattle?
Bradley: Well, there's a lot of different things that you could do on the cattle side. The easiest is to harvest the grain. You can harvest the grain. The protein is very similar to wheat. The characteristics of the grain are very similar to mostly wheat. However, the yields are going to be about 25% of wheat. We think about 500 pounds of grain per acre is really what the grain is going to yield.
Many of these crops nowadays they've been bred for many years to get the yields that we see today. Kernza is just starting that. It's going to take a little bit to get Kernza to the yields where we see in wheat, oats, and those type of grains. Grain harvest is one of them. That's how we get a lot of the products that we had talked about.
The other one that I've worked with here in Morris is grazing. Grazing it as a cover crop. We've been doing some spring grazing on it. We've been doing some late fall grazing. We've been trying to test to see if Kernza can handle grazing. The real reason why we started grazing is because Kernza yields drop off after maybe the first year. Second and third year, the yields go way down. Anecdotally when we started to clip it, we saw yields increase if you clip off in the fall, harvest it again. The thought is, well, why don't we use it for grazing instead of doing some mechanical harvest? That's what we did.
There's a lot of lush Kernza grass in the springtime. It yields just like a perennial grass pasture. We can get a lot of biomass out there for cattle to harvest. We grazed it in the spring and then we allowed it to grow back, harvested the grain, and you can also bale it for straw. There's another plus as you get straw and then it starts to grow back again and you can graze it in the fall. We've grazed it well into the fall.
Late November, Thanksgiving, we were still grazing Kernza on heifers practically in the snow. You can really extend the grazing season with Kernza.
Emily: I'm curious, Bradley, from both the grain crop perspective and the grazing perspective, how did the Kernza do in the drought?
Bradley: It did fairly well this year. We had nice lush grass in the spring and we grazed it once, then we actually let it grow. It probably didn't grow as tall as what it normally did. The grain yield would've been quite reduced. We just cut it and baled it actually and got lots of straw instead of harvesting it for the grain and it's growing back quite well.
Now we're late October here and we're going to start grazing it the first part of November and there'll be a couple thousand pounds of grass per acre out there for cows to be grazing in early November with milking cows is wonderful. There's plenty of it. The drought affected it, but maybe not as much as what it did some of the other perennial pastures here at Morris.
I should say the Kernza that we have here is an old variety. It's what we call C4 Stage. It's pre-the University of Minnesota release and there are many generations after that now. We have an old variety of Kernza here and the newer varieties are much better at grain production and grass grazing now compared to the old Kernza stand that we have.
Joe: Well, it seems like it's super versatile and being able to take a spring crop, then harvest it for grain and then take a fall crop. Honestly, it seems like it's too good to be true. Why aren't we seeing adoption? There's got to be a catch somewhere.
Bradley: Well, that's a big question, Joe. The problem is there's not a big market for it yet. Farmers that are growing it are having a hard time with marketing the grain or trying to find a buyer to market the grain. That's a little bit of an issue right now that I know there's lots of folks here at the University of Minesotta that are trying to work on that aspect of it but that's the main reason.
Then breeding, the yields just aren't there. Some farmers can be really disappointed if you get a yield and you go, "Well, my wheat field yields 100 bushels an acre and this is 25% of that." It can be disappointing and the farmers have to think about it a different way and look at Kernza in a different light than actually just as a annual production crop.
Joe: One of the big things that always comes up with any of these grasses is can you chop it? Does it ensile well? Have you tried that?
Bradley: We haven't tried that. That would be a good project to try. We did plant alfalfa with it to help provide nitrogen for the grass and it certainly could be an interesting thing to do. Our Kernza stand is, oh, what is it now? Five years old. We've had it going for a long time and it's still growing. That's a good perennial crop that we haven't tilled the ground or anything in five years and it's still growing and producing lots of grass and forage.
Joe: That was going to be my next question. It was, can you mix it in or does it benefit from being with other crops, or should it be planted alone?
Bradley: A lot of people say that you should plant it alone because it doesn't compete very well with other species. We have seen in some parts of the field where we planted alfalfa, the alfalfa starting to take over but the Kernza is still there and it's competing against the alfalfa and doing quite well. The joke is that I'm trying to kill the Kernza because I'm trying to plant other grasses and stuff in it and the Kernza still keeps coming back and still producing lots of grass. It's hard to kill.
We're not tilling it or anything like that, and it still keeps coming back, so I'm going to plant some grasses, ryegrass, and clovers in it to see what might happen as well, just to see if the Kernza still persists. There's lots of things yet with Kernza that we don't have answers to that someday we may figure out.
Joe: Well, it's good. I think it's just good to have on everybody's radar and make sure that they know that it's something that's maybe on the horizon and could be an option in the future as we look at alternative crops that could help us, especially if we are getting pressure on the environmental side and there are environmental benefits. It's definitely something to keep in mind and with the versatility of the crop, I think it could be an option for both beef and dairy producers, especially if we start to figure out some of these things we don't know quite yet.
Emily: One other thing I do want to mention, we have to give a shout-out to our Extension colleague, Connie Carlson. She works with Extension's regional sustainable development partnerships, and she has been doing a lot of work with Kernza and with early adopters of Kernza in different ways that they can use it. If you are interested in checking out more of Extension's work across the state with what we're doing with Kernza, all sorts of different things, you can just check us out on our website extension.umn.edu and just search Kernza, K-E-R-N-Z-A.
Joe: Perfect. You know where to go for more information, and with that, we'll wrap this episode. If you have comments, questions, scathing rebuttals, those go to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: We're on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety. Bradley has an Instagram, it is @wcrocdairy, right?
Emily: No, it's UMN. It's umnwcrocdairy.
Joe: Okay.
Bradley: I don't even know what it is anymore. Umnwcrocdairy.
Joe: Perfect. All right. We've got that straightened out. Follow Bradley on Instagram, check out what's [crosstalk] out there.
Emily: If you can find it.
Joe: If you can find it. Thank you everybody for listening. We will catch you guys next week.
Emily: Bye. Bradley, say bye.
Bradley: Bye-Bye.
Emily: Why are you such a wet blanket, Bradley?
Bradley: Because I can be.
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