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This article provides management guidelines to benefit from ryegrass while encouraging bermudagrass recovery. While the focus is on ryegrass in bermudagrass, the same principles apply to other cool-season annuals in other warm-season perennial grasses.

A few of the benefits of sod-seeding small grain winter pasture include providing high quality forage during the winter months, providing additional forage production during the warm-season grass's dormant season and potentially reducing the need for winter supplementation.

Productive winter pasture can be a valuable asset, but can also be expensive to establish and grow.

Fertilizer and lime, pest, and grazing management recommendations to promote productive winter pastures.

Now that ammonium nitrate has become so expensive and all but impossible to get, anyone who needs to apply nitrogen during hot weather should evaluate the alternatives.

Adequate nitrogen is necessary for optimizing winter pasture production. One consideration for providing adequate nitrogen is to maximize nitrogen use efficiency (NUE). One way to improve NUE is to apply nitrogen during the late winter as a topdress application.

As if to add insult to injury, drought conditions make weed control even more challenging and important than usual. Weeds compete for light, nutrients, space and, most importantly during a drought, water.

If early-season weeds are not controlled, they will compete with desirable forages for space, nutrients, moisture and sunlight.

As I write this month's article, most producers are feeling more optimistic because we have had some rain and it has cooled off. The 100-plus degree days of the past summer are a bad memory.

With many analysts predicting that fertilizer use will return to normal levels during 2011 and expected tight supplies, higher prices are on the way.