SWIFT CURRENT, Sask. — Researchers are surveying western Canadian producers to find out how often they test their feed.
Funded by the Beef Cattle Research Council and Saskatchewan’s Agriculture Development Fund, the survey hopes to reach 500 cow-calf producers.
Kathy Larson from the University of Saskatchewan is leading the project with Emma Stephens from Agriculture Canada in Lethbridge. She said they are looking for producers who do feed test and those who don’t.
“We learned from the Western Canadian Cow-Calf Survey that feed testing is annually used by about 40 percent of respondents,” she said. “Given feed is the largest cost for a producer, we would like to see how feed quality assessment and ration development is being done by cow-calf producers.”
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The same survey showed that even more producers in Atlantic Canada and Ontario don’t regularly feed test.
“We want to see higher adoption of that, but we need to first understand what is it that producers are doing, what are some of the holdups, what are some of the alternative ways that they’re assessing their animals’ nutrition status?” said Larson.
The online survey will close once 500 have completed it. It can be found at surveys.insightrix.com/feedtestingsurvey.
