BRANDON, Man. – Letting cattle graze a field of alfalfa is a rancher’s dream, according to a forage scientist at the Brandon Research Centre.
But Paul McCaughey is quick to warn that it can also be a nightmare, until low-bloat varieties are available.
“It’s the most productive forage that we have by a long shot. It regrows rapidly, it’s drought tolerant and it’s probably the most nutritious forage we’ve got,” McCaughey said on a recent tour of pasture management projects at the centre.
On the tour, almost 200 producers got to see the dream forage in action. For four years, McCaughey has been grazing steers on alfalfa-meadow bromegrass pastures. In collaboration with researchers at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, he is studying how to best manage alfalfa pastures.
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“We’re having really good success grazing it, and we’re getting tremendous weight gains and production per acre, so I think we’re showing where things are going to go five years down the road once low-bloat varieties of alfalfa do become available,” he said.
And this year, the team has added a cow-calf experiment to see how the pairs perform on alfalfa-based pastures compared to meadow bromegrass pastures. The experiment will also show how the pastures hold up.
McCaughey said results of the tests should emerge in a couple of years. But based on the success of similar projects with steers, he’s optimistic.
Cost is the difference
The cost per pound of gain tells the story. In feedlots, the weight gain can run as high as 70 cents per pound, while the Brandon research shows weight can be put on for 30 to 35 cents per pound in pasture.
“So even if we can’t make it pencil out so that we get filthy rich, it’s still putting gain on more efficiently than it is in the drylot,” McCaughey said, adding the steers have just a short finishing period off-pasture so they make the A1 grade.
Although the cattle got enough forage and nutrients in both heavily stocked pastures and those with fewer cattle, the animals in the lower-stocked pastures spent less time grazing each day, yet ate more forage and had higher gains.
McCaughey said the research also seems to favor rotational grazing over continuous grazing. Rotational grazing divides a pasture into paddocks, and one paddock is grazed while the others are given a chance to regrow.
He said plants in rotationally grazed pastures tend to have better root systems, making them more tolerant to drought. Researchers got about 2.5 centimetres more water from the soil profile of these pastures. The more water held in the soil, the more forage and beef can be produced.
“Rotational grazing doesn’t make animals grow faster. If anything, it may make them grow a little slower. But you’ll grow a lot more grass, and that adds up to more pounds of beef per acre from the pasture,” McCaughey said.
In fact, pounds per acre in his research increased 25 percent with rotational grazing. “That’s enough to pay for the fences.”
