A cow eats Scotch Thistle on her first day of weed training, while a herd mate checks it out. At 13.4% protein it can be a nutritious feed.

I’ve been wanting to teach cows to eat Scotch thistle for some time now, mostly because I have a great picture in my mind of a giant Scotch thistle being felled by a slow chewing cow.  I finally got my chance this year when I went to work with a rancher in Harney County, Oregon.

I met Nathan and Leasa Allington at a Saturday presentation I put on as part of my project work in the area in early June of 2010.  Almost before the lights went back on, Leasa was standing next to me to get the details about how they could become involved.  By Sunday, my Bureau of Land Management host Lesley Richman and I had talked the process over with Nate and Leasa by phone, and on Monday we dropped off the materials they needed and helped them get started with the training process.  By Friday, I was in the pasture with Nate, chopping, and serving scotch thistle mixed with wheat bran.  The cows were eating it as fast as we could dish it out – so fast in fact that I had a hard time catching them on camera!

Nate told me that he couldn’t afford herbicide, so for about 2 weeks for 6 hours a day, he had been chopping down and digging up scotch thistle in the pastures that his stock used.  As we watched the cows chowing down on their first ever serving of scotch thistle, he did some quick math in his head and decided that the expenses and labor for training his cows to be thistle eaters was a lot less than the cost of herbicide and it’s application.

I didn’t get to stay and see what happened when the cows went on to pasture, so I called Nathan this fall to check in.  He told me that when he turned them into the field above our training pasture, the scotch thistle had mostly headed out and was quite large.  He could see that they ate some of the leaves, but they didn’t eat a lot of the plant.  That makes sense, given that the plant is so large at that stage.  He said he thought they would do better next year when he could turn them into the pasture while the plant was still young and small.

He was excited to report that the training did pay off in other ways.  When he moved the herd onto his forest permit, he said, “They ATTACKED the bull and canada thistle and ate it into the dirt.”  This saves him the almost $400 per gallon cost of herbicide that his father-in-law spent to buy herbicide for Canada thistle.

I’ll be checking in with the Allingtons next fall to see what how his trainees do with the young scotch thistle and will let you know what I find out.