Last August I did a presentation in Strathmore, Alberta, Canada.  I was followed by a rancher who talked about the Coaching Program we used to train his cows to eat Canada thistle and we went out to see how they were doing.  The rancher was quite pleased with the results.

Jared Sundquist attended that presentation.  He recently wrote to ask,

“I was wondering how beneficial this technique of weed control is?  If you could please reply at your earliest convenience, I would really appreciate that.”

OK, here’s what I was thinking when I started trying to figure out how to teach cows to eat weeds:

1.  Using herbicides is expensive.  Not only is there the cost of the chemical itself, but there’s the cost of the equipment to apply it, along with labor for learning about how to use it, sometimes getting certified to use it, then applying it.  And it’s not a one time cost, but something that is repeated over and over again.

2.  Herbicides don’t appear to be working.  In spite of our best efforts, weed populations continue to expand at about 14% per year.  So it seems like we’re pouring good money after bad.

3.  Producers are often low on forage, particularly in arid areas or during drought.  But weeds are always there, even in drought, AND they’re often higher in nutritional value than traditional grass-based forage.

4.  Margins are pretty low in agriculture and the producers who can reduce costs are the ones who are going to be successful.

5.  SO – If I can figure out how to get a cow to eat a weed, producers can eliminate the expense for weed control, they’ll have more feed at no additional cost, cows gain weight more rapidly when they eat higher protein foods, so farmers will be able to raise more, fatter cows more cheaply and they’ll make more money doing it.

One of the ranchers I worked with this summer in the Burns, Oregon area told me that his father-in-law had paid almost $400 for a gallon of herbicide to spray on Canada thistle.  Nate Allington and I trained his cows to eat Scotch thistle, and then when they went to pasture, they added Canada and bull thistle to their diet. He said they ate them both into the ground.  So now he has cows that will do this every year, he never has to buy the herbicide, and he’s benefiting from the extra forage his cows have.  It seems pretty beneficial to me, but maybe we should look a little more closely.It turns out that for the one time cost of about $250 in materials and 10 hours over 10 days, a farmer/rancher can train 50 cows.  Those animals train their calves and herd mates, all of them eat the first target weed and then start exploring other weeds.  Over the last 4 years I’ve watched a group of trainees go from eating their normal grass forage, of which there was very little, to eating every single plant in a very, very weedy pasture.  In fact, in this pasture, I have a three year demonstration of how to manage cattle to reduce the weeds.  Last summer was the first grazing season and we started with 100 cattle in my 500 acre pasture, and realized that because of how many weeds they eat now I would need at least 300 to cover the whole pasture adequately, and the rancher doesn’t have that many available.  That seems like a pretty profitable problem to have.

So that’s the cost benefit side of what I was thinking and how it works for a producer’s bottom line.  If you’d like to see a short video on it that some economists helped me with you can go to my youtube channel and watch the video “The Economics of Cows Eating Weeds.”

But folks are also concerned about “eradicating weeds.”  First off, I’m going to tell you that we’ve never yet eradicated a weed, so we might as well eradicate that idea.  I’d like to say that once your cows are eating something it’s no longer a weed.  It’s a forage.  But I know there are laws that need to be changed before your county weed guy is going to buy into that. So obviously we want to demonstrate that the cows make a difference.

Fortunately, there is already a lot of literature out there, mostly sheep and goat studies, that show that grazing animals can make a difference in weed populations.  Those studies have also provided us with information about how to manage grazing if we really want to reduce weed populations.  Not surprisingly the techniques involve doing the very things that we try not to do when we’re trying to maintain a grass pasture.  Plants that are grazed early and often generally don’t do so well.  So if you want to rid your pasture of those highly nutritious, extremely resilient plants you think of as weeds, you want to time your grazing so that you hit them hard before you do damage to your grasses or “human-preferred” forages, and repeat that grazing so that the “weeds” don’t have a chance to rebound.

As I’ve already found in my Boulder County project, if you’re in a hurry to change your vegetation, you’re going to need a lot of cattle.  So why not take a deep breath, step back and relax a bit, and let your cows take care of the problem at their own pace.  They’re out there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and given a little education and a chance, they’re going to eat pretty much everything out there.  And while they’re doing that you’re not spending money on weeds, you’re making money off of them.  So to me that seems pretty beneficial.

Actually, that’s how I’ve handled my Canada thistle patch in my goat pasture.  I move my two goats between two pastures on the acre and a half they have that includes mostly grass and one nice Canada thistle patch.  My goal is to keep it in check, but to maintain it so my goats can benefit from it.  It never blooms, and rarely reaches above the tops of the grass, the patch never grows, but it never completely fades away.  With just a little more work, I could focus the goats on it, and get rid of it.  But summer is when I’m working in the field with all my ranchers so I don’t have a lot of time for that.  And besides, what would my goats do without that source of protein?  So my goats, my grass and my thistle and I all co-exist happily together.

There could be holes in my logic, or adjustments in my thinking that I need to make, so I’d welcome your input and thoughts.