No-till or Tillage Established Wheat Pasture Production Following a Summer Cover Crop.

Grazing stocker cattle on wheat pasture is an important livestock enterprise in the southern plains. In this system there is little to no crop rotation and the land area used for wheat is typically summer fallowed. Growing a summer cover crop between wheat pasture crops can provide important land stewardship benefits to the land area such as, erosion control but, the impact on subsequent wheat pasture production needs to be defined. To study the effects of growing a summer cover crop on wheat pasture production, we incorporated a multi-species cover crop mix into a wheat pasture-stocker cattle system. The study area consisted of 40.5 ha^-1 that had previously been subdivided into 10-4.0 ha^-1 paddocks and randomly assigned to either tillage or no-tillage establishment treatments. These paddocks are summer fallowed either chemically or with tillage depending on establishment method. The 4.0 ha^-1 paddocks were split into 20-2.0 ha^-1 paddocks and a multi-species summer cover crop treatment was randomly assigned to 10 of the sub-paddocks resulting in four treatments: tillage summer fallow (Till), tillage summer cover crop (TillCC), no-till chemical summer fallow (NT), and no-till summer cover crop (NTCC). The NTCC treatments were planted in late May and TillCC in early June, 2016. Cover crops were grazed for 28 days in August with stocker cattle then terminated. Wheat pasture was planted in September. Within tillage treatment, cover crop treatments produced less forage resulting in fewer grazing days [(NTCC 127 days, NT 133 days) (TillCC 133 days, Till 141 days)] than tillage treatments without a summer cover crop. These results are from the first year of multi-year study but, indicate that a summer cover crop can initially have a negative impact on subsequent wheat pasture production.