Cattle And Crops Download
Dibe Naro
Cattle producers who did not plant cover crops earlier this year should be making plans to maximize their grazing resources in 2021 by speaking with their Oklahoma State University Extension county agricultural educator.
Many Oklahoma ranchers have been reaping the benefits of feed cost and overall animal wellbeing by having cover crops available as forage resources heading into winter. However, cover crops are not going to be a viable option for every livestock operator.
The most common crops for winter cover are grasses, brassicas and legumes. Those grasses are typically small grains such as rye, triticale, winter oats and barley, which provide excellent protein and energy throughout the fall and winter. Although forage quality among those grasses will be similar, maturity will differ greatly from one species to the next.
Turnip, rape, kale and radish are brassicas typically blended with other species. With adequate moisture, those crops grow quickly and produce high-quality forage that contains 15% to 20% crude protein and 60% to 70% total digestible nutrients.
The risk of bloat for livestock on cover crops is similar to grazing only wheat or other small grains. Some in the industry believe that grazing a blend of different plants will reduce bloat risk, but more research is needed to substantiate the claim, Zook said.
Livestock nutritionist Paul Beck of the OSU Department of Animal and Food Sciences recently shared some insights on using cover crops as a grazing resource on the agricultural television program SUNUP, available for viewing online.
Many people believe that animal agriculture should be phased out and replaced with vegetarian substitutes. The livestock industry has also been attacked because it uses vast amounts of land. People forget that grazing cattle or sheep can be raised on land that is either too arid or too rough for raising crops. At least 20% of the habitable land on Earth is not suitable for crops. Rotational grazing systems can be used to improve both soil health and vegetation diversity on arid land. Grazing livestock are also being successfully used to graze cover crops on prime farmland. Soil health is improved when grazing on a cover crop is rotated with conventional cash crops, such as corn or soybeans. It also reduces the need for buying fertilizer. Grazing animals, such as cattle, sheep, goats, or bison, should be used as part of a sustainable system that will improve the land, help sequester carbon, and reduce animal welfare issues.
Most of the time, Australia's Fitzroy River does not really exist. For years at a time, the river is only a dry streambed. Upriver, cattle wander about the surrounding rangeland, plucking at tufts of brown grass and kicking up dust. Downriver, farmers irrigate, fertilize, and tend their cotton and other crops. Every five or ten years, the rains come. In a single day, water can pour down the river at a rate of 1.5 cubic kilometers (0.4 cubic miles) per second from a river catchment the size of the state of Illinois. The Fitzroy's waters flush sediment, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and other civilization-borne runoff hundreds of miles into the water off the coast of Australia.
The plumes of runoff that Dekker helps track using MODIS are a good way to assess water quality on the Great Barrier Reef. However, water quality on the reef depends on conditions far inland, where the water begins flowing towards the coast. Brodie said, "If you want to do something about conditions at the mouth of the river, then there's no point doing anything on the Great Barrier Reef. You have to do it hundreds of kilometers upriver." The two greatest inputs of sediment and nutrients into the Fitzroy River are cattle ranches and farms. "We have a whole raft of pollutants coming out of the catchment, including sediment and dissolved nutrients and herbicides," Brodie said. "Much of our work is aimed at disentangling those pollutants, identifying which industries are producing which ones and in what quantities. So we do a lot of monitoring to determine source areas."
Cattle grazing is a large source of sediment into the Fitzroy. Dekker said, "There's increasing evidence that in the past 200 years, since European settlement and changes in land use, there has been a significant increase in suspended sediment and nutrient input." As the cattle graze, they break down the riparian areas along the riverbanks, sending soil into the streambed to be carried away during the next flood. Unmanaged cattle will also spread out over the land, increasing erosion by stirring up the soil and grazing on the groundcover. Brodie said, "We believe sedimentary export has increased five or six times over natural erosion because of cattle grazing."
Several government programs, under the Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, seek to help land managers and cattle ranchers connect. "We're using the Southern Oscillation Index, a measure of air pressure, to predict what the weather is going to be like next wet season. The idea is for ranchers to manage the cattle in advance. If it's going to be a bad drought year, you could sell off your cattle now," Brodie explained. "But if it's going to be a good year with lots of grass, then you might build your cattle numbers up a bit. That allows us to retain better pasture cover."
Another program subsidizes fencing so that farmers can confine cattle to specific areas of rangeland and move the animals from paddock to paddock. Controlling the cattle allows the vegetation to recover, protects riparian areas, and holds down erosion.
Ed Morse dumps a bucket of corn into feed bunks on his land near Council Bluffs, Iowa. He is expanding his cattle herd and converting cropland into pastureland. Clay Masters for NPR hide caption
The Department of Agriculture predicts cattle prices will rise 20 percent in 2011 over last year. But that pales in comparison to the price of corn, which has more than doubled in the past year to nearly $8 a bushel.
"With the cattle you're more on your own," he says. "In some ways, it's an act of faith because you have got to look out into the future a couple years and see that this will be a paying proposition as well."
In central Missouri's Calloway County, farm owner Margot McMillen says one of her tenants offered her three times the rent to convert some of her pasture land into row crops. But she turned down the offer because of her long-term plans and a desire to avoid knee-jerk decisions based on what commodity is hot.
When crops are fed to animals, most nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium contained in the feeds are excreted as waste products. Thus, when animal products are the main sales from the farm, relatively few nutrients (relative to what animals ate) leave the farm. On the other hand, farms that exclusively produce annual grain crops, such as corn, soybeans, wheat and sorghum, or even vegetables, export a lot of nutrients contained in their crops. Another issue is that farms concentrating on production of annual crops usually have no reason to include perennial forage crops in their rotations. Additional equipment is needed to manage the crop, and the sale of forages, bulky by nature, is sometimes difficult. Occasionally there may be a local demand for hay, but most commonly there is little market for it in the wide expanse of regions growing annual crops. Exclusively growing annuals, especially only one or two crops, makes weed control more challenging, deprives the land of the improved soil health of multi-year grasses and legumes, allows disease and insect pests to flourish, and requires large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to be applied for most crops. Integrating livestock into the farm operation can make it more sustainable but also makes it more complex. If not implemented in the right way it can also increase environmental problems.
Second, there are diversified farms that raise all the feed for their animals but sell a range of crops and animal products. Combining and integrating the raising of livestock and multiple crops on individual farms has many advantages. Having a number of marketable products provides some protection against the seasonal failure of a single product and the vagaries of market price fluctuations.
Combined crop-and-livestock farms of various types have an inherent advantage for improving soil health. Crops can be fed to animals and manures are returned to the soil, thereby providing a continuous supply of organic materials. For many livestock operations, perennial forage crops are an integral part of the cropping system, thereby reducing erosion potential and helping maintain or increase soil organic matter while improving soil physical and biological properties. Soil health tests conducted on dairy farms consistently show good results for most soil health indicators, although compaction remains a concern. Nevertheless, crop-livestock farms have challenges. Silage harvests do not leave much crop residue, which needs to be compensated for with manure application or cover crops. Minimizing tillage is also important and can be done by injecting the manure or gently incorporating it with aerators or harrows, rather than plowing it under. Soil pulverization can be minimized by reducing secondary tillage, using strip or zone tillage, and establishing the crops with no-tillage planters and seeders. Also, many livestock farms grow row crops with perennial forages and use strip cropping to reduce erosion concerns.
Manure from hogs can also be handled in different ways. Farmers raising hogs on a relatively small scale sometimes use hoop houses, frequently placed in fields, with bedding on the floor. The manure mixed with bedding can be spread as a solid manure or can be composted first. The larger, more industrial-scale farms mainly use little to no bedding, with slatted floors over the manure pit, and they keep the animals clean by frequently washing the floors. The liquid manure is held in ponds for spreading, mostly in the spring before crops are planted, and in the fall after crops have been harvested. Poultry manure is handled with bedding (especially for broiler production) or with little to no bedding (industrial-scale egg production).
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