Vermont Sheep Eat Bedstraw

What to Expect When Animals First Try Weeds

If you’d like to participate in this webinar, register online at www.uvm.edu/pasture, or contact Jenn Colby at jcolby@uvm.edu, 802-656-0858.

Rachel Gilker of UVM will be shuttling me from place to place in her mini-van while I'm on tour in Vermont. Naturally, we thought the "Tour Bus" should have signs, so here they are!

I’ve added a few things to my schedule:

May 10 – Brown Bag Weed Webinar, sponsored by the UVM Center for Sustainable Agriculture over the lunch hour.  Here’s the write up on that:

Hundreds of Northeastern livestock farmers met Kathy through her visits to VT, NY and NH in the last year, becoming excited and hopeful about teaching their own livestock to become weed managers through her simple, quick process.  Now that the weed season fast approaches, can you remember the tips and tricks?  Are you ready to go out and try it?

Kathy will hit the highlights of weed-eating success, show that it can be done and answer your questions.  Visit www.livestockforlandscapes.com for more weed-eating resources.
Contact:   Register online at www.uvm.edu/pasture, or contact Jenn Colby at jcolby@uvm.edu, 802-656-0858.

May 30 – A presentation at 3:00 p.m at the Bowman Haley Marina in Bowman, ND.  Sponsored by the Bowman Weed Board, Bowman-Slope Soil Conservation District and NDSU Extension Service.  Contact Randy Gaebe for more information: bowmanweed@nd.gov

July 16 – 19 – I return to Vermont for some presentations and field tours as part of “The Great Weed Grazing World Tour.” More information to come as we zoom in on locations and dates.

July 21 – Teaching Cows to Eat Weeds Presentation in Westport, NY sponsored by the Essex County Soil and Water Conservation District.  Contact Tiffany Pinhiero for more information:  tpinheiro@westelcom.com

August 14 -15 – Two Presentations at the Nebraska Grazing Conference in Kearney, NB.  Contact Pamela Murray for more information:  pmurray1@unl.edu

November 14 – Half-day workshop at the Quivira Coalition’s annual meeting in Albuquerque, NM.  This year’s theme is “How to feed 9 billion people from the ground up.”

This multiflora rose is beginning to take over the trailer on this small farm plot. (Thanks to http://3creativepeople.blogspot.com/2011/06/tale-of-mrs-hansens-farm-garden.html for the picture!)

Greg Angell came to my presentation in Hinton, WV in March and then went home to teach his cows to eat multiflora rose.  It took him about 10 days to have multiflora rose eating cattle in his pasture.

For those of you with plenty of that plant in your pastures, that’s good news.  You can invest a few hours over 10 days to train your cows, and then use all the other time and money  you would have spent on multiflora rose for something else.

Greg and I wrote back and forth as he went through the process so that I could answer questions that came up for him.  Here are a few of his comments from our emails:

Day 5 – First feeding of multiflora rose:

Greg:  …the cows ate all of the multiflora rose that I put in the tubs with the exception of the little bit that fell out on the ground while they were eating.  My Dad has been a little skeptical of the whole process, but he was surprised when we went back to the tubs and didn’t find any plant left in there.

Today is Day 6, so I will let you know what happens after my evening feeding tomorrow.  I told my Dad that we will have to buy some more cows once they start eating the multiflora rose.  We have a lot of it in the edges of our pasture and the wooded areas we have fenced off.

Day 8

Greg:  On day 5 when I introduced the multiflora rose with wheat bran, the cows (I was working with about 20 cows between the age of 1 ½ and 5) cleaned the tubs up.  There was very little multiflora rose left in the tubs or on the ground.  Day 6 produced the same results.

Day 7 (yesterday) when I gave just the multiflora rose with no wheat bran, I only saw 3 cows (a 3 year old and two 1 ½ year old) eating multiflora rose from the tubs.  The other animals all ran to the tubs and sniffed, but didn’t eat any.  Should I have expected different results, or is this normal?  Is there anything else I should do today on day 8?

Kathy:  Not to worry.  If they’ve cleaned the tubs two days in a row, then they’ve gotten the good feedback from the plant and they know that is edible. So you’ve won that battle.  If you have a few already eating the rose in pasture, I think you’ve won there too.  Now what you want to do is encourage them to hang out near the multiflora rose patches.  I wouldn’t bother feeding them anymore out of the tubs, but I would move the tubs over to the multiflora rose.  You could throw bits of the rose in there, or maybe even leftovers from the training, but mostly the purpose of the tubs is to show them an area where they can eat.  They’ll go check the tubs, hang out there a bit, and check out the plant.  It sounds like you have multiflora rose eating cows now.  They just need some time to practice and get going.  Don’t worry.  They will start out slowly and get better and better at it.

Greg:  As I was harvesting multiflora rose yesterday, Dad asked me if I had been harvesting in an area where he was.  I told him, “no”.  After telling him that, he seemed to think the cows had been there eating on them.  Also after the day 6 feeding, I watched the animals and a couple of the smaller ones (hopefully two of the cows I witnessed eating from the tubs on day 7) headed to the woods and started picking from the multiflora rose.

Day  10 or 12?

Greg:  Well, we had been watching the cows but hadn’t seen much out of the ordinary on Thursday.  However, on Friday, I was on my way home from work and my Dad called me.  He had went to the tubs to move them around and all of the multiflora rose that we had put in them on Wednesday were gone!  We were both pretty excited.  We then went down in the woods where the cows had been and found several of them eating multiflora rose.  Dad was really relieved, because he knew they would eat them after finding the tubs empty, he just didn’t want to have to cut them and put them in the tubs to get them to eat…J.  Thanks for all of your help and advice!  I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

 

The Dalmatian toadflax in my test pasture in Boulder County Colorado is already a foot high. Normally it would be 2 to 3 inches high at this time of year.

It’s been an early spring here in Colorado and today will feel like summer as we’re expecting temperatures in the 90s – a record for this time of year.  If your area has been anything like ours, you’ve probably noticed that plants are coming up early too, and if it has been as dry for you as it has been for us, you might be wondering how much forage your pastures will produce.  To help you with that, here are some plants you might have that can be useful alternatives to your traditional pasture grasses:

Canada thistle
This remains one of the easiest plants I teach cows to eat.  When I started paying better attention, I found that many trainees started eating it in pasture after their first taste of it in training tubs.  Its protein values stay high through the grazing season, never dropping below 16%.  Since it reproduces from roots and seed, it’s a hard one to eliminate, but that also makes it a pretty persistent forage in times of drought.

Whitetop/Hoary Cress
This plant also seems to persist in droughty conditions, and as Ruby Valley Rancher Lance Knudsen will tell you, it regrows after grazing, giving you a good grass alternative through the entire grazing season.  Once your other pasture grasses have dried for the season, the good protein content in this plant (or any other weed for that matter) will help them turn those dry carbs into the protein they need in their rumens.  That’s what high protein supplement tubs do, so think of your weeds as an cheaper supplement alternative.

Rabbitbrush
The trainees I’ve been following in Boulder County, Colorado added this plant to their diets on their own.  Why?  21% protein could have something to do with it.  I just visited their test pasture and was reminded how much they like this plant when I looked at all of last year’s grazed stems.

Knapweeds
Russian, spotted, diffuse – they’re all high in protein, they all regrow after grazing, and none of them have any toxins to be concerned about.   Because of how easy it is to train cows to eat them, their high protein values, and the fact that cattle like grazing them, these are also some of my favorite weedy plants.

Toadflax
Yellow or Dalmatian, they’re both nutritious forage alternatives.  I trained cows in Boulder County to eat Dalmatian toadflax in 2009.  When I walked through their 500-acre pasture at the end of the 2011 grazing season, I couldn’t find a single toadflax that they hadn’t bitten off.  Since it reproduces from roots, its response has been to try harder.  I’m really itching to get my educated cows back into the pasture this spring to mow it back down again!

Write and tell me what’s growing in your pasture and I’ll tell you whether it’s a good forage alternative or not!

In this issue of Farm Show Magazine I talked about teaching cows to eat weeds. I also talked about my experience using goats to build firebreaks and how I would prefer using cattle for that job in the future because they eat every bit as much as my goats ever did, and they're much easier to manage.

After seeing what good brush managers cows can be, I told “Farm Show” magazine that I would prefer using them instead of goats to create firebreaks around homes in wild land areas.  Murray from Texas saw this and wrote me with a question:

“I presume you are working with Texas longhorns.  They thrive on brush and will give you a very saleable product when you are done.”

I told him I had worked with some longhorns, but most of the cows I work with are Angus, Angus-cross, and some herefords.  What I’ve found is that while some individuals are better than others at eating weeds and brush, it has not been breed specific.  In fact, one of the longhorns in my first group of weed trainees was the worst weed and brush eater of the group.

The idea that what an animal eats isn’t linked to what breed it is, is an unusual idea for many of us so maybe thinking of it this way will help:  People in the frozen north eat walrus, and insects are tasty to folks raised in some places.  I don’t eat any of those things, but it’s not because I can’t. It’s because I come from a different culture where I’ve learned to eat different things.

Murray wrote back to say that pastures grazed by Angus and Herefords tended to become overgrown with brush and that he’d never had to teach a Longhorn to eat brush, but that they just did what came naturally.  He’s right.  His Longhorns are eating what generations of his longhorns have eaten.  But that doesn’t make them better than other cattle.  They just have different experiences.

Here are some more examples of different cow cultures:

I work with a herd of Angus crosses in Boulder County, Colorado.  From the first time I saw them they ate field bindweed, and they ate LOTS of it.  I took a sample for analysis at a lab in Greeley, Colorado.  A farmer I met there was amazed that cows could be trained to eat weeds, and said, “Boy, if you could get them to eat field bindweed, that would be amazing.”  So I told her that I knew they could learn because I had cows who ate it without any training at all.

A rancher in Colorado moved his herd from the arid rangelands in Colorado to a ranch with lush green pastures.  The cattle didn’t do well at all in spite of having so much forage.  His herd was looking for the familiar plants of home, and they didn’t know what to do in their new pastures.  Eventually the rancher sold them all and replaced them with cattle familiar with the area.

I’m sure you have your own stories too.  And now you know that with a little education, your cows can get used to eating all kinds of new forages.

Heifer eats leafy spurge in training, 2004

Dear Kathy,

I am interested in your way of controlling leafy spurge with cattle, however, I was informed that leafy spurge was toxic to cattle. I guess my question is how much can they eat before they become sick? I have a 600 subirrigated meadow out here in the Nebraska Sandhills in which I have several populations of leafy spurge ranging from dense 23 acre sites to scattered stands covering 20-30 acres. I would really like to use my cattle for this simply because it would be cheaper for my operation and spraying is really not an option do to the fact that I have three endangered species and I am located around a lot of water, not to mention I am sitting on the Ogallala Aquifer. What are your suggestions, if any?

Here’s what I wrote back:

It’s not really true that leafy spurge is toxic to cattle.

I’ve looked at and read a lot about leafy spurge and I’ve collected the information here.  It describes why leafy spurge was one of the first weeds I taught cows to eat in back in 2004 and how a fellow in Canada successfully taught cows there to eat leafy spurge too.  You’ll also find a link there to one of the columns I wrote about my experience teaching cows to eat leafy spurge and why the “science” that tells us it is toxic to cattle is not accurate.

While leafy spurge is not “toxic” to cattle, they only seem to graze it well when they can graze it along with a variety of other plants.  In 2009 I worked with a rancher in Montana to train cows to eat spurge.  The pasture his cattle were in was primarily leafy spurge with a little grass scattered here and there.  It was so bad that he had considered spraying it with round up, then scraping it off, and starting from scratch.  Though the trained cattle ate some of the spurge, they didn’t do nearly as well as cattle grazing in a pasture with forages other than that weed.

If it were me, I would take some cattle through the training process.  Instead of jumping right to leafy spurge, I would teach them to eat another weed you have available; maybe Canada thistle for example.  Thistles are the easiest things I teach cows to eat and from there, they go on to choose all kinds of things in pasture that you wouldn’t imagine them eating.  On the 8th day of training, after they’ve eaten the Canada thistle well, I would introduce them to leafy spurge in the tubs.

I like to train in pasture with some of the target weeds because then the cows can feed and water themselves through the training period and I also can watch to see how quickly they decide to eat the weeds in pasture.  Often with Canada thistle it can be as quickly as the day after they first eat the weed in tubs.  In this case I would recommend a pasture with some leafy spurge, where they could eat some of it, and some of all the other plants available in pasture.  That way they build up to it a little at a time.

If you check out this blog post, you’ll get some information on why I don’t worry about animals eating too much of one thing or poisoning themselves.  I know that if they have plenty of variety, their internal feedback mechanisms will help them properly mix their diets.  So the answer to “How much can they eat without getting sick?” is basically “as much as they want.”  The research and my experience on the ground shows me that cattle will stop before making themselves sick.

Thanks to Jamie for the question!  If you have questions about plants, or training problems, do write and I’ll do my best to help you!

Lance Knudsen at the workshop in Eureka, NV

“If you’re not teaching your cows to eat weeds, you’re missing the boat!  And it’s a big boat!”

That’s what Lance Knudsen told the ranchers at the workshop I did in Eureka, Nevada in March.  Lance, of Ruby Valley, Nevada taught a small group of cows to eat whitetop in the spring of 2011 after inviting me to do a workshop there for his fellow ranchers.

“We have this pasture, it’s just a nuisance, and we never get more than a week’s use out of it.  We left the gates open to it while we were training, and as soon as we taught them to eat whitetop, they were going out to that pasture and grazing it there,” Lance told me.  ”We’d put them in, they’d graze it down, then we’d take them out.  It would regrow, and we’d put them in again.”

He said that, in the end, the trained cattle taught others, and that he got 6 weeks of use, with double the number of animals, out of a pasture that he could normally only use for a week.  He’s really happy with the amount of additional forage he got and he said the animals were healthy and slicked off quicker than the rest of his herd.

In 2004 when I began figuring out how to teach cows to eat weeds, I knew something that very few of us were taught in school:  Animals make choices about what they eat based on internal feedback they get from the nutrients and toxins in foods.

I learned this from Fred Provenza and his colleagues at Utah State University.  They had been doing research for two decades to uncover the answer to the mystery of how animals choose what to eat.  What they discovered is that when an animal experiences the good feedback from nutrients in a forage, they choose to eat more of that food.  To see an example, watch this video on Youtube showing two groups of sheep and their reactions to straw.  For those of you with slow connections, what the video shows is one group of sheep with a normal reaction to being offered straw for breakfast.  They try it out, and then don’t eat it, because straw is very low in nutrients.  Meanwhile, their herd mates are chowing down on the straw.  The difference is that every time the second group of sheep ate straw, they were dosed with a high nutrient starch solution.  Since their experience was that straw gave good nutritional feedback, they liked straw and they ate it. (Yes, that is my voice in the video.  I edited and narrated a series of videos for the BEHAVE group at USU.)

“Ah ha!” I thought.  ”I’ve read that weeds have high protein values, so that should give cows good feedback.  Then they’ll eat the weeds in training, and continue to eat them in pasture.”

This has given us a new definition of palatability.  We usually think that if something tastes good, it’s palatable.  But Fred’s research shows us that the feedback an animal gets determines whether or not that flavor tastes good or bad.  If you’d like more, here are couple of videos illustrating how feedback works that I did for BEHAVE. Here’s one for nutrients, and one for toxins.

You can see this in action on this video, showing two groups of sheep and their reactions to cargena and Russian Olive.  Both groups of sheep eat Russian olive and caragena.  After eating Russian olive, this first group is dosed with a chemical that causes nausea.  Though the flavor of the food hasn’t changed, after getting that bad feedback, the sheep quit eating it.  The second group gets dosed with the chemical after eating caragena, and they quit eating that plant.  When put in a pen with both plants, the two groups of sheep avoid the plant they had a bad experience with and eat the other one.

This video demonstrates a key part of Fred’s work.  Based on his research, we know that animals will reduce the amount they eat of a food with toxins.  All plants contain toxins, so this is very important to their survival.  As long as they have alternatives that they’re familiar with, animals rarely overdose themselves on a particular toxins.  They get in trouble when they don’t have enough options.  That’s why I’m constantly repeating, “Never put your animals in a solid stand of any one plant.”  I always make sure that there is variety in my educated cows’ pastures so that they can use their internal feedback mechanism to make good choices.

Toxin levels change in plants over the course of the growing season.  That’s why your animals may eat more of some plants at different times of the year.  Occasionally these changes can occur so rapidly that animals have difficulty reducing the amount they eat and they can get in trouble.  Fortunately there are very few plants like this. In the west, Larkspur does this though.  I’ll write more about larkspur later, but in the meantime, here’s a fact sheet from USU you might find helpful.

What the cows have shown me over the last 8 grazing seasons is that Fred’s theories work on the ground and when we show them that weeds are tasty, they go on to eat them happily in pasture.