There are as many varieties of annual ryegrass as I have fingers and toes... There are a few that are suitable for pasture. Those would be the diploid and tetraploid italian varities. Maris Ledger and Fabio are common around this area, as was Ajax at one time. Ajax gave us our best experiences. We've grown it strictly for pasture, and strictly as an annual. We never try to over winter it. Generally it will survive the winter, but it's first year is it's production year and the second year is it's reproduction year where it shoots a seed head. When it does that you may as well feed bullrushes to the cows... These are low growing varities, but they are very lush feed, produce a good tonnage and regrow very well with some moisture... but they're not really practical for mechanical harvesting. Let the cows get it themselves.
There are a multitude of other varities that grow more upright that you could harvest for hay/silage, but I have no real experience with them. I think David mostly filled in that bit anyway. I will say that this is likely our last year with the annual ryegrass too. It's gotten to be too much work for us to plant every year, we had a poor germination this year, and we've had two years now out of ten where it bolted and set seed under some stress... so it's gotten to be a somewhat costly and unpredictable crop. I think we'll go with a preannual ryegrass and Huia white clover next spring, perhaps with a bit of annual mixed in for the first year. I don't see that we've got much to lose that way even if it does winter kill...
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Today's Featured Article - A Lifetime of David Brown - by Samuel Kennedy. I was born in 1950 and reared on my family’s 100 acre farm. It was a fairly typical Northern Ireland farm where the main enterprise was dairying but some pigs, poultry and sheep were also kept. Potatoes were grown for sale and oats were grown to be used for cattle and horse feeding. Up to about 1958 the dairy cows were fed hay with some turnips and after that grass silage was the main winter feed. That same year was the last in which flax was grown on the farm. Flax provided the fibre which w
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