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    Resourcefulness is defined as having the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. Josh Tranel fits this description well and has taken advantage of a great opportunity in his dairy operation.
    As part of Iowa State University’s Virtual Dairy Day Feb. 12, Tranel, a Cuba City, Wisconsin, dairy farmer, spoke on small grain benefits as a forage source for dairy farmers. Tranel farms with seven of his cousins on a 600-cow 2,000-acre organic dairy farm.
    “On our dairy, we have started using small grains as a forage source as well as a cover crop,” Tranel said. “It fits nicely into some windows of crop rotation, keeps soil covered, reduces weed pressure and helps keep ration costs down.”
    Tranel said growing a small grain silage is cheaper than alfalfa or other typical plants. They began by growing winter rye and triticale as nurse crops and cover crops, then began sorghum sudangrass and summer annuals, eventually going all in and embracing the new crop cycle of smaller grains.
    “We had grown a lot of wheat and barley but it saw fallow so we cut it early, chopped it and put something else on that field,” Tranel said.
    On Tranel Family Farm, winter wheat, triticale, winter rye/Italian ryegrass, oat and sorghum sudangrass are grown and rotated into their cash crops. Through his presentation, Tranel highlighted pros and cons to each crop and how to apply them in a rotation.

Winter wheat
    Winter wheat has a lot of benefits, which is probably why it is one of the more common cover crops used in the Upper Midwest.
    “One of the best things about winter wheat is its winter hardiness,” Tranel said. “It’s easy to kill off for the next crop. We chop it every June and feed it to our dry cows. Because of its low potassium content, it works rumens really well.”
    However, there is a lower yield potential if the crop is not well-established before winter. Tranel recommends planting early in the fall to establish the crop prior to the first frost.
    In a rotation, Tranel suggests using winter wheat while transitioning land to organic or in areas that suffer from heavy runoff with snowmelt in spring.

Oats
    Oat is an easy commodity to establish any time of the year but struggles through the winter.
    “In our rotation, we use it as a nurse crop or to patch areas of overrun pasture, or if we need to grow forage quickly before winter,” Tranel said.

Winter/Spring Triticale
    High quality and yield potential are two of the benefits to triticale, but a lot of the success surrounding the crop depends on fall tilling.
    “We use triticale as a nurse crop for spring seed and alfalfa,” Tranel said.

Winter rye
    Winter rye is another crop with high yield potential, and excels at weed suppression.
    “We use winter rye in our rotation after corn and have found it forms great sod,” Tranel said. “We drill it in in late fall but have struggled to kill it off without chemicals.”

Sorghum sudangrass
    Sorghum or sorghum sudangrass grows best in dry, hot summers. For Tranel, the past few summers have been wetter than average, and the stand has lost quality.
    “That past few years we’ve started to grow other plants with this, a sort of cocktail mix,” Tranel said. “It really depends on the area and what your soil needs, though. … There are a lot of uses with this crop.”
    Tranel said this rotation has worked well for them on their operation.
    “This is a great way to grow high-quality forages,” he said. “There is also a lot of flexibility depending on what your operation needs.”

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