Perennial Peanut Pastures

When a south Ga. cowman says “I’m feeding peanut hay to my stock” he might mean rolled peanut vines after the peanut harvest heads off to the peanut butter plant or he might mean Perennial Peanut hay. Most of the country won’t be familiar with this forage/ hay cultivar, but folks with an eye toward grass finished livestock operations that live in the Deep South are finding out it’s hard to find an equal.

We can’t grow alfalfa in these parts, but this beautiful legume called Perennial Peanut has been steadily gaining acres since the 80’s and plenty of those old fields are still in production. University of Florida gets the credit for accidentally bringing it into the states from South America and has been working with it for years. It looks somewhat similar to field peanuts, but it doesn’t grow a seed nut and is propagated by sprigging the root rhizomes.
 
Perennial Peanut takes a little care and a good wet year or irrigation to get the stand well established. Once you have it you have it. The green leaves start showing in the early spring here in GA and can give us high quality grazing till first frost, which in this part of the world may be Thanksgiving. The plant has small 2 inch long leaves all along its stem and the extra bounty is the little yellow flowers that pop up all over your pasture. The flower is sweet and makes a nice salad garnish if you care to try some.

Perennial Peanut has been nicknamed Florida’s alfalfa because it is highly sought after by horse and livestock folks for high quality hay. In the horse markets it is not uncommon to demand $10 -$12 for a 40 lb bale. This forage can produce hay with RFQ’s (Relative Feed Quality) above 200. Full bloom Alfalfa is the bench mark at 100 so it can be quite good as dry hay or even better as baleage . There are two main hay cultivars Florigraze and Arbuckle each have their advantages but we have Florigraze here on our place.

Many municipalities have started using the lower growing landscape cultivars of Perennial Peanut for ground cover and median strips along the roadways because of its natural beauty and low maintenance cost. With its deep green leaves and prolific yellow flowers it’s makes for a beautiful landscape or pasture here in the south. It also is very drought tolerant because of its deep running root systems often over 8 feet in the right soils. The advantages of this legume pasture are pests don’t seem to care about it.

Not needing supplemental Nitrogen makes Perennial Peanut one of the few low maintenance forages of high quality we have here to try and get some reasonable summer gains on the stock. One thing is for sure in the Deep South, with hot temperatures and 55” of annual rainfall we can grow lots of forage, but the quality is not normally as high as the stuff of cooler, dryer climates. Many southern cattlemen have Bermuda or Bahia pastures and routinely invest thousands of dollars per year in nitrogen and other petroleum based fertilizers to try and get better quality. Since this forage is so valuable in the form of hay many producers spray out the grass and other volunteer plant species with herbicides to get clean hay. Since we graze ours we prefer to let the grasses and other species grow with the peanut to give the cows and sheep a bountiful buffet to choose from like any good south Ga. eating establishment, minus the sweet tea of course.

 We treat all our pastures with foliar applications of Fish oil from Neptune’s Harvest mixed with Molasses and any leftover milk from our small grass-fed Jersey /Devon cross milk herd.  6 years ago Doug Gunnick and Gearld Fry had a three day seminar here to teach cattlemen about functional grass cattle and the benefits of this type of foliar fertilization program and it continues to work well. It’s cost effective, fast, and feeds the healthy bugs and critters in the soil so they can do their job helping to grow better high quality forage. The peanut pasture responds very well to this type of fertilization and I can cover a lot of ground in a hurry with a simple spray rig at relatively low cost.

 This forage and fertilization program can answer a lot of questions for the progressive producer that has an eye on going Organic with his grass fed operation. Here in the Coastal plain region we have difficulty with the practical concept of stockpiling forage because of available forages and weather conditions. Although with 40 degree nights and 65 degree days we have ideal winter growing conditions for winter annuals from November thru April. I have been experimenting the last two years drilling into the Perennial Peanut field my winter grazing forage in October, which is rye and oats. With this method I can have the first of my winter graze almost ready to eat when that first frost takes the leaves off the Perennial Peanut. We might get close to being able to graze high quality forage all twelve months of the year. We all know the benefits of getting the hay out of the operation for improved economics.

Perennial Peanut forage can definitely help the Deep South grazer take advantage of the hot humid climate we live in and put weight on the stock.