Utah and Wyoming ranchers reduce their feeding costs by grazing their cattle on forage kochia during the fall and winter.
In the western United States a hardy plant called forage kochia or Kochia prostrata, greens up in spring, remains green and succulent during the heat of summer, and turns red in the fall. On snowy days, the leaves and stems feed cattle, sheep and wildlife.
Forage kochia can grow thigh high on the rangelands. In winter, it’s not unusual to see cattle punching holes in the snowpack’s crust to reach the kochia below.
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If the plant were just a bit taller and poking out of the snow, the cattle wouldn’t have to perform their fancy hoofwork. Producing a taller kochia is what plant breeder Blair Waldron has in mind.
Waldron analyzes the DNA content of new types of forage kochia brought to North America from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Waldron and Utah State University animal scientists collaborated in a recent study about forage kochia’s ability to keep cattle in good health and ranchers’ costs low.
For the study, 84 pregnant Angus cows spent early November through late January in one of two settings.
One group stayed in corrals where they were fed the traditional winter supplement of alfalfa hay. The other group spent the time in pasture that had been seeded with forage kochia and crested wheatgrass.
At the end of the study, the researchers looked at two indicators of overall health: body condition and backfat. Both indicators were within the desirable range for all animals. Though scores were lower for cows that grazed on seeded pasture, they were in excellent condition for calving. And their feed costs were 25 percent less than for their alfalfa-fed counterparts.
“Ranchers using the seeded pastures would have made a profit,” said Dale ZoBell, Utah State University animal scientist.
The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of Rangeland Ecology and Management.
Planting forage kochia isn’t a new idea for the mountainous region that extends from eastern Oregon and Washington through Nevada, Idaho, Utah and Colorado south to northern Arizona and New Mexico. Some stands date back 30 years. But the escalating cost of alfalfa hay has sparked new interest in forage kochia.
A kochia plant variety called Immigrant is the only kind sold in the United States today. Although it is an excellent forage for livestock, it generally grows no more than two-thirds of a metre high.
Taller plants, like Eurasian specimens that reach 1.6 metres, would be less likely to be buried by snow.
Part of Waldron’s job is exploring the globe for superior plants that could be used as parents for even better forage kochias for North America.
K. prostrata is native to central Eurasian countries such as Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where Waldron has journeyed on plant-collecting expeditions. He has brought back hundreds of specimens from these treks and is now testing them in greenhouse and outdoor experiments.
K. prostrata is a distant relative of an annual weed, K. scoparia, that can be poisonous to cattle and sheep. This annual kochia is popular with home gardeners who grow it because of its red fall foliage. Fortunately, the annual weed and the promising perennial can’t interbreed, according to ARS plant geneticists. Forage kochia is sometimes confused with the garden ornamental.
“This mix-up sometimes makes it hard to convince people that forage kochia is really a good-guy plant,” Waldron said.
Forage kochia tolerates drought, flourishes on salty or alkaline soils that make life hard for many other plants, and survives with as little as 12 centimetres of rain or other precipitation a year. It also offers shelter and food for upland songbirds and game birds. It helps control erosion and serves as a greenstrip or firebreak in fire-prone ecosystems.
Another feature is that it seems to thrive on poor quality sites that have been damaged by overgrazing, wildfire or off-road vehicles.
The department’s studies have provided information about forage kochia’s performance in North American ecosystems ranging from desert shrublands to high-mountain juniper ranges.
Scientists evaluated the information gathered from 151 ranchers, extension specialists and others with experience in managing kochia stands.
Based on that data, the researchers chose 90 sites for a close-up analysis of forage kochia’s role in a variety of ecosystems. At about half these sites, forage kochia had been seeded to revegetate land that had burned in wildfires.
At the other sites, kochia had been the top pick because of its superior ability to restore damaged areas and for its value as forage and its ability to outcompete weeds such as cheatgrass and a poisonous plant called halogeton.
“From these observations, we determined that forage kochia does not crowd out native perennials,” Waldron said.
“It thrives in elevations from 1,600 to 7,000 feet and can actually grow better than many other rangeland plants on inhospitable sites, such as dry areas with gravelly soils.”
For more information, visit www.nps.ars.usda.gov.
