A few that I can think of right off are: clover, its commonly mowed in the summer……buckwheat, you’re going to have to double crop it somehow to keep it producing otherwise it’s a short lived crop…..sunn hemp, its gets very large and stemmy as the summer goes on if its able to withstand initial browsing. Many folks are mowing it mid summer to be able to better handle the biomass and keep forage fresh……corn, it doesn’t even produce forage during the summer months.

N2T……If you want to compare and contrast the two and form a list of pros and cons then add up all of the inputs that 257 has invested in the crops he has pictured and then compare that to the investments made in a crop of “weeds”. That’s a much more fair comparison than cherry picking individual questions. I’m not out here this weekend spraying herbicide so that the weeds will make it through the summer….I’m not paying $100 per bag for the weeds…..I’m not having to feed the weeds 70 units of additional N…..I’m not having to spray before planting and intensively prep the field to grow the weeds…..I’m not having to have lots of specialized equipment to grow the weeds…..I can go on but you get the point. There’s a lot more to it than just cherry picking individual aspects.

Really my main purpose for mowing though is to double crop the biomass and try to get my whole field evened out and on the same page before fall planting gets here. I think I may even drag my disk across the field with most of the bite taken out to try and stimulate new growth in the areas where my crops have me decimated. That's IF the rain ever returns. This is why I’m going to a more weed and clover based system from the get-go in the future. Trying to grow stuff that just gets decimated is just costing me time, money, and more effort to just eventually arrive at the same destination in the end. I’m just going to skip all the bullchit in the middle from now on.

As far as my hunting club…..I haven’t checked on it in several weeks. The situation there is even more extreme than what I’m dealing with here on my test plot. I haven’t even been able to grow the same type of weeds there yet during the summer. My summer fields last year ended up being mostly dog fennel, black eyed susans, etc….just stuff the deer absolutely would not eat…..everything else in the plot was consumed. Why would I try to bust off with a $1000 worth of summer plantings on those fields when I can’t even grow ragweed on them yet due to deer browsing? We’ve actually already had it attempted and it all it got us was another year behind.