School of Agriculture and Land Resources Management, Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station
Abstract
We assessed the effectiveness of no-till forage establishment at six Alaska locations: Anchor Point, Sterling, Point MacKenzie, Palmer, Delta Junction, and Fairbanks. Directly seeding grass into established grass stands generally did not improve forage yields or quality. Seeding rate had little effect on establishment of newly seeded forages in no-till. Grass yields were depressed when companion crop yields were high, and they typically did not recover in subsequent years. Red clover established well, producing high yields of good quality forage under no-till at Point MacKenzie, but established poorly at Anchor Point and Delta Junction. These results indicated that no-till seeding of most forage crops into declining grass stands is not likely to be successful in Alaska with current available technology
