Every Montana outfit with dry hillsides and disturbed ground has cheatgrass somewhere. Downy brome, some folks call it. It greens up early, cures out early, and by the Fourth of July it’s a red-brown fire hazard standing in ground that ought to be growing bunchgrass. Most of the year it’s a nuisance. But there’s a stretch in late spring and early June when it’s actually worth something as feed, and the whole trick is grazing it before the seed heads get mean.
The window is short and it’s closing now
Cheatgrass puts on most of its growth early because it germinates in the fall or the first warm days of spring and it’s running on whatever moisture the soil held over winter. While it’s green and leafy, before the seed heads harden, cattle will eat it and do fine on it. Protein is respectable at that stage. On a lot of foothill and breaks country, that early cheatgrass is carrying cows for a few weeks while the native grasses are still coming.
The problem is how fast it turns. Cheatgrass heads out, dries, and the seeds develop a long, stiff awn with a barbed tip. Once that happens, palatability drops off a cliff and the plant goes from feed to hazard. Cattle quit grazing it because the awns work into their gums and the soft tissue around the mouth. You’ll see cattle slobbering, going off feed, sometimes with sores or abscesses in the mouth. The awns get into eyes and start irritation that can lead to pinkeye. They lodge between the toes and in the fetlock and cause lameness. On sheep it ruins fleece, but even on cattle the seeds get into everything.
So the calendar matters. If you’ve got a pasture heavy to cheatgrass, that’s the one you want cattle on early, while it’s still soft and green, and off before it cures. Graze it hard during that window. You’re not saving it for later. There’s no later. It’s the opposite of how you’d treat a good perennial pasture where you leave leaf for regrowth.
Heavy early grazing actually helps knock it back
Cheatgrass is an annual. It lives or dies by setting seed. If you graze it hard while it’s growing and keep the plants from making a good seed crop, you take away next year’s stand a little at a time. It won’t wipe it out in one season, and it won’t touch the seed already banked in the soil, which can stay viable for years. But consistent, timed grazing pressure right when the plant is trying to reproduce is one of the few tools that works against it on rough country where spraying every acre isn’t realistic.
The flip side is that overgrazed, beat-up ground is exactly what cheatgrass loves. Bare dirt, thin perennial cover, old burns, prairie dog towns, heavy-use areas around water and gates. Cheatgrass moves into the gaps. So the same management that fights it long term is the management that builds a strong stand of perennial grass to crowd it out: don’t let the good pastures get grazed to the dirt, keep litter on the ground, rest what’s been hit hard. Where you’ve got a solid stand of bluebunch, western wheatgrass, or needle-and-thread holding the ground, cheatgrass has a harder time getting a foothold.
Watch for the fire and the wrecks it causes
Cured cheatgrass is fine fuel. It carries a fire fast and it carries it early, before your native grass is dry enough to burn well. A dropped cigarette, a hot exhaust, a chain dragging sparks off a trailer, or the chaff off a swather will light a cheatgrass flat in a hurry in July and August. If you’ve got a heavy stand near buildings, corrals, or a road, that’s worth thinking about before it cures.
Keep an eye on your cattle through the summer, too. A cow slobbering and quidding feed, or one with a runny, squinting eye and no obvious sign of face flies, might have an awn stuck in there. Same with a sudden lame animal that doesn’t have foot rot in a wet corner; check between the toes. Pulling a seed head out is a lot cheaper than treating an abscess or a case of pinkeye that got started by one.
Cheatgrass isn’t going away. It’s part of the country now on a lot of Montana ground. But treated as a short-season forage instead of a year-round pasture, and grazed at the right time, it’ll carry some cows in June and cost you less trouble in July.
