Grazing Lands Dollar$ and Sense

Graziers from all over the region came together for two days of sharing ideas at the Oklahoma Grazing Lands Conservation Association (OGLCA) Annual Conference, “Grazing Lands Dollar$ and Sense: Developing Grassfed Livestock Production Systems,”  held August 11th and 12th in Oklahoma City.

Bob Drake, the chair of the National Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative (GLCI) Committee, welcomed all comers.  “Oklahoma has one of the best programs of any state in the country – one to be proud of,” he said.

Building the Grassfed Animal

Gerald Fry, of Bovine Engineering and Consulting in Rosebud, Arkansas, started the session with a presentation on, “Genetics, Cattle, and Quality Meat: Building the Grassfed Animal.”

“Looking for information on raising animals on grass is one of the hardest roads I’ve ever traveled,” Fry said.  “Up ‘til the 1960s that was all people did.  They didn’t write about it – it was just a way of life.”

Fry focused his remarks on line breeding as an approach to stabilizing herd genetics, and on selection to ensure that those genetics are appropriate to a grass-fed program of animal husbandry.

“Think of your cow herd as a gene pool,” he advised.  “The gene pool in your herd, whatever color, is just as good as the guy with a lot of papers.”

“If you don’t have width of shoulders and depth of chest, you don’t have a grass machine,” Fry said.  “During selection, you have to keep the front end on your animals.”

Selecting for such a body type, Fry said, creates a cow that is more efficient at turning grass into beef.  Currently, he said, cattle in the U.S. only convert half of every pound of forage consumed into meat.  In Argentina and Uruguay, where grass-feeding has been established longer, that ratio is two-thirds.

“A cow should be able to nurse a calf for ten months, minimum (not necessarily in a drought situation).  She’s an investment.”
 
Fry explained that a cow has to have five calves to pay for herself. Cattle in the U.S. average barely more than that, at 6.5 calves over the lifetime of the cow.  By delaying breeding until at least 20 months of age, Fry said, that number can be increased to ten or twelve calves in a lifetime, increasing the producer’s economic return on each individual mother.

A Year-Round Forage System

After lunch, Brian Northup and Bill Phillips, two scientists from the Grazinglands Research Laboratory in El Reno, took up the speaker’s baton.

As mandated by ARS, the El Reno research station focuses its research on stocker production rather than cow-calf operations. Traditional stocker systems in the southern Great Plains, Northup explained, rely on grazing winter wheat in winter and early spring, and warm-season grasses in summer. 

That leaves “forage gaps” in fall and late spring.  There are also periods during which the amount of forage is adequate, but its protein content is too high relative to the amount of energy it contains, reducing daily weight gain.

Some of El Reno’s research is aimed at shortening those forage gaps by introducing other grasses into the seasonal forage program – several cool-season perennial species for late fall and spring, as well as annual warm-season grasses double-cropped with wheat. 

So far, such approaches can supply forage for up to 300 grazing days out of the year, with other strategies, such as feeding “grain-on-grass,” as possibilities for the remaining forage gaps.

What’s in A Label?

Chuck Willoughby, of the Food and Agricultural Products Research & Technology Center (FAPC) at OSU, followed with a talk on “Labeling Laws for Grassfed Meats.”

Willoughby reviewed the required contents of a meat food label, which can include up to eight items: product name, inspection legend, net weight, handling statement, address line, ingredients statement, nutrition facts, and safe handling instructions.

Nutrition facts for most products on the market are drawn from USDA’s nutrition database.  If a product has special nutritional qualities, such as grassfed meat’s claims of leanness and higher omega-3 content, Willoughby said, it’s worth footing the bill ($150-200 up to $1000) for analytical chemistry so those claims can be included in the label’s nutritional information.

Willoughby also touched on the new proposed federal standard for grassfed meats.  While the specifics are still being hammered out, he said, the bottom line is that record-keeping and verification will be necessary to validate the grass-fed claim (see sidebar).

Bugs, Breeding, and Beef

Tom Royer, Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at OSU, then spoke on the role of dung beetles in year-round grazing systems.  By rapidly working manure into pasture soils, he said, dung beetles can increase forage availability, enhance nutrient cycling, improve soils’ water holding capacity, and reduce populations of some livestock pests.  Royer offered a few guidelines for how to manage grazing to preserve dung beetle populations (see sidebar).

Next up was Ron Morrow, a grassfed beef producer and member of Ozark Pasture Beef LLC from Arkansas.  Morrow has spent 30 years studying and teaching grazing with the University of Missouri, ATTRA, and NRCS.  In his talk he shared insights from these experiences on everything from pasture and herd management to marketing.

After supper, Teddy Gentry of Bent Tree Farms in Alabama wrapped up the day’s sessions with a presentation on grassfed beef genetics.

Bringing It All Together

Saturday morning, Jon Taggert of Burgundy Beef in Texas got things rolling with a talk describing his family’s grass-fed beef operation, custom boucherie, and retail store.

The remainder of the morning was given over to a producer panel called “Making Grassfed Work.”  Panelists included the Kerr Center’s Mary Penick, who addressed the topic of heritage breeds based on her work with the Center’s herd of Pineywoods cattle; OGLCA Executive Committee member Kim Barker, who related his experiences raising grassfed lambs, and conference presenter Ron Morrow.

After lunch, the conference wrapped up with an afternoon roundtable with all speakers together fielding and discussing questions from other conference participants.

Proposed Federal
Grass Fed Standard

The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) issued a proposed voluntary standard for grass fed livestock on May 12.  Between that time and the close of the public comment period on August 10, the agency received over 19,000 comments from the public on the proposed standard.  Summaries and full text of all comments received are posted online at http://www.ams.usda.gov/lsg/stand/claim.htm

The text of the proposed standard is:

“Grass (Forage) Fed:  Grass, forbs browse, forage, or stockpiled forages, and post-harvest crop residue without separated grain shall be at least 99 percent of the energy source for the lifetime of the ruminant specie, with the exception of milk consumed prior to weaning. Routine mineral and vitamin supplementation may also be included in the feeding regimen. Grass (forage) fed claims will be verified… by a feeding protocol that confirms a grass or forage-based diet that is 99 percent or higher.”

http://www.ams.usda.gov/lsg/stand/ls0509.txt

Dung Beetles: …

Many people who have spent time in pastures are familiar with the sight of dung beetles – small insects busily rolling balls of cow manure across the ground.  Far fewer have probably suspected just how important dung beetles can be in pasture ecosystems.

There are about 90 species of dung beetles in the U.S., including a dozen or so – many of them non-native – that can be highly beneficial in pastures. 

How does a bug with an unappealing choice of hangouts help pastures?  In rotational grazing systems, where the cattle are supposed to fertilize the pastures with their own manure, dung beetles’ activity mixes the manure into the soil much more rapidly than otherwise, ensuring that as much of the manure nutrients as possible – up to one ton per acre per day – are stored away to feed growing plants.

Dung beetles help with much more than just nitrogen.  Water flows more easily into the beetles’ tunnels, increasing infiltration (the amount of rainwater that soaks into the soil rather than just running off the surface).  According to research from a 1999 Kerr Center producer grant to Walt Davis, that increase is 129%, on average.

Cattle are understandably reluctant to graze too close to their own patties, thus leaving good grass uneaten.  Dung beetles’ quick disposal of the cowflops makes more of a pasture’s forage available to the cows.

The cowflops that dung beetles tear up are home to the eggs of hornflies as well as some internal parasites of cattle, so the more active the dung beetles are, the fewer of these pests grow up to plague cattle.

Taken together, all these beneficial impacts of dung beetles may be worth as much as $380 million a year, according to a recent paper in the journal BioScience.

Rotational grazing has built-in advantages for dung beetles. But there are some further steps that graziers can take to keep dung beetles booming in their pastures.

For one, they can time rotations to last at least as long as the 5- to 6-weeks required for adult beetles to emerge.

Some chemicals used for parasite control, particularly ivermectin, pass into manure and can harm dung beetles as well.  Using anti-parasite chemicals that are less harmful to beetles, and timing their use to cooler seasons when the beetles are less active, can help minimize their damage to dung beetle populations.

Oklahoma Grazing Lands Conservation Association
http://www.okgrazinglands.org/

Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative
http://www.glci.org/
(The national GLCI conference is Dec. 10-13 in St. Louis, Missouri.)

Bovine Engineering & Consulting
http://bovineengineering.com/

Grazinglands Research Laboratory
http://ars.usda.gov/main/
site_main.htm?modecode=62-18-00-00

Oklahoma Food and Agricultural Products Research and Technology Center (FAPC)
http://www.fapc.okstate.edu/

Oklahoma State University Department of Entomology & Plant Pathology
http://www.ento.okstate.edu/

Ozark Pasture Beef
http://www.ozarkpasturebeef.com/

Bent Tree Farms
http://benttreefarms.com/

Burgundy Pasture Beef
http://www.burgundypasturebeef.com/
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