LINDELL BEACH, B.C. – Wisconsin dairy farmer Charles Opitz noticed in 1990 that his cows favoured grazing on a particular hilltop in the shadow of spreading oak trees.
He also noticed that their milk production increased when they ate the grass on that hill.
Intrigued, he contacted a plant researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help identify it.
“(Opitz’s operation) was a large dairy farm (near Mineral Point, Wis.), about 2,000 acres,” said USDA plant geneticist Michael Casler.
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“It’s divided into different pieces with different herds. On one part of the farm, he was in the process of building a new milking parlour on top of one of the hills.
“He noticed that there was this unusual grass in the shade of the oak trees. He watched it over time because his cattle really liked it. To them this was like ice cream.
“He left them there and noticed over a period of time the grass was starting to spread down the hill and get into other parts of the pasture. By now he’s thinking this is great because they love it and they’re milking well when they eat it. That’s when he called me.”
Casler started researching the grass in 2002, eventually identifying it as meadow fescue.
It was imported from Europe more than 100 years ago but had become lost in the mix over time.
“It wasn’t even on our radar screen,” Casler said.
“People were interested in it way back in the late 1800s and 1900s in both the U.S. and Canada, but when tall fescue came in, everybody forgot about meadow fescue. Tall fescue is higher in yield and that’s what everybody cared about. So meadow fescue completely disappeared.”
He said the grass is winter hardy and persistent and has survived decades of farming. It emerged from endangered oak savannah ecosystems to spread and dominate many pastures in the driftless region of the Midwest.
Oak savannah is a plant community with scattered open-grown oak trees, which means they grow at a distance to each other.
Compared to a traditional oak forest with a closed canopy, the oak savannah community has canopies from 10 to 60 percent, which allows for the extensive growth of grasses and shrubs on the savannah floor.
Oak savannah, once common, is now extremely rare. Wisconsin’s natural resources department estimates that only 0.01 per cent of the plant community remains.
“Meadow fescue comes from northern Europe and higher altitudes in southern Europe, such as the high mountain meadows in the Alps and some of the Italian mountain ranges,” said Casler.
“I’ve been working with a lot of Europeans over the years and they recognize it as a quality forage. To them it’s not novel. Meadow fescue is an old species that Europeans have been using for hundreds of years. But to us it is the novelty that we’ve discovered something new. It’s very high quality.”
The grass has been found on more than 300 farms in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota, and Casler and his team has been able to trace its origin to various parts of Europe.
“Our theory is that when the Euro-peans first settled this area 150 to 180 years ago, they started bringing the grass (or its seeds) with them,” Casler said.
“They brought in the things they were familiar with. Our data suggests it was brought in multiple times from multiple places. Since then it has become mixed up genetically. (Strains of the grass) have crossed with each other and different hybridizations have occurred.”
Casler and his team have done DNA marker work on the grass.
Non-toxic fungi called endophytes live inside the grass, helping it survive heat, drought and pests.
Geoffrey Brink, a USDA agronomist working with Casler, was the first to examine the digestibility of the fibre in the grass’s cell walls.
“They discovered that the fibre of meadow fescue is four percent to seven percent more digestible than other cool season grasses in the U.S.,” Brink said.
“A traditional evaluation of total digestibility didn’t reveal this difference.”
He tested three meadow fescue varieties against one orchardgrass and one tall fescue variety. The meadow fescue had a nutritional forage quality advantage that may compensate for its slightly lower annual yield, he said.
“Meadow fescue yields are equal to other grasses in the driftless region,” said Brink. “But as you go further north in the Midwest, the yields tend to be slightly lower, although the gap begins to close with the frequent harvesting involved in intensive grazing.”
Brink also found that applying nitrogen fertilizer above 54 kilograms per acre per year was counterproductive because production efficiency begins to decline.
He said the results of their studies would also apply to farmers wanting to raise sheep and beef cattle on pastures of meadow fescue.
Casler believes that as a cool season grass, meadow fescue would do well in Canada and in parts of the Prairies where it is not exposed to severe drought.
“It’s right in there with tall fescue but it doesn’t have the drought tolerance of the western range grasses,” he said. “You just have to be careful about what parts of the Prairies you are talking about.”
Casler has developed a new variety of meadow fescue called Hidden Valley. Its seed is being grown for future release.
“We expect to begin marketing seed in about five to six years,” said Casler. “It should be available in Canada. We are currently working with two seed companies, one based in the U. S and one in Canada.”
His team’s research has been published in theAgronomy Journal.
