LANIGAN, Sask. – A hybrid brome grass called AC Knowles may prove to be the bovine equivalent of the hot fudge sundae.
Research being carried out at the Termuende Research Farm has found that cattle pack on more pounds on a diet of hybrid brome than they do when they eat either of its parents, smooth brome or meadow brome.
While more data must be gathered before definitive conclusions can be reached, that’s the kind of information that can put more dollars and cents into producers’ pockets, although researchers say they haven’t yet done detailed economic analysis.
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“I can’t really put any number on it right now, but at the end of the day that’s what producers are looking for,” said Bart Lardner, co-coordinator of research and technology transfer for the Western Beef Development Centre.
The most recent data, gathered during 2001, indicate that steers gained 1.8 pounds per day on smooth brome, 2.1 lb. on meadow and 2.3 lb. on hybrid.
Unfortunately, those number are based on just 75 grazing days over two years, the result of drought at the Termuende farm located about 120 kilometres east of Saskatoon.
This year, Lardner and the other members of the research team are keeping their fingers crossed for better conditions.
“We hope to get a good 100 to 120 days of production data this year,” he said, adding it’s important to compare how the varieties perform through a full season of trampling and grazing.
So far, so good, as the first three weeks of data collection on steer weight gain shows the hybrid pasture is again outperforming smooth and meadow.
The relative merits of smooth and meadow are fairly well known, because both have been around for years. Traditionally, smooth brome has been used as a hay grass and meadow brome has been used for pastures and grazing.
The hybrid offspring is designed to provide the best of both worlds, producing hay yield about equal to brome and better than meadow, and a pasture yield better than smooth and comparable to meadow. In maturity, drought tolerance and quality, it falls between its two parents.
With good moisture, the hybrid can be ready for grazing three weeks after cutting, although it would usually be four to five weeks.
However, AC Knowles was only released in 2002 and most of the data have been gathered from small research trials, leaving researchers and producers with many question about how it will perform under different conditions.
“When you stock 80 or 180 acres with 150 cows, it’s a different scenario,” said Lardner.
One positive sign from the field work done so far is that during the period under study, the hybrid brome provided 161 grazing days, compared with 136 for meadow and 127 for smooth.
Lardner said producers like forage species that require minimal management and it looks like hybrid brome will work well with alfalfa in a good rotational management system.
Researchers are also attempting to measure individual animal intake of the different grasses to see if variations in their performance on different species is related to the amount consumed.
