daddycal - 7/20/2016 10:34

I farm and ranch in Montana and run cattle and raise wheat. I am on a Beardless wheat program so I can cut and bale and feed or sell very green wheat hay or I can leave the best and cleanest and raise to sell beardless wheat seed.

When I did fecal analysis on my cow herd in the 90s, we learned how perfect, greenwheat is for cattle nutrition. When we make bright green wheat hay available for our cattle, the health of the cows and the gains on the calves is fantastic. Steer calves average just over three pounds a day on the cow. We keep very clean water available and a chelated Rumineral readily available to cows and calves.

That is the first I have heard about Fortuna wheat in a long long time. We farm around the Fortuna, ND area where that wheat was named for.

If I were in your area I would do some Alfalfa but try wheat as forage and hay, My cows are all on wheat fields that I hayed and we are getting wonderful regrowth. I have Willow creek winter wheat and fortuna spring wheat both beardless. I also have some very old Cimmeron that is about 80 percent beardless and is very good but no one can find me new Cimmeron seed.

Willow creek is very hard to get a good seed yield as it shells out easy and yield is about a third of bearded wheat like yellowstone on the same field.

Fortuna is a beautiful Spring wheat seed and it makes beautiful hay and forage. If drought hits hard, the growing wheat can get nitrates and it is important to feed wheat hay without nitrates. I have even swathed hundreds of acres of wheat and left it in the windrows and cows eat it all in late summer. It is amazing. I have windrowed Alfalfa and green crested wheat and both of them are amazing late summer feed. Saving windrows to winter is not for me as it is no problem to feed round bales to my cows during the winter if there is not enough native range. I have a lot of native range here and my resources are much different than most.