Building a better forage system

Between June 22 and 27, northern Oregon experienced weather varying from bright sun and record-breaking heat—97°F, more than 20 degrees above normal—to rain and highs in the low to mid-60s, 10 to 15 degrees below normal. How are farmers supposed to plan their crops when the weather varies so much? 

We don’t know when the rains will stop: Will it be July or May? asks Shayan Ghajar, an organic pasture and forage extension specialist at Oregon State University. If a farmer is growing a cool-season perennial and a weeklong heat wave hits in May, what happens to that crop? On average, eight months of the year, it’s easy to grow cool-season crops in Oregon, he says, but summer is a different beast. 

This is true across the Pacific Northwest, where wet and dry seasons experience vast temperature and precipitation swings. Even worse, once-reliable snowpack—which supplies much of the irrigation water used during the growing season—is becoming increasingly unreliable. This year, snowpack in parts of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho fell to near-record lows, leaving growers bracing for reduced irrigation supplies.

As Pacific Northwest growers face tighter water supplies and higher temperatures—and thus more variable forage production—farmers are starting to look for more climate-resilient forage options. Enter small cereal grains like triticale, barley, oats, rye, and wheat. Planted in fall or early spring, these cereals can produce feed during cooler, wetter parts of the year, make use of winter and spring moisture, and fit into rotations where perennial hay or corn silage alone may be progressively more difficult to sustain due to summer water shortages. 

Cereal forages are not a silver bullet. They will not replace alfalfa or other core forage crops. And interest in cereal forages isn't new, but changing water availability is giving growers new reasons to reconsider them and to build more flexible forage systems.

The water challenge

Annual precipitation across the Pacific Northwest ranges from just 6 inches in some high-elevation valleys to more than 100 inches along the coast, reflecting the region’s remarkable diversity of production systems. From the cool, wet coastal regions of western Oregon and Washington to the irrigated valleys of the Columbia Basin and Snake River Plain, the dryland wheat country of the Columbia Plateau, and the high-elevation valleys of eastern Oregon and Idaho, growers face vastly different growing conditions. Despite those differences, they share one increasingly common challenge: securing enough water to produce forage. Hotter summers, more variable precipitation, declining snowpack, earlier spring runoff, and growing competition for irrigation water are forcing producers to rethink long-standing forage systems.

For many growers, the challenge is playing out through irrigation. “We typically see cycles of drought and ‘less drought,’” says Jared Spackman, the Idaho Barley Commission endowed barley agronomist and extension specialist at the University of Idaho. “This year is a bad year all around for Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana.” As a result, farmers face tough choices. 

Questions such as, “Should I stop irrigating after the first cutting? Should I keep applying some water? Or should I irrigate at a reduced rate further into the season?” are becoming more common, says Gordon Jones, an extension agronomist and associate professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University. “How would these decisions affect yield and quality?” Some growers are even asking whether they should switch to an entirely different crop. “When do you give up on the system that’s worked for decades?” Jones asks. Those difficult decisions come into sharp focus during drought, when long-standing management practices are no longer a given. 

Growers in some parts of Idaho have had to come up with groundwater mitigation plans, Spackman says. They may be allocated a certain amount of water over three or four years and have to decide how to ration it. The first step is “understanding your water—your water rights, your local water management plan, and exactly how much water you're applying.” Growers need to know whether their irrigation systems are actually applying the amount of water they think they are, he says. An outdated pivot package can mean some parts of a field are overwatered while others are underwatered. “Water-use efficiency is going to be huge for agriculture across the state.”

Even farms that are only a few miles apart may need different strategies, Jones says. Their soils, water supplies, cropping systems, and markets are all different, so the opportunities—and the challenges—are different too. That's why there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to building a more drought- and climate-resilient future, he says. 

Management matters

Decisions about when and what to plant, how and when to harvest, what to feed, and which markets to target all have to align. In wet springs, growers may wait for fields to dry enough to support equipment even as optimal planting windows and crop insurance deadlines pass. Delayed planting can reduce growth, increase heat and drought stress, and complicate decisions about whether to harvest for forage or grain. Fall planting avoids some of those challenges but introduces others. “Whatever you're growing should be something that handles waterlogging, diseases, and pathogens,” Ghajar says.

Harvest timing is just as strategic. Cutting cereals at boot stage improves forage quality and can save one or two irrigations on early‑maturing crops like hybrid rye, Spackman says, but taking the crop to soft dough produces a lot more tonnage, though it sacrifices some quality. When to harvest can matter just as much as what to grow.

Market requirements also shape management decisions. The highest-value forage in irrigated regions often goes to dairies, export hay markets, or premium small-bale buyers, all of which demand specific quality traits rather than maximum biomass. Those expectations should determine which cereal to plant, how to fertilize it, and when to harvest it. "A grower has to know their market before even seeding," Jones says.

Annual systems raise the management bar even further, Ghajar says. Instead of planting a perennial field and managing it for years, growers may be planting two to three times a year, with different warm‑ and cool‑season annuals, which multiplies passes across the field, seed costs, and risk, he says. 

Nutrient management also requires more attention, Spackman notes. Residual nutrients from crops such as potatoes and sugar beets can significantly reduce fertilizer needs for the following cereal crop, Spackman says, meaning blanket fertilizer programs can waste money and increase nutrient losses. 

In addition, Ghajar says, the system must match a grower’s equipment and timing reality. A program built on tight windows—early‑harvest hybrid rye, quick‑turn annuals, and multiple plantings, for example—requires equipment that can move quickly between fields and that can handle softer conditions without doing damage. If growers don’t have the tools to get into the field when that narrow “right now” window opens, they lose the water‑use and quality advantages that made annual cereal systems attractive. 

Cereal forages are not a cure-all for forage or water challenges. Rather than replacing alfalfa, grass hay, or corn silage, they provide another tool for building more resilient forage systems. The key is generating the data needed to evaluate each crop's water use, production costs, forage quality, and return on investment.

Planning for the future