A few wet winters haven’t dimmed memories of the severe drought Utah cattle producers – and producers around the West – lived through over several years.
“A whole bunch of producers had to downsize their herds because there wasn’t pasture for their cattle and hay was so expensive,” said Kara Thornton-Kurth, an associate professor in Utah State University’s Department of Animal, Dairy and Veterinary Sciences. “They started looking for alternative ways to get forage for their cattle.”
One of those alternatives was sprouted grains, which, with funding from Western SARE, Thornton-Kurth and colleagues from Utah State are evaluating from nutrition, economic and environmental perspectives.
Sprouted grains are barley or wheat seeds grown on metal trays in a humidity- and temperature-controlled environment. (The Utah research is looking at barley.) The seeds are grown without soil or fertilizer.
“Within six days, you have this little shoot that has come out on the top and root mat at the bottom,” Thornton-Kurth explained. “It has the sprouted seed and the shoot is about six to 10 inches long. It looks like sod, but there’s no soil.”
“Because the plant is only six days old, it is really highly digestable and nutrient dense,” Thornton-Kurth said. “It’s got a fair bit of protein and a lot of energy.”
Sprouted grains don’t replace dry forages but are instead mixed with it. Part of the three-year research project will determine what ratio of sprouted grain is ideal to mix with dry forage, and the team will also look to see if the feed has health benefits for the cattle or nutrition or carcass flavor benefits to the beef at harvest. The team will evaluate the feed’s benefits for both finishing steers and heifers.
A large part of the research will focus on the economics of sprouted grain systems, to see if they can pencil out for producers.
“You can almost think of these systems as insurance because you can produce a high-quality feed year-round independent of the weather,” Thornton-Kurth said. “I don’t think these systems will out-compete field-grown forage in a normal year when hay prices are low, but in a drought hay prices are so high that these systems could provide an alterntive for producers and a sense of security that they can produce a percentage of the feed they need at a predictable cost.”
And once the initial investment is made, producers can start and stop growing sprouted grains whenever they need to based on forage prices or availablility.
Part of the economic analysis will also look at the input savings of producing sprouted grains compared to growing alfalfa. The grains use no fertilizer, have no runoff and use much less water, and some systems even recycle and reuse the water. An aspect of the economic analysis will be to gauge consumers’ willingness to pay for beef produced with these systems.
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