OUTLOOK, Sask. – When feeding sunflowers to cattle was discussed at a recent crop tour in Outlook, the crowd was fortunate to have Dave Christensen on hand.
The professor emeritus from the University of Saskatchewan’s animal and poultry science department said various studies have been conducted dealing with how ruminants digest sunflowers.
“We’ve done several trials with sunflowers for dairy cows. The first one was about 15 years ago, when a dairy farmer near Weyburn ended up with what he thought was fairly good quality, low cost sunflower,” Christensen said.
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“We put sunflowers in at about a kilo of dry matter into the ration and got an energy response of about a kilo and a half per day on the milk.”
However, he was reluctant to advise producers to grow sunflowers for the dairy industry.
“It depends on the price of alfalfa, barley and oil meals. In the last few years we’ve looked at it and farmers aren’t likely to pay more than about 12 cents a pound for sunflower.”
Sunflowers also seem to affect milk quality.
“We’ve recently been running sunflower trials for dairy cows to look at the effect on milk composition. We’ve been doing this work with flax, soybean products and sunflower. The interest is in CLA, conjugated linoleic acid. Sunflowers are just as good as anything in increasing the CLA content. They will double the content in milk fat. There’s no differential in price for high CLA milk, but there may be some opportunity there.”
Other feedlot trials are looking at the effect of sunflowers on beef carcass fat and CLA content. Christensen said there may also be future interest in that as well.
