Cattle Nutrition: Tips and Reminders for Spring

Mar 11, 2024

By Dr. Katie Mason

As the grass begins to green up, there are a few considerations about grazing management and nutrition. Here are a few tips to keep in mind this time of year:

Do you have enough grass? Cool-season pastures are coming out of dormancy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that forage is plentiful. When cattle graze forage plants too early, animal performance suffers, but also plant persistence may be negatively affected since plants have not had enough time to develop adequate energy reserves. If possible, wait until fescue canopy height is 10 inches before you move cattle fully to pasture, or at least limit graze and provide hay as well. Take it slow with the transition from a mostly dry diet to fresh forage. High-moisture, low fiber forage can result in increased passage rates and diarrhea. Slowly remove hay from the diet while adapting cattle back to fresh pasture.

What is the body condition of your herd? In the winter, low or moderate quality hay without proper supplementation may have caused cows to drop body condition. For cows that are close to calving or have just calved, we want to see a BCS of about 6. This allows them to have plenty of energy stored in the form of fat to pull from while lactating. If cattle have been “roughed” through the winter, you may want to provide supplements to meet their energy needs. Body condition score at calving has an impact on the post-partum interval, meaning if BCS is too low, post-partum interval is longer, and it takes cattle longer to breed back. This results in extended calving seasons the following year. First-calf heifers especially need extra nutritional support during this time because they are still growing while lactating.

How can you improve next year? It is a great time to reflect on the winter-feeding system that you used over the past few months and determine what worked well and what did not. Think ahead to next winter and decide what you may want to change. Unfortunately, we cannot control input prices or how much we receive at the sale barn; however, we can adapt our management and production strategies. Reducing inefficiencies in nutrition and grazing management are an important part of the profitability equation. As we look forward to warmer temperatures and greener grass, take some time to reflect on ways you can reduce inefficiencies to be prepared for when winter inevitably comes around again.

Source : tennessee.edu

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.