When we had the NC Cattleman’s Association come to visit, we had an unexpected bonus. Along with the cattlemen, we had some grazing experts who joined the group and did some instruction with our pasture as the model. I not only finally learned how my grazing stick works, I also found out what another one of our grasses is in our pasture. We know we have Bermuda grass, crab grass, fescue, and Johnson grass. What I didn’t know was we also have a lot of dallisgrass. I’d never even heard of dallisgrass so I did some searching on Google. What I found didn’t make me feel good at all. The first 10 or so links on Google were all about how to kill dallisgrass. It sounded like it took 2-4-D, napalm, or pigs to get rid of it. It also sounded like everyone was trying to kill it and it was just behind kudzu on the lovability scale of flora and fauna.
Then I was lucky enough to come across this forum. Looks like some people love dallisgrass, namely cattlemen. That’s a relief to me because a key part of our management strategy is to support what grows naturally vs. trying to seed or cultivate certain types of grasses. What grows naturally is pretty hard to kill with drought or pressure. Cultivated stands are a different story. If we had the kudzu of grass we’d have a problem but I should have known it was ok, as looking at the grazing and looking at the cows performance is all that I need to know about our management system. Our cows are fat and happy, dallisgrass or no.