Research

Background

One of the trickiest things to do in beef production systems is to accurately measure how much forage grazing animals are consuming. The ability to easily, cost-effectively, and accurately estimate forage intake would have several benefits for producers including providing key information to optimize pasture utilization and cow efficiency. Previous research has examined several options, but none have translated into a method easily used on-farm thus far.

Objectives

The objectives of this project are to:

• Determine estimated forage intake and/or forage biomass removal on pasture using several different methods (e.g. quadrat clipping, disk meters, camera imaging, near infra-red spectroscopy and wet chemistry fecal/forage markers, the RumiWatch system, various animal energy equations, etc.)
• Evaluate, compare and/or validate the different methods over two grazing seasons

Implications of the Research

Comparing traditional, emerging and novel methods to estimate intake of grazing animals could potentially provide an avenue for producers to explore more practical, cost-effective, and user-friendly means to collect forage intake information, which in turn, could have impacts on cow selection, grazing management, and feed costs.