There are as many varieties of annual ryegrass as I have fingers and toes... There are a few that are suitable for pasture. Those would be the diploid and tetraploid italian varities. Maris Ledger and Fabio are common around this area, as was Ajax at one time. Ajax gave us our best experiences. We've grown it strictly for pasture, and strictly as an annual. We never try to over winter it. Generally it will survive the winter, but it's first year is it's production year and the second year is it's reproduction year where it shoots a seed head. When it does that you may as well feed bullrushes to the cows... These are low growing varities, but they are very lush feed, produce a good tonnage and regrow very well with some moisture... but they're not really practical for mechanical harvesting. Let the cows get it themselves.
There are a multitude of other varities that grow more upright that you could harvest for hay/silage, but I have no real experience with them. I think David mostly filled in that bit anyway. I will say that this is likely our last year with the annual ryegrass too. It's gotten to be too much work for us to plant every year, we had a poor germination this year, and we've had two years now out of ten where it bolted and set seed under some stress... so it's gotten to be a somewhat costly and unpredictable crop. I think we'll go with a preannual ryegrass and Huia white clover next spring, perhaps with a bit of annual mixed in for the first year. I don't see that we've got much to lose that way even if it does winter kill...
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Today's Featured Article - Ford Part Number Trivia - by Forum Participants. "Replaced by" means the part was superseded. All of my part books date back to 1964 and New Holland have changed some part numbers. They usually put the old Ford part number on the package. I was suppressed when I looked up the part number of the auxiliary drive shaft because for some reason the part number went through a radical change and it lost its "Basic Part Number". Ford part numbers follow the following rules. Most part numbers are in three parts. The middle part is called the
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