Cattle Production and Forages in Central Montana
Guest post by Clemson student Olivia Griffin
Sustainability is the ability to maintain something over the long term without depleting necessary resources. In cattle production, sustainability involves managing resources such as land, feed, and water to help support long term productivity limiting the environmental impacts. This includes responsible waste management, efficient use of feedstuffs and water, along with practices that promote animal welfare. As cattle operations grow in scale, the importance of sustainable practices increases. In confined systems like feedlots and stocker operations the importance of sustainability becomes a larger factor in the overall production. Visiting facilities like this helps to provide information on how producers are adapting to environmental challenges while working to maintain efficient output production systems.
Visiting Yellowstone Cattle Feeders showed the sustainability of feedlot production cattle. In this production system feeders are trying to sustain the large production of cattle on small plots of land. Cow-calf production is the initial stage in raising beef cattle. This production stage is where a herd of cows are bred to produce calves that are then sold to other producers for backgrounding or to feedlots for further finishing. In the past there were less regulations on waste management of these cattle and animal welfare standards. These large operations have to follow Confined Animal Feeding Operation(CAFO) rules. These rules are used to produce animals on large scale operations. By concentrating animals in a confined space, CAFOs can optimize feeding, housing, and waste management, leading to increased production efficiency. Through using CAFO rules they are more efficient in sustainability of resources. To me being able to see the different ways the producers ensure sustainability and limiting waste products was interesting. Certain conflicts this production faced includes following the waste management and animal welfare conflicts. For example, this production facility faced conflict in waste management and not being able to spread their manure onto their fields due to the excess of nutrients already in the fields from previous owners overloading the fields with the spread of manure. The facility also said they plan for the future to add a digester in order to use the manure from the cattle to create renewable energy.
Judith Basin County Farms was similar to the Yellowstone Cattle Feeders in the way they were producing cattle in small feeder pens. These cattle were stockers, building bone and weight before being sent to feedlots. This company feeds silage to their cattle that they keep in large plastic covered piles to allow fermentation of materials maximizing the nutrients in the feed. They used lagoons for manure run off of the stock pens. This manure was then pumped back out and spread onto the fields used to produce feeds the cattle would eat. This production faces most of the same sustainability conflicts as the Yellowstone Cattle Feeders such as manure management, feed efficiency and land use, and water usage and quality. This producer was talking about digging a new well for sustainability of their water systems.
During this week we were also able to go in the field and take forage samples from different environments. We took forage samples from thinned burned, unthinned burned, and unthinned unburned sites. The different sites were used to take the biomass of the different quadrats. We weighed these forages for the wet weight in estimating the dry matter in these plants. We also would indicate which plants were what species. Through these processes we were trying to sustain healthy ecosystems that support cattle grazing and ecological balance of this environment. This means maintaining productive forage, soil health, and biodiversity over the long term. I found it interesting how different sites responded to thinning and burning differently for sustainable land use.
Through visiting these places I was able to learn more about large scale cattle operations and how they maintain their sustainability, which I was most excited to learn about. The different cattle operations really highlighted the CAFO regulations, waste management systems, and feed and water management. In addition to the cattle operations, we were also able to learn more about the forages these animals consume on prairie ecosystems. Through this research we will be able to understand more about their dry matter intake versus their wet feed intake. Overall these experiences help aid in understanding the sustainability issues these productions face on a daily basis and how they can continually work to improve their conditions.
