Glenda Pereira: 00:08
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast! This is your host, Dr. Glenda Pereira, an Assistant Extension Professor and the Dairy Specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, as well as an Assistant Professor of Animal Science within the School of Food and Agriculture. For today’s episode, we’re going to switch gears and talk a little bit about what goes into helping our animals grow. So we’re going to talk about forages predominantly.
Glenda Pereira: 00:34
And I have somebody I’ve been wanting to get on the podcast for a long time now. So we have Joe Lawrence joining us today from Cornell University, and he’s going to introduce himself. He’s with the PRO-DAIRY team, and he’s a senior associate extension educator. But he’s going to tell us more about that. So I’m really excited to talk about their corn silage program that Joe leads with his team there.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02
And I think a lot of the information we’re going to learn about today will be super useful for this growing season, and then for the next growing season as folks plan that out as well. So Joe, without further ado, thanks for being on the Farmcast and let us know a little bit more about yourself.
Joe Lawrence: 01:20
Yeah, thanks, Glenda. So as you mentioned, I’m part of the PRO-DAIRY team at Cornell, which is an extension and applied research team. And so myself and my teammates have statewide responsibilities in different areas from field crops to farm business management to dairy science. And we work both with our county and regional educators in the Cooperative Extension System around the state and with the faculty on campus and their research and extension programs. So I’ve been in this position about ten years.
Joe Lawrence: 01:59
I’m a native of the northern part of New York State up along the St. Lawrence River and continue to live in that area and run this statewide forage program. And part of that program is our corn silage trials, which we collaborate with University of Vermont Extension on, as well as some great collaborations across the Northeast from the University of Maine Extension down to Pennsylvania, where there are corn silage trials as well. And that’s part of what we’ll get into today: the opportunity to utilize this data across the Northeast and pick out the parts that are most impactful for your farm.
Glenda Pereira: 02:51
Yeah. I want to go on a little sidetrack here, but we’re recording this in late January, and we’re going into the Super Bowl in two weeks. So as a native of Upstate New York, are you a Bills fan?
Joe Lawrence: 03:08
So, I don’t know if I should admit this on a public format like this, but I actually grew up as a Pats fan.
Glenda Pereira: 03:17
I think I mean, people are going to come for you, Joe. The Bills fans mocking us, I should say. Yeah. I know that. I get that a lot.
Joe Lawrence: 03:25
But I will defend myself in that this was not a, you know, a Tom Brady era front-runner thing; this was something that started when I was quite young and I lived through some pretty poor records. So it goes back way beyond their success in this century. But yeah, I never really embraced the Bills, even though I’m not too far away. And not to go on too much of a tangent, my 15-year-old has been a diehard Seahawks fan since he was about three years old and picked his favorite team based on the logo he liked the best. So he’s excited.
Joe Lawrence: 04:10
The Seahawks all the way. It’s a pretty exciting time for him too.
Glenda Pereira: 04:15
Yeah. That’s kind of cool. So two coasts, I guess.
Joe Lawrence: 04:18
Yeah. Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 04:19
So back to the focus of today’s episode, even though this is great. So you had mentioned that you’ve been in this role for about ten years. Where were you previous to this? Quickly, tell us a little bit more about your training and how it helped prepare you to lead this corn silage program, because you have this awesome report that you send out to folks. And I’m going to put a link to where they can find more information in the show notes.
Glenda Pereira: 04:45
It’s a lot of planning, a lot of moving pieces, and trying to plant as many hybrids as possible across the state of New York and even in Vermont, like you mentioned with our colleague Heather there. It’s a lot to put this program together and then have successful results that you can share and use in your extension programming.
Joe Lawrence: 05:07
I guess a little more background is my initial interests were really, I thought I was going to get more into the nutrient management space working with the dairy industry. I was going through school at a time where the CAFO program and some of the nutrient management planning aspects were really kind of in their infancy and starting to develop, and I thought my path initially was going to be in that area. So I went to SUNY Cobleskill for my undergrad, and then I did a master’s at Cornell in nutrient management. My first job out of Cornell was with a county cooperative extension here in New York in Lewis County in the northern part of the state. I landed in that job and really enjoyed it, but a lot of the questions I was getting from farmers in the county were really on forage management, and I kind of joked at the time that there was, you know, the classic agronomist who helps you get the seed in the ground, pick the fertilizer, kill the pest, and then their job’s done, and then the dairy nutritionist comes and picks up a sample of the silage and sends it off to the lab and has to figure out what to do with it, right?
Joe Lawrence: 06:23
And there wasn’t a lot of, it seemed like there was a bit of a disconnect in between there. And we had a dairy educator in the county at the time, too, that I worked with, and we just made a great team and really keyed in on this issue. And so we started doing a lot of programming around forage management from the harvest of the crop to the feeding of the cow. So I’m not an animal nutritionist in any way; I joke that I’ve dealt with it coming out the back end and I deal with it going in the front end, but the cow itself is a bit of a black box to me. But that all set me up pretty well, that experience.
Joe Lawrence: 07:02
And then I did leave Extension for a few years and worked as a crop advisor for a local cooperative and got some good field experience doing that prior to this position coming available. But I felt like it really set me up well. And I found the area of forages really fascinating and had the good fortune to come into this position with PRO-DAIRY. At that time, there was a corn silage program evaluating hybrids that had been on kind of a hiatus for a couple of years because the previous faculty who had run the program had retired. And so it was really kind of baked right into my job description that the college was interested in getting this program up and running again. So we had some great support from some other faculty at the college and the industry was looking to have this again.
Joe Lawrence: 08:00
I came on board in 2016. And we hit the ground running in 2016 with kind of a revamped version of the program. So any seed company that’s out there is invited to enter hybrids, and they do have to pay an entry fee. That’s how we fund the program. But they can enter hybrids of their choosing out of their lineup, pay an entry fee, and then we provide a third-party side-by-side evaluation of those hybrids. And right now, the program has morphed some over the years, but right now we offer a location in Central New York and then one location in Vermont with Heather Darby and her team there at UVM, and we average between sixty and seventy-five hybrids that get entered each year.
Joe Lawrence: 08:58
So at both of these locations, we’ll have those 60 to 70-some hybrids all planted in randomized, replicated plots. And we monitor them through the season and harvest and get yield data and forage quality data. Something that is a bit unique and we feel sets our program apart a little bit is that instead of just providing the results of the forage quality data, we also run the corn silage samples through a mock diet and the CNCPS program, which is a ration balancing program that was developed at Cornell and is estimated to feed about 40% of the dairy cows in the world. So it’s out there in the industry under some trade names, but the backbone science of the model is the CNCPS through Cornell. And so what we do is we take kind of a base diet for the growing season, and then we substitute all of these different hybrids that were grown in our trials into that diet and look at what it does to the predicted milk production.
Joe Lawrence: 10:16
I do like to clarify that it’s not necessarily a diet you would actually feed your cows because if your nutritionist is working with you on the farm there and you put in a new corn silage, they’re going to adjust other ingredients to rebalance it, right? We do not do that because our interest in using the model this way is a little different in that we want to see what it tells us these changes in corn silage are going to do to the predicted milk production rather than trying to rebalance the diet.
Glenda Pereira: 10:48
Yeah. And I think you said it really well. In the beginning, when you were in your county role, there seemed to be this lag in what the cow is actually eating, and you bridge that gap. It kind of fell in your lap. This program fell in your lap, but you’re bridging that gap now. And I work with Tom and Mike as well in this capacity to try to meet in the middle to what could this potentially do for milk yield.
Glenda Pereira: 11:16
But I think that is, like you said, a really big benefit of this program, that you’re having those results to potentially assess. And then as you mentioned, too, this is really a platform to provide results for farmers and consultants to potentially try this on their farm and then see if it works or not. Right? And I think that’s why you said anyone is welcome to participate. And your report is really so digestible.
Glenda Pereira: 11:46
No pun intended. So then folks can utilize it in that capacity. Right? So maybe next year, if they are potentially working with their nutritionist or with their seed dealer, they can look at these results and then say, we have a similar growing degree day, a similar soil type, and a similar season here.
Glenda Pereira: 12:03
I like these milk yield results. Let’s see what we could do with this. So I really like the application of that, and it’s kind of awesome that it came back full circle for you from that beginning role. And now you’re having this output and outcome here for the farmers, not only in New York, but across New England as well.
Joe Lawrence: 12:24
Yeah, and that’s something not just our data, but a lot of these sort of trials have shown over the years is some of our key forage quality metrics are driven as much by the growing environment and the weather conditions as they are by the hybrid. So, I mean, certainly hybrid selection is still a really important thing for farms; we want to pick hybrids with the relative maturities that really match our growing season, with the pest tolerance packages and the agronomic packages that give us the best results for our farm. But especially if we look at fiber digestibility, which is a big part of balancing diets these days, right, when utilizing forages, we see that among non-BMR corns, the growing season, in particular rainfall patterns, can create a larger difference in fiber digestibility than the hybrid genetics do. So if you have poorly digestible corn silage that you’re feeding on your farm right now, to me, the best way you can put your time and energy to use is really evaluating: are these problems we’re experiencing with our forages something that is inherent to the growing season we had?
Joe Lawrence: 13:54
And if that’s the case, then it doesn’t necessarily necessitate that you have to go out and try to redo your whole portfolio of what hybrids you buy, or reassess your growing management or your harvest management. It may just simply be a fact of the growing season that was provided. We have limited resources and limited time on a farm, right? So if we can kind of recognize the things that are outside of our control a little bit and just accept them for what they are, we can put more of our time and resources into managing the things that really do make a difference in the bottom line of the farm, right. And I think that’s another way, in addition to looking at hybrid performance, this report can help us: it helps us understand if it was the growing season or our management that is impacting the type of forages we’re feeding right now.
Glenda Pereira: 14:55
Yeah. No, very well said. And I kind of wanted to start putting some of these building blocks together. So a hybrid—because maybe folks know, maybe folks don’t know—what differentiates a hybrid versus a non-hybrid?
Joe Lawrence: 15:12
Yeah, and that is something that we see in corn most dominantly in the field crops industry. It’s been around for several decades. Plant breeders realized that if you took two different male and female corn plants and cross-pollinated them, you would get this first-generation hybrid of the two parents that has more vigor than either parent may have had. And that’s unique. We don’t see that in soybeans or alfalfa or some of our other field crops. We would refer to them as varieties because it’s a different variety of soybeans, but it’s not a hybrid of two parents like we have in corn. So hybridized corn dominates the industry.
Joe Lawrence: 16:00
For some niche markets, you may still see what’s called open-pollinated corn, which is not a hybrid, but really a vast majority of the industry for both silage and grain is dominated by hybrids at this point.
Glenda Pereira: 16:18
And what about growing degree days?
Joe Lawrence: 16:21
Yeah, so growing degree days are a way to recognize that each calendar day isn’t the same thing to whether it’s a plant or insect or whatever. The temperatures we have affect how they grow during that period. So there are different growing degree day models with what we call different base temperatures that are applied to alfalfa versus corn. There’s even some pest models that have different base temperatures to understand the life cycle of a pest. And we use that in IPM to predict when pests will be a problem. Like for corn, for example, we use a system where you take the high and low temperature for the day and you subtract off a base of 50 as your base temperature, and that gives you a number of heat units that were accumulated for that calendar day.
Joe Lawrence: 17:20
And again, we use different bases for different plants because it’s based on the idea that different plants are going to utilize temperatures differently.
Glenda Pereira: 17:34
Yeah. A lot of what your report alluded to was that a major focus for you guys was to understand what the weather patterns potentially were, and to really document them well to then say, you know, is the yield we’re seeing for this specific hybrid really due to the fact that—and I think you mentioned this—there are significant hybrid differences, but at the end of the day, it’s really the weather and those factors that we can’t control. So in the 2025 report that you published, you had two planting dates at your two locations.
Glenda Pereira: 18:11
And folks can go look at this report, but I’m just going to quickly highlight some of the CliffsNotes and then your harvesting dates. You had early-mid hybrids and then you had mid-late hybrids as well, but you had two different harvest dates. And then 2025 was a curveball for everybody. So you mentioned that you weren’t able to harvest at one of the locations due to the fact that there was just so much variability. It potentially wasn’t worth your effort to harvest and then generate a report for that.
Glenda Pereira: 18:46
But you have a ton of metrics and variables to look through here. Do you want to talk to us about just some of the key points of what you documented? And then more specifically, the differences in the hybrids were likely due to environmental factors. And I think that’s critical because you said in the beginning, before we started this podcast, maybe there’s places in Maine that are more similar in environmental factors to places in New York or elsewhere across the country than in that same county you’re in. And I see that all the time.
Glenda Pereira: 19:22
We have microclimates here in Maine, and it really impacts folks. They’re like, “Oh, we got rain today,” and it’s like nobody else got rain. And it’s just these micro-pockets. So I really like that you target that as an explanation so then folks can really understand what their environment is like and apply this hybrid or not.
Joe Lawrence: 19:45
Yeah, it’s always great to have data from your own farm, right? But in the absence of being able to do that each time, the more data we can provide on soil types, rainfall patterns, and growing degree days, hopefully, the more you can dial in on a location that was similar to your farm’s growing season. And it may not be the location that was closest to you. But going back to the report itself: we will accept hybrids, whatever the companies want to enter, but for practical reasons, we really focus on harvest timing and maturity at harvest. If we have too broad of a range of maturities, it’s very hard to harvest them. And we feel like we’re doing a disservice to the report if we have some hybrids that are harvested way too immature, say a dry matter that’s in the high 20s or low 30s below what we would target, or if we have some shorter season hybrids that end up being harvested and they’re way too dry. That’s not a really great representation of what those hybrids can do if we’re not harvesting them at the ideal time.
Joe Lawrence: 21:06
So to manage for that a little bit, we tend to accept hybrids from 85 days on the shorter end up to 110 days on the long end, and then we split them into two groups for harvest timing. So those earlier 85 to 98-day hybrids, we’d harvest at one time, and then we may come back to that site a week or ten days later to harvest the 99 to 110-day hybrids to give them the time to get into the maturity range we want. That’s going to vary across the Northeast, and it’s going to vary across a big state like Maine. It varies from north to south in New York, too, right? But we try to offer a range that is most representative of the growing climates that we’re going to experience.
Glenda Pereira: 21:56
Yeah. And see here, that’s one of our biggest challenges. Like last year, some folks, because it was so wet, were planting past July 4.
Glenda Pereira: 22:10
And we had a pretty harsh, quick winter. And I remember this December, it was just really a harsh winter right away. And so we had an earlier frost and that just kind of threw everything off. So I always tell folks to really look at those growing degree days and then work with their experts on this because that harvest time is really critical. And maybe they need to harvest earlier rather than later because of all these other environmental factors.
Glenda Pereira: 22:41
Yeah, thanks for explaining more about that. I don’t know if you wanted to add anything else.
Joe Lawrence: 22:45
Yeah, well, I think you made a great point there. And that’s an area where there is a perception in the industry that if we can grow longer-season hybrids, we’re going to get higher yields. And there is some evidence of that on the grain side, in particular, but we consistently see in our report—and you can go to our results and see this; we try to highlight it each year—where we may have a short 85-day hybrid that yields as well or better than a 95-day hybrid. And part of that is because of maturity, because around 50% of our silage yield comes from the ear. A significant change in that yield on a dry matter basis is when we convert more of that milky substance that’s in the ear into starch. So that’s not only increasing our total tonnage we’re harvesting, it’s also increasing the starch content of our silage.
Joe Lawrence: 23:45
So we can actually get higher yields and more of an impact on yields from a field by waiting. Instead of harvesting it when it’s 32% dry matter, if we can wait until it’s 35% or 36% dry matter, we can see a more significant change in yield and the added value of extra starch content compared to what we can see harvesting that 95-day hybrid versus the 85-day one. And I really challenge farms, especially with how unpredictable our growing seasons have been, to pull back a little bit. Drop your average relative maturities that you’re selecting by maybe five days. That’s going to give you more flexibility to manage and pick your harvest timing than trying to push the envelope and grow that hybrid that’s the longest possible relative maturity you think you can squeeze into your location.
Glenda Pereira: 24:53
Yeah. So my colleague Juan Romero would love to hear this because he’s all about dry matter. And he’s like, “Please try to get as close to 35 to 38 as possible.” Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 25:08
He’s a big proponent of that. But sometimes that’s not always a reality. And I do just want to highlight one more point about this report, and then I think we’ll wrap up with our conversation about this awesome corn silage hybrid evaluation program. But you have some really cool graphs, and it’s figure 1.5, just highlighting kind of that overlap between yield and predicted milk yield. I really like how you plotted all of the hybrids on this graph and folks can really look at it, but kind of what you were talking about.
Glenda Pereira: 25:44
Right? So you had your 85 to 94 day, 95 to 98, 99 to 104, and then 105 to 110. And you plotted all of those hybrids and then kind of had your yield, your minimum and your max for both crop tonnage and for predicted milk yield. Folks can use that, but I see that, like, for example, in your lower growing degree day, the 85-day corn, a lot of the hybrids seem to be potentially on the top two quadrants, whereas there was more variability in the short and the really long ones actually.
Glenda Pereira: 26:27
But I see in the first one, there’s a lot more above-average yield in milk for your shorter growing degree day corn. So just something to think about as folks peek through these results. These quadrants really do a good job of helping us digest some of this information.
Joe Lawrence: 26:45
Yeah, we found a lot of value in those because it is a way to look at a site and say what was above average in both yield and quality. And to your point, dry matter can really drive that, right? So those shorter-season hybrids that were a few points drier at harvest can drive their yield because now they’re a little more of a nutrient-dense package with a little higher percentage of starch in them. That can potentially drive benefits in that predicted milk yield. And dry matter is a great observation of how management and that selection process can influence that.
Glenda Pereira: 27:27
Yeah. Awesome. Well, is there anything else we didn’t talk about today that you would like to just wrap up with?
Joe Lawrence: 27:37
I already kind of said it, but again, we hope this is of value across the Northeast. And we’ve had some past collaborations, and we were hoping for some future ones where we can expand out the number of sites we have a little bit to represent more variation in the weather conditions different areas have. So I would just say stay tuned for that. And if you’re interested, you know, our contact information is on the report and probably with this podcast. And we’re always looking for collaborators for this work.
Glenda Pereira: 28:15
Yeah. We’ll share all this content in the show notes; folks can find more info there. So thanks so much, Joe, once again, for being on the Maine Farmcast.
Glenda Pereira: 28:25
This was a great discussion.
Joe Lawrence: 28:26
Thank you.
Glenda Pereira: 28:28
For our listeners, if you have topic suggestions, comments, or questions, be sure to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.