BrushyPines
5 year old buck +
I'm having a hard time finding milo in my area. One of the local co ops has milo feed, not seed, and said that it would germinate & come up if planted. Has anyone planted milo feed before and had success?
Milo question
- Thread starter BrushyPines
- Start date
bigboreblr
5 year old buck +
I use feed oats, but I test germinate them. I put some soil in a flower pot base. I grab a handful of seed from the top and bottom of the bag. I pick 25 average whole seeds. No broken ones, empty hulls,or oddball looking ones. Covedr it with a little bit more soil, then cover it with some clear plastic and put by a window. Never had an issue with the oats, but do it every time.
Hoytvectrix
5 year old buck +
Just keep asking around for sorghum grain or Milo seed. If they don't have it in stock, I'm sure they can order some for you. It should be fairly cheap if you buy the non-gmo stuff.
CarolinaDawg
A good 3 year old buck
Hancock Seed has it in stock with very reasonable shipping. https://hancockseed.com/products/wgf-sorghum-seed
BrushyPines
5 year old buck +
I've asked every local seed store. No one is getting milo seed this year. Idk if it's a supply chain problem or what. Just didnt want to buy milo feed and it not work.
You can buy it of the Pheasants Forever habitat page.
www.pfhabitatstore.com
Early Longtail Milo (25# bag) Seed Mix | Pheasants Forever
Early Longtail Milo (25# bag) - 1 Bag Plants 4-5 Acres. Short growing seasons are no longer a barrier to good food production for wildlife. Early Longtail Milo is an early maturing sorghum that provides a heavy seed crop in as little as 85 days in normal growing conditions. It makes for great huntin
FarmerDan
5 year old buck +
Let's suppose I was a grain grower growing grain sorghum. Let's suppose the local seed processor was offering contracts for "seed, grain sorghum, variety not stated." I sign the contract and agree to deliver so many tons of grain sorghum. There might be some specifications in the contract about how I will get paid (or not paid) based on the weed seed content of my grain and it's eventual germination rate, but that's transparent to you.
Eventually you buy my grain sorghum - for seed - and the only thing that happens between the time I harvest the grain and you buy it for seed is - it gets cleaned and germination tested.
Think of "cleaning" like this - imagine you're standing in a pile of grain sorghum grain with shovel in hand. Over to the side there's a big fan blowing any direction except in your face. You shovel the grain and throw it into the air. What comes back down is the heavy grain. The lighter weed seeds and broken grain sorghum kernels are blown clear.
Next, the state seed inspector comes, collects a small sample and trucks it back to the state lab where the number and kind of remaining weed seeds are counted and the grain is germination tested. The state prints need seed tags (far from free) and brings them back to the processor who bags and tags "seed, grain sorghum. variety not stated" ..now .with a guaranteed (ha) germination percent and the number of other seeds in the seed bag as a percentage of total weight.
For all of this you pay 2X to 3X the cost of a bag of feed grain now called seed. Cleaned and guaranteed.
Which you choose is up to you.
Bassattackr
5 year old buck +
Yes. Milo likes N but not crazy high like corn. 100# / acre of Nitrogen gets a great stand.
As others have stated, make sure you don’t plant too thick.
Red Milo (higher tannin levels) is favored to hunt over. White Milo will be wiped out by birds by October 1st.
As others have stated, make sure you don’t plant too thick.
Red Milo (higher tannin levels) is favored to hunt over. White Milo will be wiped out by birds by October 1st.
Hoytvectrix
5 year old buck +
I didn't know that about red and white Milo. Interesting.
100 lbs nitrogen per acre? So two 50 lb bags 46-0-0 urea per acre. I have never grown milo in a pure stand - always in a mix. If the bottoms dry out soon enough to work this year, I am going to try some. I figure the deer would use it, and if it happens to flood in the winter, we could duck hunt over it
Wild Thing
5 year old buck +
Remember that the numbers in the mix represent the percentage of actual N-P or K contained in the bag. So.....100# of 46-0-0 (2 - 50# bags) would only be 46# of actual N.
In order to apply 100# of actual N using 46-0-0 you would need to apply 217.4# of Urea - 46-0-0.
100 divided by .46 = 217.39
BrushyPines
5 year old buck +
So in other words you are saying, both "feed" and "seed" are the same things, one just went through an expensive process to "prove" it germinates while the other did not?
BrushyPines
5 year old buck +
Interesting. Didnt know that. Milo is never hammered at my place. Main reason I use it is to have a living plant on my plots and it grows really well on my poor soil. The goal is to improve the soil with spring plots, not feed deer. There is plenty of food throughout my thinned pines.
Wild Thing
5 year old buck +
Just read an article from Gamekeepers (Farming For Wildlife) magazine entitled "Organic Food Plot Farming" by Dale Bliss this morning. Here is part of what he had to say about Sorghums (Milo)...
"...Some of the best grass cover crops would include sorghums, millets, cereal rye, oats, triticale and winter wheat. Sorghums may deserve their own category. While it may not be as palatable or provide as much food to whitetails as certain other plant types, in the cover crop world, there is no more versatile or widely used plant family."
Dr Grant Woods has also lauded the use of sorghum in cover crops for its soil building qualities. I have used it somewhat sparingly in my cover crop mixes in the past but do plan to use it more in the future.
BrushyPines
5 year old buck +
My spring mix usually consist of milo, buckwheat and cowpeas. From what I have read for a successful TnM plot to build soil, you want living plants on the plot year round and a diversity of plants.
Wild Thing
5 year old buck +
Absolutely - the more diverse the plant community and the longer you have living roots in the soil, the better your cover crop can help the soil.
I seem to keep changing up my cover crop recipes but the past couple of years I have mixed up a 12 variety blend of seeds. I have included Milo in them but will likely up the amount of it this year. I should mention that these days I am drilling into my cover crops rather than practicing T&M. Your blend of seeds would be much easier to terminate without using any herbicide.
FarmerDan
5 year old buck +
It depends. Generalities are rarely true. The reference I made was for sorghum, variety not stated. The scenario was contrived - and possible and somewhat likely. if you're a seed processor you probably lean toward growers you trust. When one starts growing specific varieties there's much more regulation and documentation required. Corn hybrids are a whole different issue. GMO's have their own challenges. Where the specific seed is grown is also important.
Here, we often debate feed oats and seed oats. Good feed oats are plump and full of germplasm. I do use them in food plots but I'm not averse to buying specific varieties of seed oats. Bad feed oats are all seed coat and sheath with just enough germplasm to possibly be viable in a seed bed.
Using grain as seed is a gamble. If you gamble understand the odds and be prepared to lose. In my original post I probably left it like the cost of seed vs grain...the 2X or 3x times the cost of a comparable volume/weight of grain ..was a bad thing. It is not. Nobody (except maybe Monsanto) is getting rich growing, processing and selling seed. The additional costs of seed compared to grain only reflect the additional costs involved with the slimmest of profit margin for those involved in taking the seed from grain to seed.
One more thing I would add. In all of this I'm assuming the grain (not the seed) is a recent harvest, that it's not been stored in a bin for any length of time like - years? Seed, be it grain or seed, loses its vigor as time goes on. So, there's that. You don't know when you buy grain for seed.
Great question!
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