Producers regularly buy mineral supplements for their cattle, but the Saskatchewan Forage Council wants to know how many trace minerals are available in provincial pastures.
“We haven’t stood back and looked at what is going into the animals,” said Janice Bruynooghe, the council’s executive director.
The two-year study will take samples of forage plants twice a year in the four soil zones: brown, dark brown, black and gray. The information will be used to provide trace mineral profiles of the pastures and assess the trace mineral supplement programs on each pasture.
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Three pastures per soil zone will be sampled and up to six forage species will be sampled per pasture.
The samples will be taken from the province’s community pastures, and forage species will be clipped at a height to simulate grazing.
The samples will be sent to a laboratory for wet chemistry forage analysis, which will study them for moisture, dry matter, crude protein, calcium, sulfur, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, molybdenum, copper, sodium, sodium chloride, selenium, zinc, manganese, iron, lignin, acid detergent fibre, neutral detergent fibre and total digestible nutrients.
Bruynooghe said the information will be used to look for trends within the soil types and forage species. Livestock producers can then use it for a more targeted trace mineral supplement program.
“It will let producers work with suppliers to put together mineral re-quirements that work for them and not just go out with a bag of mineral and have a shotgun approach,” said Bruynooghe.
The project will also take water samples, which will be used to assess nutritional value to the cattle as it relates to the overall nutrients available to the animal.
Bruynooghe believes the information won’t give clear answers but will be a starting point for researchers and extension agrologists to learn more about pasture mineral supplementation.
“I think the project will give us good starting information. It may give us more questions than a total list of answers.”
