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CHECKLIST FOR SEEDING FORAGES 路 OBNOXIOUS ABSINTH

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Contents canadian cattlemen · april 2016 · Volume 79, No. 4

 fo rag e g raz ing

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Learning is a way of life at the Bar K.

seeing the ranch as a classroom  forage weeds

FEATURES Learning to grow more grass in Saskatchewan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Contents of Cattlemen are copyrighted and may be reproduced only when written permission is obtained from the editor and proper credit is given to Cattlemen.

Obnoxious absinth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 What perennial forage should I seed this year?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Cattlemen and Canadian Cattlemen are Trade Marks of Farm Business Communications. Cattlemen is is published published monthly monthly by by Farm Farm Business Business Communications. Communications. Cattlemen Head Head office: office: Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Manitoba. Printed Printed by by Transcontinental Transcontinental LGMC. Cattlemen Cattlemen is is printed printed with with linseed linseed oil-based oil-based inks. inks. LGMC. Subscription rates rates in in Canada Canada — — $43 $43 for for one one year, year, $64 $64 for for 22 years, years, Subscription $91 $91 for for 33 years years (prices (prices include include GST). GST). Manitoba Manitoba residents residents add add 8% PST. PST. U.S. U.S. subscription subscription rate rate — — $35 $35 (U.S. (U.S. funds). funds). Subscription Subscription 8% rate outside outside Canada Canada and and U.S. U.S. — — $55 $55 per per year. year. Single Single copies copies $3. $3. rate We acknowledge the financial support of the Governm m ent of ent of We acknowledge the financial support of the Govern Canada Canada through through the Canada the Canada Periodical Periodical Fund Fund of the the Department Department of of Canadian Canadian Heritage. Heritage. of Publications Mail Mail Agreement Agreement Number Number 40069240. 40069240. Publications Canadian Postmaster: Return undeliverable Canadian Canadian Postmaster: Return undeliverable Canadian addresses (covers only) to: Circulation addresses (covers only) to: Circulation Dept., Dept., PO PO Box Box 9800, 9800, Winnipeg, Winnipeg, MB MB R3C R3C 3K7. 3K7.

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Points to remember when seeding forages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Obnoxious absinth

 researc h

Seeing the ranch as a classroom . . . . . . . 28

Verified Beef Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Urgent: More temporary foreign workers needed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

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Less stress and more hay in a day . . . . . . 24 Spring is almost here: what to plant?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

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What perennial forage should I seed this year?

Congratulations! To our April survey winner, William Pender of Fort Macleod, Alta. This month’s survey is on page 54. Cover Photo: Supplied by the Grafton family.

Comment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Newsmakers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Our History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Nutrition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Holistic Ranching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Research on the Record. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Free Market Reflections. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 CCA Reports. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Straight from the Hip. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Vet Advice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Prime Cuts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 News Roundup. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Purely Purebred. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 The Markets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Market Talk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Sales and Events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 C at t l e m e n · a p r i l 2 0 1 6

 COMMENT

By Gren Winslow

The clock is ticking on TFW

ate last month the beef industry got a glimmer of good news on the labour front when Employment, Workforce Development and Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk officially requested a review of the Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) program. Unfortunately it appears she didn’t do it fast enough or go far enough to stop the next scheduled cut to the program. When the Conservatives overreacted to some caustic headlines and rapidly rewrote the TFW regulations back in 2014, they tightened up on the conditions under which a company could hire foreign workers and then froze the numbers they could employ at 30 per cent per work site for businesses with 10 or more employees. Then they added a slide, reducing the total to 20 per cent on July 1, 2015 and finally 10 per cent this July. If the minister is truly concerned with the fairness of the changes made to the TFW program you might think her first action would have been to extend this July 1 deadline until the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities (HUMA for short) had a chance to study the current program and offer up ways to improve it. Maritime fish processors were recently granted an exemption to the July reduction but as this issue goes to press there had been no announcement of a similar concession for meat processors. The 10-member HUMA committee chaired by Cambridge, Ont., MP Bryan May, is currently dealing with Bill C-4, the Labour Act, and is then scheduled to wrap up a study on Employment Insurance. The best guess is they won’t get to the TFW study until June and possibly the fall. They plan to do it in 10 sessions in alternate weeks with another study on reducing poverty. However it goes, it appears packers and processors will be forced to cut another 10 per cent of their foreign workers on July 1, unless the minister convinces the government to make an administrative change before then. “We have plants already that when somebody leaves or retires they have no choice but to cut back on production,” says Ron Davidson, the Canadian Meat Council director of government and media relations. “The other thing that is really important is every time you ratchet down the level you reduce the pool of temporary foreign workers that we were using as a pathway to permanency. ”

C at t l e m e n · A p r i l 2 0 1 6

In the past as many as 70 per cent of the people in this pool who entered the country as temporary workers went on to become permanent residents of Canada. But as the size of that pool declines it becomes harder to manage the process. This is particularly galling for an industry that is already facing a critical labour shortage. No matter how much time and effort they put into recruiting, on any given week there are consistently a thousand openings at plants around the country. The Conservatives initially revamped the TFW program to avoid the appearance of these so-called lowwage workers being brought in to take jobs away from Canadians. The irony is these aren’t low-paying jobs. Most of them are in union shops offering competitive wages and benefits but are located in rural communities. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to attract people to work as butchers in rural communities in anything like the numbers that are needed to just maintain current production lines. More details on the TFW program can be found in our article in this issue. Of course meat packers are not the only agriculture sector struggling to find good help these days. According to a labour market study released by the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council last month, the number of unfilled jobs in the beef sector alone cost the industry $141 million in lost productivity and sales in 2014, and is expected to get much worse over the next decade. According to this report we had 40,600 labourers in the Canadian beef industry in 2014, including 300 temporary foreign workers. At the same time 3,500 jobs went unfilled. Over the next 10 years the study says the number of unfilled jobs could grow to 12,500, assuming we see some growth once the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU are eventually ratified. Retiring cattle producers are projected to make up a third of these losses as those over 65 make up about 15 per cent of industry’s current labour force. Immigration will have to cover a portion of this shortfall, and some of those will no doubt enter this country under the Temporary Foreign Workers program. At least we hope they will, if Minister Mihychuk and her friends around the cabinet table can agree to strip away the shackles from this proven program and let us all get back to work. c

www.canadiancattlemen.ca

Turn out with LONGRANGE ® for season-long

PEACE OF MIND. 1 INJECTION • 2 PHASES • EXTENDED RELEASE COVERING UP TO 150 DAYS 1

LONGRANGE vs. Conventional Dewormers2 0.28 lbs./day more

Average Daily Gain (ADG) in lbs. 2.5

Difference ADG 0.24*

Difference ADG 0.40

1.93

2.33 1.93

Injectable

Pour-on

2 1.5

Difference ADG 0.30*

Difference ADG 0.28*

2.14

2.07 1.79

1.84

1.69

1 .5 0

Conventional Dewormers

Combinations

LONGRANGE

Entire Study

*Statistically significant (P<0.01)

Conventional Dewormers Injectable • formulations of doramectin or ivermectin Pour-on • formulations of ivermectin

1 2 †

Treatment in the spring with LONGRANGE for parasite control leads to better average daily gain (ADG). How much better? In a stocker trial with 15,000+ enrolled head, cattle treated with LONGRANGE gained an average 0.28 lbs./day more than those treated with conventional dewormers.2 That equals 28 lbs. over 100 days.†

Treat your cattle this spring. Talk to your veterinarian about LONGRANGE.

Combinations • moxidectin + fenbendazole • ivermectin + fenbendazole • doramectin + fenbendazole • doramectin + fenbendazole + ivermectin • albendazole + ivermectin

Based on the Canadian LONGRANGE label. Data on file at Merial. 28 lbs. = 12.72 Kg.

Available in 500 mL and 250 mL bottles Administer subcutaneously at 1 mL/50 kg.

 THE INDUST RY

NewsMakers

Dan Darling

David Haywood-Farmer Dan Darling

Cow-calf operator Dan Darling of Castleton, Ont., was elected president of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association last month. Third-generation rancher David Haywood-Farmer of Savona, B.C., is the new vice-president while Dave Solverson of Alberta moves to the past president’s chair in the CCA’s new executive. Matt Bowman is the new president of Beef Farmers of Ontario and Joe Hill is vice-president. Bowman and his family run a 110head Charolais-based cowcalf operation, cash crop Matt Bowman 700 acres of oats, wheat, barley and canola, operate a seed cleaning plant and a U-pick strawberry patch near Temiskaming in Northern Ontario. Joe Hill and his family run a 200-head, short-keep Joe Hill feedlot operation and crop 800 acres of owned and rented land near Fergus. Also elected to the 12-person board of directors were Hereford breeder Dave Cavanagh from Peterborough County, cow-calf producer Kim Sytsma from Leeds and feedlot director Tom Wilson of Lambton County. Beef Farmers of Ontario (BFO) has selected Bryan and Cathy Gilvesy, of Y U Ranch in Tillsonburg as the 2016 winners of the Ontario Environmental Stewardship ward Bryan Givesy (TESA), sponsored by the RBC Royal Bank. Y U Ranch is a grassbased beef operation featuring Texas Longhorn cattle raised under range conditions. The Gilvesys have demonstrated their commitment to the environment by focusing on water and soil health, managing grasslands and protecting wildlife

C at t l e m e n · A p r i l 2 0 1 6

habitat. The family has been involved in several environmental projects such as the Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS) program, installed nesting structures to support wildlife diversity, created buffer areas along waterways, managed forest areas to provide wildlife habitat and improve carbon storage, and established a habitat for native pollinator species. Kevin Aitken of MapleDale Farms from the Holstein area in Grey County is the winner of the 2016 Ontario Pasture Award. In 2009, Aitken seeded all of his unpastured land Kevin Aitken into permanent pasture. Since then, 5,000 feet of waterline have been installed to provide fresh water to each paddock to provide a consistent supply at all times. Pasture is his main source of feed from roughly mid-April to midNovember for his 97 cow-calf pairs plus some custom grazed cattle and a few dairy cattle. Hay is purchased for his own herd during the winter. The Ontario award is sponsored by Beef Farmers of Ontario (BFO), Mapleseed and the Ontario Forage Council. Jim Clark, executive director of the Ontario Cattle Feeders’ Association and the Ontario Corn Fed Beef program is the 2016 recipient of the Canadian Cattlemen Association’s Jim Clark Beef Industry Innovation and Sustainability Award. Managed by the Ontario Cattle Feeders’ Association, the Ontario Corn Fed Beef program has grown into the largest producer-owned branded beef program in Canada. Dr. Alastair Cribb, a pro fessor of clinical pharmacology and dean of the University of Calgary faculty of veterinar y medicine was recently given the Veterinarian Dr. Alastair Cribb of the Year Award by the Alberta Veterinary Medical Association. After completing his DVM degree at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in

1984 he spent two years in mixed practice in the Maritimes, before obtaining a PhD in pharmacogenetics/clinical pharmacology at the University of Toronto. He followed this with a post-doctoral fellowship at Dalhousie, four years in drug safety assessment with Merck & Co and 10 years as a professor of clinical pharmacology at the Atlantic Veterinary College before being named dean of the Calgary faculty in 2006. The AVMA also named Dr. Trevor Hook, a mixed animal practitioner from Ponoka as the winner of its Young Veterinarian of the Year Award. Dr. Kevin MacAulay, a Dr. Trevor Hook companion animal practitioner from Calgary, was elected president of the AVMA. Duncan Barnett of 150 Mile House, B.C., received a Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award presented by His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston at a ceremony in Vancouver in early March to mark his nearly 15-year fight to protect British Columbia’s agricultural lands and environment from invasive plants. Barnett began by helping to develop the Invasive Plant Strategy in 2001, then by chairing the newly formed Invasive Species Council of British Columbia in 2004. Aaron Brower is staying for another term as president of the Western Stock Growers’ Association with the support of first vice-president James Hargrave, second vice-president Ryan Copithorne, treasurer Phil Rowland and manager Lindsye Dunbar. The 2016 board of the Alberta Forage Industry Network includes chair Christine Flukerth of Olds College, vice-chair Surya Acharya with Agriculture and AgriFood Canada, treasurer Nora Paulovich with North Peace Applied Research, secretary Brian Palichuk with North Star Seeds and directors John Bland, Cyrus Weasel Fat, Doug Wray and Lyndon Mansell. The board advisers are Grant Lastiwka and Holly Mayer and administrator Kristen McDonald. c

www.canadiancattlemen.ca

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 our histo ry

Alberta’s Horn Penalty and Fund By Kenneth Coppock Abridged from the January 1950 issue of Canadian Cattlemen

lberta has given some good leads and some bad ones to the other western provinces. In the matter of the horn penalty we are convinced that the lead given was definitely bad. A brief historical review should be of interest. Over a long period Canadian packers pointed out to livestock men through publicity that the livestock industry year after year suffers a preventable loss by marketing cattle with horns. Damage was done to hides and carcasses which loss definitely must come out of the producers’ pockets through lower prices paid for livestock. Finally the packers through their council decided that a penalty of $1 per head should be assessed against all horned cattle they purchased. This was designed to impress producers with the desirability of dehorning their cattle. It was, they said, of an educational nature and not a means of “putting more money in the pockets of the packers.” The deduction across Canada actually started on May 1, 1937. We believe the packers made a mistake. If after consultation with producers it was decided to take action the policy should have been one of rewards. A reward of $1 per head for every dehorned animal sold to packers would in our judgment have been far more constructive than a penalty assessed against every horned animal marketed. Our social and business structure, except where a citizen breaks the law and is subject to fine or penalty, is built up and functions on the basis of rewards for jobs well done. Then, too, in following the policy they did follow, the packers aggravated the cattlemen’s general disapproval of them which had accrued from the low prices of the early ’30s and from the bad publicity resulting from the investigations of the Stevens’ Commission. Faith of the producers in the good intent of the packers was at a low ebb. The horn penalty deduction plunged the producers’ faith to an even lower level. Also it was soon evident that packers continued to bid 10 cents to 25 cents per 100 pounds lower for the horned animals than the dehorned animals of like quality. The $1 penalty for the horned animals was thus just another way, so the producer thought, of reducing the buying price and putting additional dollars in the packers’ pockets. As the producers suspicioned, the marketer of horned cattle was twice penalized, first with a lower market price and second with a horn penalty. The minister of agriculture, the late D.B. Mullen, of the new government in Alberta, had come from the ranks of producers and was keenly anxious to do something which would improve the cattle industry. No doubt he was also possessed on the same attitude toward the packer as prevailed among the producers at the time. It was, therefore, not long before legislation was enacted which not only retained the $1-per-head penalty imposed by the packer on slaughter cattle but placed it on all cattle marketed with horns and weighing over 400 pounds. There was an exception. Registered cattle, both beef type and dairy,

C at t l e m e n · A p r i l 2 0 1 6

when marketed and accompanied with registration papers were exempted from the penalty. The $1-per-head penalty assessed by the packers was taken over by the province and a general feeling of approval surged through the ranks of the producers because they felt at long last, they had a government that could stand up to the packers. In was in that spirit that the Alberta Horned Cattle Purchases Act was born in 1938. The act provided that a trust account should be set up and administered for the “improvement of the livestock industry.” In the minds of many it was thought that the minister’s intention was clear enough, that he would improve the cattle industry. It was not long however, before it became evident that the cattle money was to finance policies relating to livestock in the broadest interpretation of the term. In rather quick succession other western provinces followed Alberta’s lead. Saskatchewan passed essentially the same act but its interpretation of the word “livestock” in recent years has been “cattle” and expenditures from its Horn Fund, we are informed, has been restricted to improvement of the cattle industry. In Manitoba, expenditures from the fund have been restricted to cattle policies and projects. From the first the Horned Cattle Purchases Act in Alberta was a financial success. A constant stream of dollars poured into the fund, ranging in volume from $70,000 to $125,000 per annum. At first it was thought the volume of collections would decline as producers would, in order to escape the penalty, dehorn their cattle. It was soon discovered, however, that for some reason peculiar to the industry, the percentage of horns on cattle marketed remained fairly constant. Since the enactment of Alberta’s Horned Cattle Act to the present nearly one million dollars has been taken from Alberta’s cattle industry. The cattle industry has received back through the province’s Bull Exchange Policy of earlier years and its Cattle Improvement Policy of recent years a substantial percentage of the take, but too large a percentage of the income is used for administration, for the maintenance of a pathological laboratory, and for assistance to other than cattle projects. The Western Stock Growers’ Association has taken the stand that the act should be repealed in its entirety as bad legislation. As a matter of fact, it is opposed to special levies and funds designed to do those things which are in a general sense the responsibility of government which should be accomplished by the normal process of government. If, however, legislators with enough moral courage to overcome the political advantages gained through the ramified expenditures from the Horn Fund are lacking, and the act is retained, then expenditures from the fund should be restricted to well-thought-out policies to improve only the cattle industry of the province. For more of the past from pages of our magazine see the History Section at www.canadiancattlemen.ca. c

www.canadiancattlemen.ca

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 forage m a nag e m e n t

By Heather Smith Thomas

Learning to grow more grass in Saskatchewan

rt McElroy has been farming in southern Saskatchewan, about 50 miles east of Alberta, since 1996. He started seeding some of the place back to grass in 1998. In 1999 he and his oldest son took the Ranching for Profit class as a home study course and started doing some rotational grazing. In 2005 he decided that the continuous cropping was not working, with the cost of machinery, fertilizer, etc. “I realized we had to do something different, even though we had made some improvements with continuous cropping; we started to get some cover on the ground and the water infiltration rate had improved, breaking through the hardpan with the root systems. “When we first came here we had only one half of one per cent organic matter in the first soil tests. What this land actually started with, I have no idea, but the early farming efforts here had probably reduced the soil fertility,” says McElroy. “There wasn’t enough organic matter for any biological life to live on. We began to think about the critters below the ground, versus the livestock above the ground. We realized that continuous cropping was better than half-and-half summer fallowing, but it would not get us to the place we needed to be in order to really begin to build soil organic matter and biological life in the soil. “In 2006 my wife and I and one of our sons took a Holistic Resource Management course with Don and Bev Campbell here in Frontier. At that time we also decided we had to seed the entire place back to grass,” he says.

C at t l e m e n · A p r i l 2 0 1 6

Along with their own cows, they started custom grazing, bringing in 1,200 yearlings from a neighbour. This helped add manure to the soil. In 2008 they started putting the 1,200 head on 2.7 acres for two to three hours, moving them up to six times a day. “Don and Bev Campbell taught us financial planning, and how to balance our lives as a family, and how to look at grazing. We had done some rotational grazing, but not to the extent of what we are doing now. All of these things came together about the same time,” McElroy explains. “We also decided we had to learn how to handle cattle properly. We’d been around livestock all our lives, but realized we had more to learn. I went to Texas twice with some of our children, to learn stockmanship from Bud Williams. Our place is divided by one-wire electric fences and we are moving them continually. This was one of the most incredible things we learned — how to teach animals to respond to pressure and release, and how to settle them in a pasture.” When working with 1,200 head in such close contact, he says it didn’t take very long to get these animals settled. “They adapt very readily.” One of the advantages to this region is that ranchers can usually winter graze seven or eight years out of 10. “With our own cow herd, we started trying to save some grass and winter graze. We did some swath grazing, and do some bale grazing when snow gets too deep. In 2003 I was calving cows in late March and into April and I’d go outside in the middle of the night when it was minus 29 C and I realized that if I can’t

enjoy calving and it can’t be a blessing, then we are never going to do this again. That year the bulls didn’t get turned out until August 20. We decided to calve later, due to some of the inspiration from Dave Pratt and the Ranching for Profit course,” McElroy says. “I also took Dick Givens’ low cost cowcalf seminar and he encouraged calving in sync with nature. “All of these things were coming together, and in 2008 I went to Colorado and bought my first bull from Kit Pharo. We realized we had to downsize the frame on our cattle, plus we needed animals that were more adapted to surviving completely on forages — and doing it all on their own,” he says. Today the farm has 150 cows with grassbased genetics. “They completely look after themselves. “The only thing I might do differently now is add another species for grazing. For many years we were mono-cropping (which is not the best for the land and ecosystem) and now we are mono-grazing. If one of my children wants to come home to this place, another enterprise we could add to the livestock would be sheep or goats. I think this would continue to enhance what we are doing here now,” he says. “Many things have come together in our lives the past 10 years that helped us change. I was 55 when the revelation came to me that the rate we were going in continuous cropping wasn’t sustainable. The quality of life since we made the change has been amazing. I can do as much as I want during the winter. In the summer we are quite busy, which is a wonderful time to be busy,

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forage management

but the winter is easy. We move a string of wire every day to graze cows, and keep 200 head of calves/yearlings around and they are coming and going with sell-buy marketing,” he says. “We are grateful to be able to still do what we are doing, at this stage of our lives, and running the farm rather than the farm running us!” “Every five years now we will do a test to see what kind of advances we are making in storing carbon in the ground — to see if we are really making progress,” he says. “Right now the real progress we see with our grazing is probably due to the fact that many of these pastures are only grazed for two to three hours each year. They have a very long period of rest. Where my cows grazed this past year in February was grazed for three weeks in early May the year before, but it hadn’t been grazed at all the year before that. That piece of land had some bare ground on it so I let it grow the year before to produce seed. Then I put the big group of yearlings in it early in the spring when it was wet, to trample in seed from the previous fall, and to use up that grass. Then there were no more animals in there again until the first of December 2014, and then we rotated them through it,” McElroy says. “We got five inches of rain late Augustearly September last year, which is unusual in this part of the world, to get fall rain. The flush of new seedling grass was phenomenal and it was hard to imagine that much new green grass. With the rain, the cool conditions and the amount of organic matter and litter, the grass flourished. We’ve grown so much seed over the past several years; some of this land goes to seed every year. Where we did have some bare ground, it will be interesting to see how this continues to fill in.” Grass has an amazing ability to spread and cover the bare spots if it has a chance. “Some of the first grass I seeded was a monoculture of crested wheat. That was a mistake, but Neil Denis says you never make any mistakes; you just have a pile of learning experiences! When I still had my no-till disc drill, during the last years I was seeding grass, I went into that stand of crested wheat in early November and dormant-seeded alfalfa. Again, I probably should have added more species, like meadow brome, at the same time,” says McElroy. “People told me I would never be able to get anything else to grow in a solid stand of crested wheat. But I figured I couldn’t make it any worse and decided to try it. Early the www.canadiancattlemen.ca

next spring, I put big groups of cattle in there and chewed that crested wheat right into the ground. That gave the alfalfa a chance to get going, and also increased the animal impact — not only fertilizing it but working some of that ground to get the alfalfa seed growing,” he explains. “Now that piece of ground actually has too much alfalfa growing on it!” He has another piece of ground where he seeded Russian wild rye as the grass

and cicer milkvetch as the legume. Again, I should have added four or five other species of grass, but last spring when the big groups of cattle grazed it, I broadcast seed from the back of my quad, seeding meadow brome and alfalfa on that piece to try to add more diversity. I’ll see how that turns out and whether it works. Some of these things you have to be patient with, but I’ve never had an absolute failure yet on any of these experiments.” c

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 forage w e e ds

By Debbie Furber

Obnoxious Absinth

s the rains of 2010 brought signs of an end to a battering 10-year drought, Marj Veno could see that absinth wormwood was getting the upper hand in pastures around the ranch’s home place northeast of Hanna, Alta. Absinth first reared its ugly yellow-flowered head in the pasture west of the yard on the old road and in the ditches after a new stretch of grid road was built in 1987. It fanned out in all directions, eventually to a large slough on that quarter, across the road to the shelterbelt trees along a small pasture near the house and on out into the native range on the home quarter. Veno says the most likely source of the weed was the grass seed mix that the Special Area crew used for reclamation work because she had never seen absinth before it invaded her three-generation ranch in the Special Area. Special Area is a municipal designation, similar to a county, but administered as one large region running from Hanna to the Saskatchewan border, Veteran on the north, and Empress to the south, about an hour north of Medicine Hat. Absinth is a long-lived shrub-like perennial notorious for yielding profuse amounts of seed that remains viable for three or four years and takes hold in any spot of disturbed ground. Gopher mounds, coyote dens, cow trails, even buckbrush patches in pastures are jumping off places for new plants to take root and spread their seed. It seemed like the weed had just been

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mocking her attempts over the past 25 years to keep it under control by mowing the reclaimed roadway to try to prevent seed set, and tilling, mowing and spot spraying the shelterbelt area. “When the rains finally came the prairie was so beat up from grasshoppers and had gone dormant, but this stuff was ready to jump all over that moisture and absolutely erupted. I think that’s why it got away on me, because it got the jump on the prairie grasses,” Veno says.

hen the rains finally W came the prairie was so beat up… this stuff was ready to jump all over that moisture and absolutely erupted “To say it only attacks overgrazed pastures just isn’t true, though,” she says driving past places where the silvery leaves of absinth plants poke out from the healthy prairie wool stand with a thick thatch cover in the bottom. Veno and her husband, Murray McArthur, run 300 commercial and 300 purebred cows on 12,500 acres of predominantly native range across three ranch sites in the area.

They keep detailed grazing records to manage for year-round grazing as far as possible and the range east of the yard is an important part of their winter grazing program. “With a bit of rain in September, that prairie wool greens up and the cattle get fat fast on it. It’s powerful grass because they eat less and get more good out of it. Lots of winters they see very little extra feed. It’s just what they can rustle up themselves out there and they’re always fat,” she says. She is very grateful to the folks at the Chinook Applied Research Association and manager Dianne Westerlund for getting her pointed in the right direction with the use of the herbicide Restore II. Westerlund organized a demonstration project at the ranch as part of a Commission for Environmental Cooperation project intended to demonstrate various beneficial management practices for sustainable use of grasslands at project sites in Mexico, the U.S. and the prairie provinces. Side-by-side applications of three herbicides (2,4-D, Reclaim, and Restore II) were carried out in spring 2014 with additional treatments made in spring 2015 in the pasture near where the absinth problem originated. Headland areas and fence lines were also sprayed to try to prevent further spread. Large areas of absinth were mowed with a three-point-hitch mower, as were the ditches along the road to prevent seed set. Veno purchased additional Restore II to spot spray individual absinth plants in that pasture and the native grass pasture across the road.

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Mounds on one side of this pond (left) were sprayed in 2014 with Restore II, the other side went unsprayed.

Restore II is a broad-spectrum broadleaf herbicide designed specifically for use on rangeland and permanent pasture with residual activity in the soil to help control germinating seeds and emerging seedlings. There are no grazing restrictions following application except for lactating dairy cows, but there is a 30-day wait time before cutting for hay or silage. Veno was impressed with the results. After two summers of vigilant spot spraying by wand from a sprayer mounted on the back of the side-by-side, she had the shelterbelt area cleaned up and a good start on the native range. At least there is hope now that eventually she will be able to say the same about the native range. Her concerns are twofold. Not only is the absinth-infested area important winter grazing range for their operation, but the Berry Creek that runs through the pasture

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is the major tributary running out of the region to the Red Deer River, approximately 75 miles to the south. The wintering range is in a flat flood plane where three creeks converge into the Berry Creek. Spring runoff spills over the banks to flood irrigate about 600 acres of native grass. When the water is coming in full force, she opens a control structure on the creek built by the PRFA in the 1940s to let water flow downstream to flood irrigate a neighbour’s 300-acre hay meadow. Shutting the gate diverts it into a channel that runs to Ducks Unlimited’s big wetland restoration project, Contra Costa, approximately three miles southeast of the pasture. There, it floods about three sections before the water runs over the spillway, back into Berry Creek and on to the Berry Creek (Carolside) Reservoir east of Drumheller near Sunnynook. Not only is the reservoir a major recreational

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fishing site, but it supports a lot of farms and ranches on an irrigation project south of there. From there, the water continues on its path to the Red Deer River. “It just scares me because the seeds fall down here, the water comes in, and away the seeds go. There’s potential to make a massive mess,” she says, adding that the land around Contra Costa is already infested. To make matters worse, the weed popped up at a gas-well reclamation site on their east ranch about two weeks after the company sowed the grass. Veno attacked it and brought the problem to the attention of the gas company, which followed up with another treatment. “I see a big problem because thousands of old well sites will be reclaimed in central Alberta in the coming decade. People need Continued on page 14

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C at t l e m e n · A p r i l 2 0 1 6

fo r ag e w e e ds

Continued from page 13

to be aware of this weed. I don’t want to see this happen everywhere because this is such a unique part of the province,” Veno says. Absinth is starting to get a bit of attention, but so far not many resources are available to help with control, Westerlund says. The provincial government designates prohibited weeds and it’s up to the counties to declare noxious and problem weeds in their jurisdictions. The Special Area board has been aware of the absinth problem since the early 1990s and manages it as a problem weed, but so far it hasn’t made it onto the list of noxious weeds, although at least one county to the west of the Special Area has recently added absinth to this category. Saskatchewan Control Projects

Once an absinth plant is established it spreads rapidly in native pastures.

Absinth is categorized as a noxious weed across Saskatchewan. Last year, it was added to the list of noxious weeds eligible for assistance under the Invasive Plant Control Program administered by the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities on behalf of Saskatchewan Agriculture and the federal government under Growing Forward 2. Approved herbicide costs for control of the specified noxious weeds are rebated at 100 per cent for public land and 50 per cent for private land. The program also rebates 100 per cent of approved herbicide costs to control prohibited weeds on public and private land. A project evaluating the effectiveness of five herbicide options for absinth control was carried out by Bart Lardner and Daalkhaijav Damiran with the Western Beef Development Centre and Nadia Mori, forage specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture. Based on effectiveness reducing absinth up to 12 months after application at four sites across the province, the ranking was 2,4-D < Banvel II < Rejuvra XL < Grazon < Restore II < Reclaim. Based on cost per acre, the ranking was 2,4-D < Restore II < Reclaim < Grazon < Banvel II. Rejuvra XL wasn’t commercially available in Canada until after the project wrapped up. All products increased the percentage of grass in the canopy, decreased the percentage of legumes and other weeds, and increased the percentage of bare ground in the 12 months following treatment. All except 2,4-D reduced the percentage of absinth. It did provide some top-growth control, but absinth actually increased from

an average of 8.3 per cent before treatment to 10.6 per cent of the canopy a year later, suggesting that multiple applications would be necessary. The economics didn’t work out for Banvel II considering that it was the most expensive per acre and absinth control averaged only 55 per cent across the sites. This compares to 99 per cent for Restore II and Reclaim at lower price points. The one site where a few absinth plants did reappear was treated when the temperature was above the recommended maximum of 28 C. Grazon was very effective as well, but has limitations because it is highly mobile in soil. Restore II, Reclaim and Grazon are Dow AgroSciences products designed specifically for use on rangeland and permanent pasture. Secondary herbicide activity may occur through soil uptake to control seeds that do try to germinate. The authors suggest that if these products are able to provide multiple years of control, they may be more economical than lower-cost options that require multiple applications. Rejuvra XL is a DuPont product, also designed specifically for control of broadleaf weeds and some brush species on permanent pasture, with additional control of young, actively germinating weeds through uptake by roots and shoots. Although absinth isn’t listed among the broadleaf weeds the product controls, it did reduce absinth from an average of 4.3 per cent to 1.1 per cent and totally wiped out all other broadleaf weeds. The authors note that the greater the weed and legume density in a forage stand, the more bare ground there will be follow-

C at t l e m e n · A p r i l 2 0 1 6

PHOTO: Marj vento

ing an effective treatment and the greater the opportunity for more weeds to take hold unless a contingency plan is in place for filling them with desirable species. When legumes make up more than 18 per cent of the initial stand, legume loss after treatment can negatively affect total forage biomass and quality of the stand due to loss of nitrogen fixation and cross-fertilization to grasses. The fact sheet with full results is available at www.wbdc.sk.ca. Weed wiper shows promise

Absinth and common tansy are good candidates for wiper applications because they generally grow taller than forage crops. A six-inch height difference between the target weeds and desirable forages will help protect the desirable forages. Grazing right before wiping is one way to ensure the height difference because cattle won’t usually eat absinth and tansy. The rope-wick wiper is mounted on the front of a quad. A PVC tube holds the herbicide solution and a rope threaded in and out of the tube spreads the herbicide on contact with vegetation. However, there is no way to turn off the flow once the tube is filled. The kill rate on the target weeds was only 15 to 30 per cent across the three sites in a recent trial. The rotating drum wiper pulled behind a quad gave an overall 80 per cent kill on the target weeds. The drum is covered with a thin carpet-like material wetted by sprayer nozzles along the drum under a covered boom. It was easy to stop flow of the herbicide in progress and to clean out. c

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3/7/16 6:01 PM

 researc h

By Duane McCartney

What Perennial Forage Should I Seed this Year?

attle grazers all across Canada have a wide choice of perennial forage species that they can seed this year. But how do producers pick a species and variety to grow in their respective areas? The question of seeding in mixtures has always been a puzzle. In the 1960s and early 1970s, seed mixtures contained 17 different grasses and legumes. It was a shotgun approach and over the years, these old pastures wore down to low-producing bluegrass stands and little else. Currently, all sorts of research is being done in Canada on perennial forage mixtures. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada researchers, with financial help from the Beef Cattle Research Council, have come up with new blends of grass and legumes that could offer richer pastures for beef cattle. In Nova Scotia, Yousef Papadopoulos and John Duynisveld at the Nappan Research Centre are looking at mixtures to grassfinish beef cattle. “Farmers often plant recommended varieties designed to produce hay, but are not good for grazing. They’ve been selected for a hay production where they’re harvested two or three times a year and they don’t have the pressure of animals grazing on them,” Duynisveld says. Papadopoulos, a plant breeder, has compared the growth or yield to the energy and protein in the pastures.

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“The highest yielding binary mixtures were white clover and Courtney tall fescue; birdsfoot trefoil and Kokanee tall fescue; alfalfa and Kokanee tall fescue; alfalfa and Express timothy or birdsfoot trefoil and Arctic orchardgrass. The ultimate goal is to offer farmers a pasture that will allow them to keep their cattle grass fed, and avoid the additional expense of sending cattle to a feedlot before slaughter. Keeping cattle in fields longer can save farmers money.” Gilles Bélanger at Agriculture and AgriFood Canada in Quebec City says there is a lot of interest in their region for finding a replacement for timothy. Timothy has poor regrowth and will not take advantage of a longer and warmer growing season with climate change. As well, timothy does not respond well to the intensive cutting management used by dairy farmers. “In an effort to increase forage quality we are looking at tall fescue, meadow fescue, festulolium, perennial ryegrass, and meadow bromegrass, mostly in a mixture with alfalfa. We are also collaborating with our colleagues at Université Laval to compare feeding timothy and tall fescue to dairy cows. Tall fescue has a bad reputation for intake. So we are trying to answer some of those questions.” The Quebec team is also looking at the ratio of available energy to protein in forages as a means of increasing the efficiency of nitrogen use in dairy cows and milk pro-

duction. Their efforts focus on increasing the ratio of non-structural carbohydrates or sugars to rapidly degradable protein through cutting management and species selection. The research shows the choice of species in the mixture does affect this ratio. For instance, meadow fescue with alfalfa produced the highest ratio of readily available energy to crude protein in a study comparing 18 grass-legume mixtures. Mike Schellenberg at the Ag Canada, Swift Current Research and Development Centre found seeded mixtures increased forage production, resilience to negative weather events and below-ground diversity which has been related to improved soil health. “Some of our initial work has also identified improved forage production with more than a single legume species” he says. “Having an early-season legume such as alfalfa growing with a late-season legume such as purple prairie clover provided the best yields and highest quality forage.” “Higher productivity is found with legumes present. In our case, we started with 50:50 of alfalfa to purple prairie clover. To allow for other species to remain in the forage mixture, the recommendation is to have less than 30 per cent wheatgrass. Postseeding management will also determine what will remain in the stand.” Native plant mixtures are another focus of BCRC funded research at Swift Current, Lethbridge, Saskatoon and Bran-

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research

don, including the development of native plant materials for seeding into pasture and rangelands at Swift Current. Species moving toward commercialization include northern wheatgrass, rough fescue, prairie sand reed grass, winterfat and white and purple prairie clovers. The white prairie clover is furthest along. “The prairie clovers have interesting condensed tannin profiles that help prevent bloat and have anti-microbial characteristics,” says Schellenberg. A few new grass varieties have been developed in recent years through Bruce Coulman’s breeding program at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Armada meadow and AC Goliath crested wheatgrass showed high forage yield in multiple location trials. AC Success is one of the only two hybrid bromes developed in Canada. It showed high forage yield, and relatively good regrowth. In future, Bill Biligetu at U of S will be developing locally adapted alfalfa and sainfoin varieties that will have high yield and persistence under local environment and will include winter hardiness, disease resistance, and tolerance to intensive grazing. Alfalfa’s nitrogen-fixing capacity and the ability of its deep roots to prevent wind and water erosion makes it a common ingredient in mixed-species improved pastures. Alfalfa can sustain high levels of production in pastured cattle, but its propensity to cause bloat discourages its inclusion at high seeding densities. “Condensed tannins in legumes are responsible for their bloat-safe nature,” says Tim McAllister, a researcher at Lethbridge Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. “Alfalfa only produces the condensed tannins in its seed coat, whereas other legumes such as birdsfoot trefoil, cicer milkvetch, purple prairie clover and sainfoin produce condensed tannins within the foliage. In addition to preventing bloat, condensed tannins improve ruminal nitrogen utilization, control intestinal parasites, reduce Escherichia coli in feces and possibly reduce methane emission.” Along with plant breeder Surya Acharya the Lethbridge team has been using sainfoin to develop high-performance grazing systems by growing it in mixed stands with alfalfa. “Among the condensed tannin forages, sainfoin is the most adaptable for use in a high-performance grazing system in mixed stands with alfalfa,” says Acharya. “It has high nutritive value, winter hardiness, drought tolerance and resistance to some alfalfa insects. It www.canadiancattlemen.ca

is well adapted to dry and calcareous soils and grows best on deep soils with a pH above 6.0. Sainfoin is comparable to alfalfa in nutritional quality and results in average daily gains in cattle that are similar to alfalfa.” Sainfoin produces higher daily weight gain compared to other condensed tannincontaining legumes such as birdsfoot trefoil. Sainfoin also retains its leaves longer than alfalfa and can be harvested at a more mature stage without a loss in quality, with the highest yields obtained at 75 to 100 per cent bloom. As little as 10 per cent sainfoin in alfalfa pastures can dramatically reduce the risk of pasture bloat. As for bloat-free alfalfa grazing, he recommends establishment of sainfoin and alfalfa mixed stands in alternate rows using the new multi-cut-type AAC Mountainview sainfoin. Seed 15 pounds of Mountainview sanfoin and five pounds of alfalfa in alternate rows without grass. Other single-cut-type sainfoin cultivars will not provide bloat protection in mixed alfalfa stands due to the lack of regrowth.

urrently, all kinds C of research is being done in Canada on perennial forage mixtures Yuxi Wang, an expert in condensed tannin chemistry at Lethbridge, is looking at including purple prairie clover, a legume with unusually high levels of condensed tannins that is native to North American grasslands, into high productivity grazing systems. Purple prairie clover is highly digestible and has properties against Escherichia coli O157:H7 and lowers the levels of E. coli shed in cattle feces. Bart Lardner with the Western Beef Development Centre at Lanigan, Sask., and Alan Iwaasa at Swift Current are evaluating the effects of grazing, forage yield and quality on animal performance. “We are looking at different forage binary mixtures of Mountainview sainfoin or Yellowhead alfalfa, a very persistent alfalfa seeded with AC Success hybrid bromegrass or Tom Russian wild ryegrass for August-September, October summer-fall grazing period,” says Lardner “We are also evaluating a number of legumes: white prairie clover, purple prai-

rie clover, Canada milkvetch, and Veldt cicer milkvetch developed from AAFC-Lethbridge,” says Iwaasa. The grasses are Admiral meadow bromegrass, Tom RWR and AC-Success. These legume+grass binary mixtures are being evaluated at both Swift Current and Lanigan. In addition, at Swift Current on small plots, they are evaluating the newest sainfoin varieties Shoshoe and Delaney from the U.S. and Canada’s AC-Mountainview and Nova and another RWR, Bozoisky II. “We are evaluating them for forage quality and stand longevity in binary mixtures for extending the grazing season,” he explains. Don Thompson, a rangeland research scientist at Lethbridge, says introduced grasses are often cited as more productive than native grasses. However, if the seed quality of native grasses was improved, he thinks they would establish as well as introduced grasses and yield as well, too. The main factor holding native stands back is reduced productivity due to poor establishment which reduces stand density. Thompson says western wheatgrass and little bluestem are the most promising native grasses for forage production. “It was interesting that a warm-season grass like little bluestem may be well adapted for late-season forage production well beyond its normal range of occurrence,” he adds. “Mixtures of these grasses with purple prairie clover have more stable yields and improved nutritive value. One idea is for producers to establish separate pastures for early and later summer grazing. The earlyseason pasture could be western wheatgrass and the late-season pasture could be little bluestem with purple prairie clover. We observed that due to its rhizomatous nature, western wheatgrass tends to dominate when seeded in a mixed stand. One study at Swift Current and Lethbridge showed that green needlegrass was as productive as western wheatgrass but may be a more suitable cool-season grass for grasslegume mixtures.” “In British Columbia, bluebunch wheatgrass is well adapted to the mid-summer drought in the Interior and two new bluebunch wheat grass varieties are being developed for use in British Columbia.” For additional information on seeding forages go to www.Foragebeef.ca. c Duane McCartney is a retired forage beef systems research scientist at Lacombe, Alta.

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 Nutritio n

By John McKinnon

Silage — The Forage of Choice for Cattle Feeders

his past winter has again demonstrated the value of cereal silage as a forage source for cattle feeders. Many of you will recall that hay supplies were tight last fall, particularly in Western Canada and as a result, for many feedlots hay was priced out of the ration. How did these lots make it through the winter without hay? To answer this question, you don’t have to look any further than the silage pile. Silage for many lots was the forage base of the feeding program. In fact, for many feeders, hay was restricted to the starter ration and even then, it was fed at levels that were approximately half of the normal inclusion rate. This reliance on silage is not restricted to western Canadian feedlots, nor is it restricted to drought years. Feeders across the country rely on silage year in and year out to provide both the quantity and quality of required forage at a competitive price. What is changing, however, is that cattle feeders have more choices with respect to forage crops and within crops, to specific varieties that can be grown for silage. With this article I will discuss some of these options, particularly with reference to barley, corn and triticale. Let’s start with barley as it has traditionally been the crop of choice for silage in Western Canada. Barley is a relatively early-maturing cereal that grows well in most soil zones. There are a number of feed or semi-dwarf varieties that one can grow for silage depending on requirements for maturity, disease and lodging resistance and choice of smooth versus rough awns. With proper fertility and moisture conditions, barley will yield three to 3.5 tonnes of dry matter per acre; however, experience at the University of Saskatchewan has shown that yields can drop to two tonnes of dry matter under less-than-optimal conditions. To optimize both dry matter and nutrient yield, barley is typically harvested for silage at the mid- to late-dough stage. Barley cut at this stage will average 10 to 12 per cent protein and 63 to 65 per cent total digestible nutrients (TDN). Variety can influence both the yield and nutritive value of the resulting silage. For example, CDC Cowboy is known for its yield potential, however, relative to varieties such as Rosser, it has lower TDN levels due to higher fibre and lower starch content. Corn has been a staple forage source for feedlots in Eastern and Central Canada for many years. The development of early-maturing corn varieties has recently allowed for silage and even grain production in areas

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of Western Canada. Corn is a warm-season crop that requires relatively higher growing temperatures and moisture conditions than cereals such as barley or triticale. Corn is typically harvested for silage in the “Dent” stage of development when it is between 60 and 70 per cent moisture (65 per cent is ideal). During this phase the kernels fill with starch in a characteristic fashion. As the liquid starch fills the kernel, it progressively “hardens” from the crown to the base of the kernel. The separation between hard and soft starch is known as the milk line and is used as an indicator of maturity of the plant. For example, it is common to hear terms such as one quarter, one-half and twothirds milk line as it moves from the crown to the base. The “black layer” forms when the milk line reaches the tips of the kernels, indicating the plant is physiologically mature. While there is no substitute for knowledge of whole-plant moisture content, corn is often harvested for silage between one-half and two-thirds milk line development. Given the right combination of temperature, moisture and seed variety, corn will outyield other silage crops in terms of dry matter (i.e. typically five to six tonnes or more per acre) as well as in digestible nutrient (i.e. 67 to 72 per cent TDN, DM basis) content. These benefits help to offset its higher costs of production. Selection of a variety suitable for local growing conditions is critical to obtaining this advantage. One drawback to corn silage from a nutritional perspective is its lower protein content which averages eight to nine per cent. Triticale is a cereal that is gaining more attention as a silage crop, particularly with the release of newer varieties. Triticale can be fall or spring seeded and harvested as silage or greenfeed. Other advantages include its drought tolerance and the fact that it does not turn as quickly in the field as it matures. Yield trials carried out in Alberta have shown that triticale will equal or outyield barley as a silage crop. Nutritionally there is not a great deal of difference between triticale and barley silage when both are harvested at the correct stage of maturity, although barley silage tends to be more digestible at advanced stages of maturity. There is also the perception real or not, that cattle do not consume triticale as readily as barley silage. These advances in plant breeding and agronomy are rapidly expanding the options that beef producers have for growing silage. Making the right choice will influence not only the quantity and quality of your forage supply but also its cost. c

John McKinnon is a beef cattle nutritionist at the University of Saskatchewan

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 forage s e e d i ng

By Duane McCartney

Points to Remember When Seeding Forages

“T

here are a few common mistakes made that limit the success of new forage establishments” says Joel Bagg, a former forage specialist with Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, and now with Quality Seeds. “One of the biggest problems is not seeding new forage stands often enough. Many alfalfa-based stands are simply too old, resulting in huge losses of forage yield. Alfalfa yields are normally very high during the first two years, but by the third year, yields can decline by 15 to 20 per cent, and possibly 35 per cent by the fourth year. That is a lot of yield to give up. In addition to higher forage yields, alfalfa can supply the equivalent of 100 lbs./ac. nitrogen to the corn crop in the rotation, Corn yields can increase by 10 to 15 per cent following alfalfa rather than corn after corn. “Poor packing before and after seeding can be a major problem,” he adds. Forage seeds are very small, and it is essential that there is good seed-to-soil contact, particularly in dry soils. A firm, level, clod-free

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seedbed is very important for uniform seeding depth and good seed-to-soil contact. A loose, lumpy seedbed dries out quickly, and lumps make seedling emergence difficult. Soil should be firm enough at planting for a footprint to sink no deeper than nine mm (3 ⁄ 8 inch). If necessary, pack before seeding, in addition to packing after the seed drill, as packing after seeding results in more rapid and even germination.” Jack Kyle, a retired Ontario pasture specialist says, “forage crops remove a lot of phosphorus and potassium and have high soil nutrient requirements. It is very important to soil test in many locations and then fertilize as necessary. If soil pH is low, it is important to apply lime to correct the pH level. Most soils in Ontario are in an acceptable pH range but some are low and lime should be incorporated prior to seeding for optimum benefit. Species and variety selection will be influenced by intended use of the forage. Alfalfa is the dominant species so it is necessary to choose grass species that have a similar maturity to the alfalfa.” “If (you are) using a cereal cover crop it

should be harvested as forage rather than allowed to go to grain maturity,” adds Kyle. “The early harvest in late June or the first week in July in Ontario will reduce the competition for sunlight and moisture and allow the forage seedlings to develop more vigorously. ” For years, forage specialists across Canada have stressed the benefit of using certified forage seed that is recommended for your ecosystem. Buying cheap forage seed is a poor way to save. As land costs increase, the cost of seed is only a small percentage of the cost of producing forage. Cheaper, common seed has no yield assurance, disease resistance or winter hardiness. Seed is unpredictable and will vary from year to year. The use of high performance, proven varieties, rather than unknown brands or common seed, is strongly recommended. “It takes very little extra yield to justify seeding the higher valued certified seed.” says Joel Bagg. “Lack of weed control during the establishment period will impact yield and forage quality for the life of the stand. Herbicide control of broadleaf annual weeds at

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forage seeding

Waddington recommends cross-seeding the forage in a separate operation. That usually results in a better stand. Surya Acharya, a plant breeder at the Lethbridge research centre, is also cautious about using companion crops that vigorously compete with perennial, slow-to-establish forage crops for nutrients, water and sunlight, making the stand weaker than a new forage crop that only competes with weeds. He also recommends mowing seedling

perennial forage crops down to four inches when they reach eight to 10 inches high. “This doesn’t harm the young perennial plants, but helps reduce annual weed competition by eliminating possible weed seed production. Pruning also causes the perennial forage crops to stool out and cover the ground,” he adds. c Duane McCartney is a retired forage beef research scientist at Lacombe, Alta.

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establishment is especially important.” he says. “To lower the risk of injury to alfalfa seedlings, determine the optimum time of spraying by the stage of development of the new seedlings and consult your provincial herbicide guides for recommended rates.” Grant Lastiwka, a forage and livestock business specialist in Alberta, agrees with Bagg. “Pack and firm the seedbed before planting and afterwards depending on seeding method. Blowing forage seed on with a fertilizer spreader does not work as well as direct placement, especially in dry years. Paying to have it seeded by someone who is skilled may be well worth the cost, especially with seed prices being high. If seeding in sod, I am now thinking mid- to the third week of April or very late fall using a good no-till drill works best.” John Waddington, a retired forage agronomist who worked with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Melfort and Swift Current, reviewed the research done in the last 100 years on seeding companion crops with perennial forages and found weather played a major role in the successful establishment of the forage. Companion crops can also affect forage seedling size, with smaller plants unable to produce maximum yields the following spring. This is why forage yields are often lower in the first year when forages are seeded with a companion crop than when they are established alone. The economic value of seeding forages with or without a companion crop in the black soil zone of Western Canada depends on the relative prices of forage, grain, and cereal hay, because forage yields depend so much on spring moisture. Wheat, barley, oats, canola, flax, and peas have been used successfully to establish forages. In the dark brown soil zone, evapotranspiration is greater and precipitation less, on average, than in the black soil zone. There is usually adequate moisture in the soil from snowmelt in spring for seed germination. Because evapotranspiration normally exceeds summer rainfall, plants come under stress and forage establishment is more uncertain with a companion crop in those conditions. In the dark brown soil zone, rotations including under-seeded alfalfa are usually not economical because the forage yield is linked to the variation in spring weather. For this reason it’s not advisable to use a companion crop to establish forages in the brown soil zone. When you do use a companion crop

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 forage equ i p m e n t

By Debbie Furber

Less Stress and More Hay in a Day

aunch of the IntelliCruise feedrate control system in 2016 marks the latest advancement in forage harvesting technology from New Holland after introducing its CropRFV last year and CropID in 2013. IntelliCruise does exactly what the name implies. It’s a variable cruise control for the tractor that adjusts ground speed according to a set rate for forage feeding into the baler. The electronic control unit mounted on the baler signals the electronic control unit on the tractor to automatically slow ground speed while picking up heavier swaths and increase speed while picking up lighter swaths to maintain a consistent feed rate in crops that aren’t uniform. In charge-control mode, the signal from the baler’s load sensor adjusts tractor speed according to how much forage the plunger pushes with each stroke. In slice-control mode, tractor speed adjusts to bale slice thickness to produce bales with a uniform number and thickness of slices. Claude Lesperance, field support specialist with New Holland at Guelph, Ont., says the advantages of automatically matching the tractor’s ground speed to crop load are three-fold. It optimizes baler performance resulting in as much as a nine per cent increase in baler capacity and productivity. This means that you’ll be able to put up about nine per cent more hay by weight in a day with IntelliCruise controlling the tractor’s speed. In turn, IntelliCruise helps reduce driver fatigue from continuously gauging swath volume to shift speed up and down accordingly from the cab. Research to date shows that there will be a savings on fuel but the amount depends on many variables. IntelliCruise is built to the very latest ISOBUS class III standard and is installed on New Holland’s 2016 model large square balers. The baler has to be married up with a tractor with ISOBUS class III functionality, which the company’s 2016 model T6 and T7 tractors offer, Lesperance explains. Customers who purchase a new baler and don’t have a compatible tractor won’t be charged for the IntelliCruise system in the price of the baler. When the time

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Everything you could want to know about a bale is found on a scannable tag on the twine.

comes to upgrade to a tractor with ISOBUS class III technology, the customer can buy the unlock code to activate the IntelliCruise system. ISOBUS is an electronic network adhering to International Standards Organization 11783 for use of bus applications with universal connections and compatibility regardless of manufacturer. Instead of dedicated monitors and wiring for each device on each piece of equipment, the ISOBUS class III network makes it possible to have one virtual terminal in a cab that will recognize any certified 11783 ISOBUS class III compatible electronic control unit on the tractor and other attached equipment. A bus is a twisted four-wire cable for transmitting electronic data, already widely used in the automotive industry. The basic ISOBUS standard for agricultural equipment was first published in 2001. The earlier class I and II networks allowed the electronic control unit in the tractor to display information about the tractor and its subsystems. Class III has the added capacity to receive data from electronic control units on an attached implement and carry out commands based on that information via the tractor’s task con-

troller programmed through the farm’s management computer. CropRFV and CropID

New Holland’s CropRFV (relative feed value) system for BigBaler 230, 330 and 340 large square balers incorporates the bale weighing technology developed by Case New Holland Industrial and the moisture determination technology from Harvest Tec of Hudson, Wisconsin, to estimate the RFV of each bale as it is made. First, a grab sample taken from swaths just after cutting is sent to a feed-test lab. The RFV from the analysis is entered into the CropRFV system to calibrate the program for that particular field at the time of baling. The system’s moisture sensors and weigh scale take readings on the fly and feed them into the program to adjust the baseline RFV accordingly for each whole bale, not just samples here and there. The underlying premise is that leaves are the most nutrient-dense, digestible part of forages and pack much more tightly into a bale than stemmy, fibrous material. It follows that bales with more leaf material weigh up heavier and are of higher quality than bales of the same moisture content than bales made with more stems.

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forage equipment

The RFV of alfalfa hay can vary widely across a field depending on the stage of maturity of each plant at cutting and on harvest conditions. In trials to prove the Harvest Tec system’s accuracy, the lab results for RFV on 108 first-cut alfalfa bales ranged from 159 to 230 even though the bales were made within a two-hour period on the same field. RFV combines an estimate of digestible dry matter and dry-matter intake into an index for use when comparing forage quality and, therefore, how well an animal could be expected to perform when fed hay or silage with differing RFVs. Acid detergent fibre (ADF), which is the non-digestible component of forage, is used to inversely predict the portion that is digestible. Neutral detergent fibre (NDF) is all of the plant parts that are somewhat digestible and give the animal a feeling of fullness. It is used to estimate how much of the forage an animal would be able to consume based on its body weight. The equation for indexing the RFV of forages was developed so that full-bloom alfalfa with 41 per cent ADF and 53 per cent NDF has a RFV of 100. Forages with RFVs above 100 are considered superior to full-bloom alfalfa. RFV is a useful tool for pricing, buying and selling hay, and predicting animal performance relative to other forage choices, but actual values for crude protein and energy are needed to balance rations. The Utah State University’s research, to prove the Harvest Tec system’s accu-

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racy, involved coring 542 bales from three cuts of alfalfa to send for lab analyses. The results were compared with RFVs generated by the Harvest Tec system for bales from the same cuts. The conclusion was that the system offers a practical way to get a prediction of hay quality as it comes out of the field.

FV combines an R estimate of digestible dry matter and dry-matter intake into an index for use when comparing forages Further testing under widespread conditions on eight farms in six states with varying temperatures, precipitation (or irrigation) amounts, varieties, cutting times, bale sizes and balers found a strong correlation between the Harvest Tec system’s RFV results and lab RFV results on core samples from more than 3,000 bales. The CropRFV monitor displays RFV as bales are made and details are summarized in a printable job report that shows averages for the field. The CropID program takes the CropRFV system to the next level by tagging each bale with its RFV along with bale weight,

moisture, date and time of baling, field location and variable-rate preservative application. The information is written to a radio-frequency identification chip in a vinyl tag attached to the baler twine. The CropID tagger, also underpinned with Harvest Tec technology, can be used without CropRFV to write any of the other data to the chip. The tags can be read with a hand-held scanner or the scanner can be mounted on handling equipment to sort bales into low-, medium- and high-RFV lots for consistency when shipping and/or feeding the hay. An arch-like portal scanner, usually positioned over a scale, is capable of reading information from tags on each individual bale loaded on a truck. Data from the portal scanner is transmitted to a computer program for viewing or printout. Lesperance says an option in lieu of the CropID chip is a dye marker kit. It sprays one, two or three marks on both sides of the bales as they leave the bale chamber based on pre-programmed RFV values you put into the CropRVF system. You could, for instance, set it up to spray one mark on bales with RFV less than 100, two marks for bales with RFV of 101 to 150, and three marks for those with RFV of 151 and higher. For more information about these innovations, visit your local dealership or www. newholland.com. Lesperance’s powerpoint presentation from the Canadian Forage & Grassland Association conference is available at www.canadianfga.ca. c

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 Holistic R a nc hi ng

By Don Campbell

a planned grazing q and a

. What is planned grazing? A. Planned grazing was developed by Allan Savory. It is a term that describes the method used in H M to develop a grazing plan. Planned grazing is designed to stop overgrazing. Q. What is overgrazing? A. Overgrazing is a function of time. It can occur in two ways. The first is to stay in a pasture too long at one time (graze period). The second is by returning to the pasture for a second graze before the plants have fully recovered from the first graze (recovery period). Overgrazing is not related to the number of animals. Traditionally overgrazing has been associated with the number of animals. Traditional grazing practices have focused on the percentage of utilization of the forage. The basic model has been to take half and leave half with the result that we overgrazed some of the plants each year. As long as we kept close to the 50 per cent theory things weren’t too bad but the long-term result has been that most pastures slowly deteriorated. We see more bare ground, an ineffective water cycle and more invasive species such as aspen, buck brush, silver willow and thistle. Pasture rejuvenation was a major expense and over time our stocking rate declined. This is not a recipe for sustainability. Unfortunately this model is still promoted and accepted by many ranchers and range ecologists. We now know overgrazing is a function of time. This is the main difference between traditional grazing and planned grazing. In H M we recognize we don’t overgraze a pasture but we do overgraze individual plants. This begins with the most desirable species and continues on down the line. With planned grazing pastures improve over time. We have more desirable species, less bare ground and a more effective water cycle. Pasture rejuvenation is no longer necessary. This is a model that leads to profit in the short term and sustainability in the long term. Q. What does the term graze period mean? A. The graze period refers to the number of days that the cattle will be in a pasture at one time. The shorter the graze period, the better. As a guideline I suggest three to five days. Q. What does the term recovery period mean? A. This is the number of days between grazings. It has to be long enough to allow full recovery of the plants before they are grazed a second time. In most instances a recovery period of 60 to 90 days is required. My experience has been that as you move closer to the 90 days you will be more pleased with the results. If you live in a dry environment you might use an even longer recovery period. Q. What does full recovery mean? A. Full recovery occurs when the root supplies of a plant are fully replenished after the plant has been grazed. Grazing a second time at this stage of growth is beneficial to both the plant and the soil. The best indicator of full recovery is that the plant is ready to flower. Q. How many pastures do I need to do a good job of grazing?

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A. I don’t know. That can only be determined on an individual basis. With a five-day graze period and a 75-day recovery period you will need 16 pastures. The formula is recovery period (75)/graze period (5) + 1 = 16. Q. What other information do I require? A. It is important to have a method of determining when growth starts. Before growth starts and after growth stops you can’t overgraze, as the plants are dormant. Overgrazing occurs in the growing season. In my area the best indicator of growth starting is the day the leaves appear on the poplar trees. There will be some growth before this date but I think it is marginal and can be overlooked. Once the leaves appear we need to implement our grazing plan to prevent overgrazing. For 10 years now at our place growth has started as early as April 20 and as late as May 18. Obviously having a set date for the start of growth will not be very effective. Q. What does the term stocking rate refer to? A. Stocking rate is the number of animals on a given piece of land for the growing season. Q. Is stocking rate the same as stock density? A. No. Stock density is the number of head per acre for a short period of time. The higher the stock density the more beneficial the grazing will be. The stock density is directly related to the graze period. For example if you planned to have a five-day graze period and then changed to a one-day graze period you would increase the stock density five times. The stocking rate would be unchanged. Q. What does the severity of the graze mean? A. The severity of the graze refers to how much residue is left when the cattle leave a pasture. The ideal is to leave as much grass behind as possible. However, to achieve full recovery in a variety of growing conditions we need to vary the severity of the graze depending on the growing conditions we are experiencing. You cannot manage for a set amount of residue unless you are willing to change your stocking rate during the growing season. It is important to realize that overgrazing and severe grazing are different. Q. How do I get started? A. You have the graze period and the recovery period selected. You now plan how you will move your animals through your pastures. You would do this before the grazing season begins. Once the growing season starts you monitor the regrowth in the first pasture grazed to see if it will be necessary to increase or decrease your recovery period. You will change the severity of the graze to change the recovery period. The result will be full recovery under all growing conditions. Good luck. You have the information you need to stop overgrazing your pastures. The result will be healthier land, increased production, increased profit and sustainability. c Don Campbell ranches with his family at Meadow Lake, Sask., and teaches Holistic Management courses. He can be reached at 306-236-6088 or doncampbell@sasktel.net.

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 COVER STO RY · fo r ag e g r a z i ng

By Debbie Furber

Seeing the ranch as a classroom Learning is a way of life at the Bar K

Taylor and Tamara Grafton

rom 400 auction market cows in the early 1980s, Bar K Ranch has evolved into a modern beef operation with more than 1,000 cows on 8,000 acres north of Prince George, B.C. Bar K manager Taylor Grafton credits innovation and education for the ranch’s growth, which is very much in line with the philosophy applied to the owner’s original family business, Carrier Lumber. Founded in 1951 by William Kordyban of Prince George, Carrier Lumber survived the trade and insect turmoil that beset the forestry industry and today operates forestry divisions with a mill and mill fabrication shop at Prince George along with operations in Saskatchewan. Grafton’s parents, Mark and Laura, were the first managers at Bar K back when it was little more than a few corrals and outbuild-

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ings with some fencing around the cleared land. That relationship has now been transferred to the second generation of both families, with Grafton taking over his role as manager in the last couple of years. “The owners have always wanted to use the ranch as a place where people can learn,” Grafton says. Toward that end, participating in Agriculture in the Classroom has been a frequent community initiative with classroom visits to Prince George schools and up to 1,000 students visiting the ranch most years. In a similar vein the ranch has hosted grazing workshops, Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals animal-handling clinics, co-operated in the province’s first farmed-Arctic Char pilot project, and conducted tours of its winter grazing pastures as part of the British Columbia Cattle-

“ The owners have always wanted to use the ranch as a place where people can learn.” Taylor Grafton Manager

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forage grazing

men’s Association’s technology transfer pilot program. This same philosophy extends to employees. In 2005, with full support from the ranch’s seven cowboys, Bar K became the first B.C. beef operation registered under the Verified Beef Production program, which goes a step beyond attending a voluntary workshop to ongoing record-keeping and third-party audits to verify program requirements are being met. The audit is intended to be a learning opportunity. “I really work on training for our cowboys and explaining the science and principles behind how we do things to help them learn faster than the old way. That was to have a new cowboy travel along and watch the experienced riders and it could take years to make a good cowboy,” Grafton explains. His employee training materials focus on practical animal behaviour, and include some books by Dr. Temple Grandin and Tim O’Byrne’s Cowboys and Buckaroos. Grafton himself is currently doing a masters degree on foraging behaviour through Texas A&M, and admits he’s addicted to learning. Similar to many larger outfits in British Columbia, Bar K’s horsemanship and stockmanship history traces back to the buckaroo tradition. Grafton’s grandfather was a buckaroo for ranches of the Great Basin before emigrating from the U.S. to British Columbia. Buckaroo is the American term for Vaquero. The traditional Spanish style of gentling horses and moving cattle was introduced to the Americas through the early mission ranches. Their methods of taking time to work with horse and cattle instincts rather than fast-breaking horses to work cattle spread to Nevada, which is the nucleus of the Great Basin area. As part of this ongoing training, Grafton takes time before working the cattle to talk about what could go wrong and how they will prevent those things from happening. “It’s really just being more verbal about what I’m thinking and I encourage the experienced cowboys to teach the younger ones and verbalize what they know. The younger generation seems to respond well to this and it has created a culture around the teaching and learning process at the ranch. “I’m a collaborative person. My philosophy is that everyone has a different way of looking at things and contributing, so I like to encourage people to think independently and critically and to be creative, come up with new ideas and innovate. I think that’s the way the cattle industry will succeed,” Grafton says. www.canadiancattlemen.ca

Innovation

Bar K Ranch was an early participant in the B.C. Environmental Farm Plan program and benefited from funding that helped with fencing and watering options. Grafton says those options not only help protect the lakes, wetlands and creeks that run through the ranch, but also contribute to the bottom line by improving their grazing management. The ranch was also an early supporter of electronic auctions, first selling calves through TEAM and now selling cull cows through B.C. Livestock Producers Co-operative’s video auction sales. “We’ve had success off the get-go. I think we are well suited to Internet sales because we can sell whole lots of very similar calves and we’ve built a reputation for cattle that do well in the feedlot, with low mortality and sickness. We attribute this to several factors including our pre-conditioning program and the fact that our cattle don’t have to mix with other cattle,” he explains. Bar K runs a three-way cross-breeding program. The main maternal herd is Red Angus bred Hereford to produce Red Baldies that are bred Black Angus as the terminal cross. They also keep a small Black Angus herd on the side and sell some bred heifers out of this program that the ranch started 15 years ago. They tag the calves as they are born and add them to a database of all of the animals’ radio frequency identification numbers. This allows them to keep detailed records and register all birth dates. Calving starts April 15 with the heifers in the yard and May 1 for the cows out on a calving pasture. The pairs are turned out to summer pastures as they and the grass are ready, usually around the end of May. Weaning takes place from the end of October into early November. Normally

they like to background the calves over winter and pasture them the following summer, depending on their feed and grass supplies. The intensively managed-grazing system his mom originally established for the Red Baldy pairs has since been found to be more conducive to putting weight on yearlings than grazing pairs because the quality and quantity of the early grass allows them to up their stocking density. As an added bonus, it doesn’t take long for a few cowboys on horseback to grab groups of yearlings as the market wants them, he adds. Most of the range is a mix of tame fescues, orchardgrass and bromegrasses favoured by the region’s moderate climate with summertime highs that peak around 25 C with ample rainfall. Grafton says the calves grow like crazy on it because it doesn’t get coarse as fast as the grasses in more arid areas of the province. Experience has been the best teacher over the past decade as Bar K looked for ways to extend the grazing season. It didn’t hurt that the Graftons also have close ties with Dr. Bart Lardner, who cowboyed at Bar K in his youth and is now a research scientist with the Western Beef Development Centre in Saskatchewan focused on grazing research. “Knowing Bart and trusting in his research program helped us adopt winter grazing early on. It was a nice foundation to work from and we can move on from there to the next things,” Grafton says. From his own experience he has learned that swath grazing is as much an art as it is a science. One of those lessons is to make big swaths that stand up under snow and run in a consistent direction. When cows have a tough time finding snow-covered swaths that zigzag around sloughs and corners they will just stop grazing, he explains. Continued on page 30

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fo r ag e g r a z i ng

Continued from page 29

Double swaths are easier to find in the snow so there is less waste, but the manure isn’t spread as evenly as it is with single swaths. To even out the manure, they place their double swaths between the old rows every other year, or lay down single swaths and roll them over to double them up later when heavy snow is expected. Free-choice grazing of swaths with hay bales between the rows was a bad idea. The cattle ate the bales and ignored the swaths. Triticale flunked out as a swath-grazing crop the first time they tried it using alternating rows of oats sown at 120 lbs./ acre and triticale at 100 lbs./acre. The cows picked through the swaths to get at the oats and flat-out refused the triticale. To be fair, this was the herd’s first taste of triticale. Since then they’ve learned cattle clean up triticale swaths if the crop is planted on its own and they are expecting a new mix of triticale-fall rye will make great early grazing this spring. Bears, it turns out, love straight oats but lost interest when the Graftons started growing an oat-barley mix and more triticale for swath grazing as well as corn for winter grazing. They do see elk, but the herds seem to be migrating to somewhere else, and never take much feed. Same goes for the deer that are seen from time to time. Mixed feeding has been successful when limit-feeding silage to supplement grazing on poor-quality hay bales. An advantage of this system is that monensin can be added

The Bar K has been a family affair for Warren, Chantelle, Mark, Laura, Tamara and Taylor Grafton.

to the silage to improve feed efficiency by approximately three per cent. Bale grazing is fairly new at Bar K. They are not set up very well for making or feeding hay, but Grafton intends to do more of it based on what he’s seen so far. In deep-snow the bales are easier to find and the cattle tend to finish one bale before breaking trail to another, eliminating the need to move an electric fence to control access. He also likes the look of those lush rings of forage where the bales were sitting that dot the pastures on marginal land when the grass comes back. They use galvanized aircraft cable for electric fencing because it has a 500-pound break tensile strength, excellent conductivity, and costs around $25 for a 1,000-foot roll. On the downside, it’s heavy and not very visible to cattle. Grazing standing whole corn plants is another idea that’s likely to gain a perma-

nent place in Bar K’s winter grazing scheme after using it for three winters. It fits well as the last crop to be grazed because the cows can easily get at it in deep snow. Grazing is controlled to avoid founder as the cows go for the cobs first thing. It looks as though two or three years of annuals for swath grazing to help control weeds before corn will be a beneficial rotation. Grafton has found it’s better to seed the corn as early as possible to take advantage of spring moisture and then focus on weed control even when the crop gets off to a good start. Corn makes excellent use of nitrogen, so feeding silage in winter on fields slated for corn in the spring is a great way to recycle nutrients. After trying everything from one-day to one-week moves for swath grazing, they’ve settled on three-day moves for the swaths and the corn with one day added on the third move to encourage the cattle to clean up the entire pasture. c

Canadian forage and grassland managers provide significant environmental and economic benefit for Canadians coast to coast.

7th Annual CFGA Conference

Using Manitoba’s productive forage and grassland scene as the backdrop, the 2016 CFGA conference will highlight how the Canadian forage sector is supporting sustainable growth and development throughout the Canadian agriculture industry.

November 15-17, 2016 Fairmont Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Topics for discussion include:

Producing environmental and economic opportunities on Canada’s grasslands

Photo: Ducks Unlimited Canada

v Economics of forage production v Environmental benefits

For information go to

www.canadianfga.ca or send an email message to

conference@canadianfga.ca

of grass on the landscape

v Export industry development v The role of cover crops in annual production systems v Soil nutrient management and conservation

 researc h o n t h e r eco r d

By Reynold Bergen

Dry-Chilling

(and two other things)

he muscle tissues of healthy animals are essentially free of bacteria until carcasses are skinned. At that point, it is impossible to eliminate the transfer of bacteria from the hide and the environment to the meat. Many of those bacteria are harmless, but some can cause meat to spoil faster. Others, like verotoxigenic E. coli (e.g. E. coli O157:H7 and others) can pose a very serious risk to human health. Well-managed packing plants can minimize the transfer of bacteria from the animal to the carcass, but they can’t eliminate it completely. Many food safety interventions such as hide-on carcass washes, hide-off carcass washes, organic acid sprays, steam pasteurization, steam vacuums and trimming of visible contamination have been implemented to essentially eliminate these pathogens. Other than carcass washes and trimming, many of these interventions are too costly for smaller abattoirs to install and operate. Two things that bacteria need to survive are water and the right temperature. In Canada, beef carcasses must be chilled to a surface temperature of 7 C or less within 24 hours of carcass dressing because E. coli and many other pathogens do not grow well in cold temperatures. Some packing plants periodically spray carcasses with cold water as they chill to avoid carcass weight loss. However, allowing carcass surfaces to dry as they chill may starve the surface bacteria of water, forcing them to dry out and die. The effects of dry-chilling on bacterial survival have been studied before. Some studies have found that it works and others have found that it doesn’t. It’s difficult to understand these contradictory results, because most of these studies haven’t described the carcass or cooler temperatures, humidity or airflow parameters in detail. A soon-to-be-published study led by Dr. Xianqin Yang of AAFC Lacombe (Effects of Dry Chilling on the Microflora of Beef Carcasses at a Canadian Beef Packing Plant; Journal of Food Protection 79:538-543) studied whether dry-chilling could be an effective way to control pathogens in a commercial packing plant. What they did: This study was conducted at a commercial beef-packing plant that processes 200 head of cattle per week and routinely dry-chills carcasses for three days before fabricating them. Groups of 25 carcasses were selected at random, and swabbed for surface bacteria at the start of chilling, and again after they had been chilled for one, two, four, six, eight, 24 and 67 hours. Numbers of aerobes (bacteria that grow in the presence of oxygen and suggest airborne contamination), coliforms (common indicators of fecal contamination) and Escherichia coli were determined. Another 25 carcasses at various locations in the

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cooler were fitted with probes to measure carcass surface and deep leg temperatures. Ambient air temperature, movement and relative humidity were set to 0 C, 1.65 m/s and 88 per cent and monitored throughout the chilling process. What they learned: On average, shoulder and rump surfaces took between 13 and 16 hours to reach 7 C, and the deep leg took up over 32 hours to reach 7 C. The numbers of aerobes on carcass surfaces were reduced by 90 per cent when the first hour of chilling had passed, and by 99 per cent once the first day of chilling was complete. The subsequent 43 hours of chilling didn’t reduce the numbers of aerobes any further. Numbers of coliforms and E. coli on carcasses were reduced by more than 90 per cent within the first hour, and by more than 99 per cent by the time the first day of chilling was complete. No coliforms or E. coli were found after the full 67 hours of chilling were completed. What it means: This study showed that numbers of aerobes, coliforms and E. coli on carcass surfaces could be reduced by 99 per cent within a 24-hour dry-chilling period with appropriate air temperature, speed and humidity parameters. Dry-chilling process may be a costeffective method to control microbiological contamination of beef carcasses in abattoirs where daily kill volumes don’t justify an investment in hide-on or hide-off carcass washes, sprays, or carcass pasteurizers. It may also be useful for facilities serving export markets that do not yet recognize the effectiveness of some of the interventions commonly used in large commercial packing facilities. Small and large packers can effectively minimize the number of bacteria on beef carcasses. They just need to use different approaches. Two more things: April 22 is Earth Day, so take a look back at the January research column to recall some of the environmental improvements that Canada’s beef industry made over the past 30 years. We’d also like your help to identify forage, cattle and beef research priorities as we prepare to update Canada’s National Beef Research Strategy. You can access our research survey and share your thoughts at http://www.beefresearch.ca/blog/beefresearch-priority-survey/. The Beef Research Cluster is funded by the National Checkoff and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada with additional contributions from provincial beef industry groups and governments to advance research and technology transfer supporting the Canadian beef industry’s vision to be recognized as a preferred supplier of healthy, high-quality beef, cattle and genetics. c Dr. Reynold Bergen is the science director of the Beef Cattle Research Council.

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 Free Mar k et R e flect i o n s

By Steve Dittmer

Landmark Antimicrobial Study Should Redirect Resistance Hunt

don’t know about Canada’s consumer and government agency attitudes, but down here in the States, steam has been building for decades to take antibiotics away from livestock producers, mainly because of resistance problems in the human population. There wasn’t any evidence that some sort of resistance could be passed from animal to human in meat products. But better-safe-than-sorry attitudes have been gaining ground. Those attitudes have fostered the “no antibiotics” meat products, the extremes of which have practically implied there was someone on the meatprocessing line injecting antibiotics in meat cuts. Even if your bureaucrats and medical establishment authority figures are more enlightened than ours down here, you all have the problem of shipping cattle or meat down here that meets U.S. standards. So there was joy when I read a recent study. And, while we’re proud of the folks involved down here, Canadians can also be proud of your share in this triumph. This study was to use advanced genomic sequencing technology to identify genes that carried antibiotic resistance factors, track them through feedlot cattle and their environment, from feedlot entry to end products at the packing house and see if those resistance factors were passed along through meat or the environment. The study involved 16 researchers from Colorado State University; Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Lethbridge Research Centre; University of Saskatoon and the University of Colorado, Denver School of Medicine. The study pooled samples from eight different pens of cattle totalling 1,741 head, in four different feedlots in Colorado and Texas. Any antimicrobial drug administration was documented and the researchers tracked antimicrobial resistance genes at key points along the feeding and processing trail. Interestingly, at the genomic level, they identified over 300 unique antimicrobial resistance genes. But during the feeding period, the array of antimicrobial resistance

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genes narrowed, indicating there were selective pressures in the feedlot. The really good news came after processing. Did all the interventions packers now use during processing to drastically reduce pathogen incidence affect the resistance genes? Testing the beef trimmings after processing, the researchers found no antimicrobial resistance genes. In cautious research language, that “suggests” that the processing interventions eliminate the antimicrobial resistance genes that could be transmitted to humans and suggests beef products are not a likely source of antimicrobial resistance. Noelle R. Noyes, clinical sciences, Colorado State University, and the team used next-generation sequencing to describe the antibiotic resistance potential (known as the “resistome”) found in a sample, whether taken from feed yards, trucks or packing plants. The team followed the resistome population, discovering that some groups of resistance genes at the beginning of the feeding period disappeared by its end. Most of the resistance groups that remained for the entire period correlated with whatever antibiotics were used in these cattle. But when the resulting beef products were sampled, no resistance groups could be found. This Noyes study is the first to “have specifically tracked antimicrobial use in cattle while investigating antimicrobial resistance in market-ready products or consumers.” The researchers collected pooled samples of manure, soil and water in pens at multiple points before and after the feeding period, from transport trucks, packing house holding pens, and after processing, of the carcass-cut conveyor belt and from trimmings. The cattle were fed typical corn-based rations and handled normally as to animal health and doctoring but by pen riders who were unaware of the study. All cattle received macrolides (tylosin) in the feed but administration of antimicrobial drugs to individual animals was infrequent. However, at least one animal within each group received doses of tetracyclines. At the packing plant, typical antimicro-

bial interventions were used during carcass processing, including hot water pasteurization, lactic and peroxyacetic acid spray, as well as knife trimming and spot steam vacuuming. Researchers found some interesting environmental discoveries. A small number of soil and water samples, involving a feed yard pen, a plant holding pen and trucks, showed the presence of antimicrobial resistance genes that were not used on the study cattle, are not cleared for cattle but confer resistance to antimicrobials important in human health. It is unclear whether these antimicrobial resistance genes were triggered by the use of other drugs or migrated there via feedlot workers, working dogs or horses. “While our results suggest that slaughterbased intervention systems minimize the likelihood of intact antimicrobial resistance genes being passed through the food chain, they also highlight the potential risk posed by indirect environmental exposures to the feedlot resistome,” the study concluded. This study was enabled by JBS USA packing plants, Fiver Rivers Cattle Feeding, and the University of Colorado Denver High Throughput Sequencing Core, which is supported in part by the Genomics and Microarray Shared Resource of Colorado’s NIH/NCI Cancer Center Support Grant. It was funded by the U.S. National Beef Checkoff. Question is, will the first example of solid science stop speculative government policy assuming that antibiotic resistance is significantly related to livestock antibiotic use? Thanks to U.S. and Canadian researchers and the American beef checkoff we have an astounding first shot. The full text of this study was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal eLife at elifesciences.org/content/5/e13195v1, March 8, 2016, under the title, “Resistome diversity in cattle and the environment decreases during beef production.” c Steve Dittmer is the CEO of Agribusiness Freedom Foundation, a non-profit group promoting free market principles throughout the food chain. He can be reached at steve@agfreedom.ag.

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INNOVATION FILE:

What if you could give your calves long lasting, effective pain reliefâ&#x20AC;Ś that was also affordable? Veterinarians and producers asked for a pain medication that was both affordable* and long lasting. Solvet went a step further. New Meloxicam Oral Suspension delivers a minimum of 56 hours relief from pain and inflammation when castrating. Its oral suspension formulation also makes it easy to administer. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just one example of Innovation By Request. Talk to your Veterinarian about Meloxicam Oral Suspension for pain prevention.

Solvet researches, develops and manufactures products to meet the needs of veterinarians and producers from their headquarters in Calgary, Alberta. * Calculated as days of therapy per label claim at product list price. Solvet is a trademark of Alberta Veterinary Laboratories Ltd.

5370-Meloxicam-Prod-Ad-CM-FINAL.indd 1

2016-03-15 12:08 PM

 researc h

By Steve Kenyon

Spring is almost here: What to Plant?

very common question that I receive at many of my conferences or seminars is, “What should we plant?” They are of course referring to the type of forage species to seed into their overgrazed pastures? This might seem like a pretty straightforward question but I always catch producers off guard with my answer. They are looking for the latest and greatest grass and/or legume seed that will magically fix their pasture. Our industry has trained us to look for a Band-Aid fix, a quick solution that can reverse what poor management has caused. If a symptom exists in agriculture, you can bet someone has come up with a quick fix you can buy in a box, bag or bottle. What we need to look for is the solution, not a quick fix to address the symptom. In an old, worn out pasture, the symptom is poor grass production and maybe an increase in weeds. By addressing the symptom by reseeding, we are not fixing the problem. To address the problem of overgrazing, we need to first plant fence posts. To be able to manage the pasture to prevent overgrazing, we need to start a rotational grazing system that is managed according to the four grazing concepts. We need some cross fencing to manage the concepts: Graze period: The amount of time the animals are allowed on a specific paddock. Rest period: The time given to a paddock to allow the plants to recover. Stock density: The number of animal days per acre at a given time. Animal impact: The physical stimulation upon the soil by the animal’s hooves. Every environment is different but the concepts never change. We need to adjust the concepts to fit the environment. I might need to graze differently than you but we both still need to understand the concepts and manage the grazing. This is the only true fix to a worn out pasture. If you are willing to fix the problem, by all means go ahead and treat the symptom as well but only if you address the problem first. The graze period is important to prevent cattle from taking a second bite. We do not want to be grazing a plant when it has low energy reserves. It is the energy reserves that we are managing, not the top of the plant. The graze period has to be short enough so that the animals do not have time to re-bite plants that have started to put up a new leaf. If the plant is grazed when the energy reserves are low, we are overgrazing. Simple. Move the cattle before the plants start to regrow. The rest period might not be the same in Alberta as it is in Nevada but the concept of rest is the same everywhere. It is because we are managing the same issue — the energy reserves of the plant. If the rest period is too short, then the energy reserves will not have had time to replenish before the next grazing. If plants are grazed when the reserves are low, we are overgrazing. Both the graze period and the rest period have to be managed together to prevent overgrazing. Stock density is the number of animal units on a piece of land at a specific point in time. It is measured in animal days per acre. The benefits of a higher stock density are improved plant utilization and better manure distribution. If you have good plant utilization, every plant is either bitten or stepped on or damaged in some way. This allows for an even playing field for every plant when the pasture regrows. The higher the stock density, the better your manure distribution and the better your nutrient recycling will be. We want the nutrients spread

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The first thing to plant to improve your pastures is more posts.

back out on the land as evenly as possible. The higher the stock density, the better it is for the land. Animal impact helps with seedling development, nutrient recycling and breaking up capped soil. It can also improve the land, as the cattle tramp a lot of litter into the ground for better recycling of plant materials. All four of these concepts have to be working together to heal a pasture. It is the only true “fix” to a worn out old pasture. So in answer to the question, what is the first thing we need to plant, it is fence posts. We need to manage the grazing first. If you still want to plant some new species out there, by all means, do that. Every area is different and a different species may do better in your area. If I wanted to add some new legumes to fix some free nitrogen, I would select a few different types that do well in my area. I would also make sure we have some bunch grasses that do well in my area to get some growth and root depth, plus some creeping grasses to fill in the holes and hold onto more of the rainfall and reduce evaporation. I believe that a good polyculture is the best forage crop to have. I like shrubs and trees as well. The more different types of plants we have, the greater the biodiversity we will have in our soil and our wildlife. The solutions to our problems in agriculture do not come from a box, bag or bottle. They come from our management. Spring is right around the corner, so let’s get planting! Happy grazing. c Steve Kenyon runs Greener Pastures Ranching Ltd. in Busby, Alta., www.greenerpasturesranching.com, 780-307-6500, email skenyon@ greenerpasturesranching.com or find them on Facebook.

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 CCA repo rts

By Dan Darling

The way forward

am pleased to be addressing you as president of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association (CCA). I, along with vice-president David HaywoodFarmer, were elected by acclamation at the CCA 2016 annual general meeting (AGM) in March. I am truly honoured to take on the role of CCA president and will continue to represent the best interests of beef producers across Canada. I’d like to start off by introducing myself. Along with my brother Van, I operate a cow-calf operation with 250 cows and background calves on 1,500 acres in the Township of Cramahe of Northumberland County, Ont. We cash crop corn, soybeans and wheat for grain, as well as forages to feed our cow herd. We also sell freezer beef by the cut and side to local consumers. Along with my experience at the CCA, I’m a past president of Beef Farmers of Ontario (BFO) and represented Ontario beef farmers provincially on the BFO Cow-Calf and Government Relations Committees. I’m the first Ontario-based CCA president since Stan Eby (2004-06). Eby, whom I was pleased to see attend the 2016 CCA AGM in Ottawa, led the industry through the early years of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis. His leadership and particularly his point that “industry is in this together and we need to work together to find a path forward,” set the tone for many initiatives in the beef cattle sector since then, including most recently the National Beef Strategy. I would like to thank past president Dave Solverson for his leadership during the past two years. The CCA achieved many significant accomplishments under his tenure. Trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) could be very beneficial for Canadian beef producers by allowing the industry to enjoy equal or preferential access to highvalue markets. The CCA’s focus on trade will continue. My top trade priorities include achieving a bilateral trade agreement with Japan, access for beef from animals over 30 months of age with Mexico, and resolution of the long-standing technical barriers that have prevented the European Union (EU) from approving Canada’s main packing plants to export to the EU. This will enable meaningful access for Canada’s beef producers under CETA. Traceability is crucial to expanding trade, and I would like to see movement from the government towards having the industry-supported Cattle Implementation Plan accepted as the business plan that best reflects the realities of cattle production. The CCA’s focus on continuous improvement will not change. Organizationally, the CCA is well equipped to deal with the headwinds that face the industry going forwww.canadiancattlemen.ca

ward and I have confidence in the exceptional work we do on behalf of Canada’s 68,500 beef operations. Climate is a major focus of the Government of Canada. Fortunately Canadian beef cattle producers are already among the most sustainable and efficient in the world. They are utilizing tools like managed grazing and raising feed-efficient cattle to maintain that trend. Due to investment in research and innovation the beef cattle sector in Canada has one of the lowest greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints for beef in the world. A recent study showed the GHG intensity per kilogram of beef has decreased by 15 per cent from 1981-2011, and that in 2011, it required 24 per cent less land and 27 per cent fewer cattle to produce an equivalent amount of beef as in 1981. The CCA and groups like the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB) are producing leading-edge work in this area going forward. Through the CRSB, the Canadian cattle industry is recognized as a global leader in the continuous improvement and sustainability of the beef value chain through science, multi-stakeholder engagement, communication and collaboration. I look forward to engaging with Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to discuss the forward-thinking work underway in the beef cattle sector. The recently released Labour Market Information Study (LMIS) underscores the need for the Canadian Agricultural and Agri-Food Workforce Action Plan. The LMIS found that the chronic workforce shortages in Canada’s agricultural sector are expected to continue, with the number of unfilled jobs in the beef sector forecast to quadruple over the next decade. The study also found that unfilled vacancies cost the beef industry $141 million in farm gate cash receipts in 2014. A dedicated plan for Canadian agriculture is critical to ensure the industry has a sufficient workforce to take advantage of significant opportunities in the future. The CCA stands with every other segment of Canadian agriculture and primary processing in supporting the Labour Task Force’s Canadian Agricultural and AgriFood Workforce Action Plan, and encourages its swift implementation. Proactively addressing workforce issues in agriculture, in terms of insufficient labour to fill jobs at packing plants and farms and the lost opportunity those chronic job vacancies create, is a top priority for the CCA. The beef cattle industry is a major driver of the Canadian economy in both rural and urban areas. In 2014 the beef cattle industry contributed $18.7 billion to Canadian GDP. Market access expansion and potential trade deals on the horizon will mean more opportunity to export Canadian beef and beef products. Industry must make the most of these opportunities, but the current labour situation is a serious threat to our competitiveness. c

Dan Darling is president of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association

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 straigh t f ro m t h e h i p

By Brenda Schoepp

A Vulnerable World

t is spring and the time when all Canadian farmers think of green grass, planting, awakening forests, early rains and trickling rebirth. This is our land and our livelihood and no one understands it better. Our soil, so firmly attached to our working boots, is the foundation of our existence and the reason for the health and the wealth of our nation. Although fossil fuels are surely needed to farm today, it is food that got us to this point and renewable fuels such as trees that allowed civilizations to grow. This is also a vulnerable world. Not from the sense that we are destroying it, but because it is so misunderstood and underappreciated. Only a few Canadians understand what a farm is or does. Most think there really is a climate change disaster (although the average temperature is actually cooling) and farming, particularly beef production, is responsible for most GHG emissions. (All of agriculture, forestry and waste is nine per cent of GHG). Farming is not responsible for the end of the earth as some would have us believe. Rather, we are the regenerators of life. Let us be clear in our arguments. No one exists without healthy soil and healthy soil is dependent on carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is a renewable source of carbon and with sunlight is synthesized as sugar in plants. This feeds the plants and wards off pests and as the plant matures, the sugars go back down into the soil, feeding the microbes and the process is repeated in a biological process. Micro-organisms feed on the organic matter producing nutrients and those nutrients are taken up by the plant. When there is an imbalance, such as a shortage of CO2, the soil is bound and can’t take on extra responsibility. For example, if CO2 is not in abundance then nitrogen cannot be metabolized. For the sake of agriculture I seriously question the science or sense behind a carbon tax. CO2 has never been scientifically linked to long-term global warming or extreme weather. The higher the concentration of CO2 the greater the production of plant life on earth — that is why many food producers, especially green houses, capture it and pump it directly back into the soil for plant growth. Is the desertification of areas due in part to a reduction in CO2 rather than an increase in it? When it comes to carbon tax, tax payers have become victims of a money grab with propaganda being masked as science, with a movement based on fictional fear and the complete lack of understanding of the importance of CO2 to life. In Alberta, for example, individual households will be taxed from $300 and up depending on energy usage for what is really a necessity — it is cold in winter. All buildings and houses are estimated to contribute eight per cent to GHG, so the logic that agriculture, forestry and families should foot the bill for the other

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84 per cent is absurd. Real carcinogens released into the air will not be taxed and foreign-owned multinationals will be heavily subsidized to adjust. Governments fail to understand basic science. Carbon tax of the masses is not an environmental solution. Forests or planted tree stands, grasslands and natural areas and forages are profound sequesters of carbon and they can handle massive change. They are long-term respirators that continuously recycle the CO2 into nutrients for the soil. The importance of these areas cannot be underestimated and ignoring their function or failing to value them is like choosing to live with one lung. Farmers then are the stewards of our greatest resource. So why is research within ag being compromised? A case in point is the reduction of one half of the biotechnology research team at BASF. Chopping 350 out of a 700-person research team is pretty dramatic, especially when you are in the seed bed with Monsanto that has a strong desire to capture the pesticide arm of BASF. Why stop plant research now when we have never been under more pressure to secure the public trust in terms of handling a critical natural resource? If Monsanto wants farmers to have a one-stop shop to buy all their crop inputs and that stop is at Monsanto, we have a problem and that problem is about the perception of all of agriculture. Massive intensive farms are critical in terms of meeting current and global food needs. Yes, they use more fossil fuel but they still sequester carbon and their value is in producing enough food per hectare/acre/metre that we can start to set aside an increasing amount of natural spaces. Great producers, they remain vulnerable to a loss of freedom of choice and increasing input costs along with poor public perception. It is this lack of appreciation that overlaps all farms, including those on rangelands and with extensive forage production. Forage production can offset some negativity as we relate the importance of farming to press, policy-makers and our consuming public. Forage requires fewer inputs, less fossil fuel and is regenerative in nature. There is an interrelationship as legumes will develop a mycorrhizal association with grasses, fixing nitrogen in a swap for phosphate. There is also a relationship with wildlife and cattle that contributes to the entire food and nutrient cycle. Forage is the base for feed, bedding, fertilizer and is a carbon sink that builds the soil — the beginning and the end of the cycle. The last thing we would call ourselves in this business is vulnerable — but we truly are until we can sell our value to all stakeholders from both an environmental and ecological standpoint. c Contact Brenda through her website: www.brendaschoepp. com. All rights reserved Brenda Schoepp 2016

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BUILDING TRUST IN CANADIAN BEEF

Engagement announcement: Data and sustainability Flirting for years, now it’s getting serious

Data has always had a seductive aura for business. Managers dream of the ability to make pinpoint, irrefutable decisions based on hard numbers. The reality for many businesses and indus try? Like a hobbyist who is better at collecting tools than actually using them, many businesses in agriculture and food have been better at col lecting data than they have at actually using it. Sometimes better at hoarding than sharing it. That’s changing rapidly and it has made big data headlines a regular in media today. One of the drivers of this interest is the growing expectations around sustainability and food. Here are some things to watch for as data helps drive beef industry social licence. Growing sophistication. The feedlot indus try and crop sector are already leaders in using data for business decision-making. As data usefulness and analysis across all businesses grow, expect new, markedly more sophis ticated options to emerge. And expect new options for data to lead industry initiatives, using actual data to verify sustainability. BIXS benefits. BIXS, the homegrown beef industry program, is one of the best industrywide examples of the potential in this new data arena. Designed to play data-sharing matchmaker between producers and the rest of the value chain, expect new progress from a renewed team. The recent announcements of carcass data sharing with Cargill is one example. Science weighs in. A powerful example of science playing a bigger role in data collection and analysis is the study on the environmen

Aggregate data from cow-calf and feedlot sectors can be leveraged to further public understanding.

tal hoofprint of the Canadian cattle industry. That study showed improvements in pro ductivity and efficiency have also produced environmental benefits. Forages, with their extensive root system, promote healthy soil and soil microbes. That improves soil struc ture, reduces soil losses due to wind and water erosion, and builds carbon sequestration. Better feed conversion efficiencies are accompanied by reductions in methane and manure production. All good messages in today’s world and another example of a data driver. And more research is coming as part of Canada’s beef cattle sustainability assessment. Producer interaction. Because they are the keeper of the records, producers will be a focus of market interaction and a driver of developments in data. Larger producers will have options to solidify their positioning and smaller producers will get fresh oppor tunities for improvement.

For the food chain, the real value will be the ability to connect producers with their data, helping tell their story. All players in the value chain will be depending on that, which will mean more people knocking on the producers’ door. That could mean more power for beef farmers and ranchers. Benefits for all producers

“As data sharing opens up, and data is shared in an aggregated way, that should offer new improvements for beef pro ducers of all sizes,” says Terry Grajczyk, national manager of The Verified Beef Production Plus (VBP+) program. “The VBP+ program and collaborative discussions of the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef can help anchor this new world. “That’s a potential payoff for the investment producers have already made in VBP+.”

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THE REAL STORY OF AG

Give your ag pride a

Social media provides a powerful and si

Those of us who work in agriculture – who live and love it every day – have the responsibility to make sure our industry is better understood. Because if we don’t, someone else will. And, we might not like what they have to say. Social media offers many opportunities to tell ag’s story. Here are some ways you can start leveraging social media today.

Use hashtags Want to share your perspective on #GMO? Or curious about what people are saying about how we care for farm animals? Follow or search relevant hashtags. Look for conversations that you can contribute to. Share your perspective, photos and experiences. Speak from the heart and remember that it isn’t about picking a fight – it’s about sharing a conversation.

Share and like Find and follow people from different sectors or areas of the country who you think are helping tell the real, positive story of our industry. You can help spread their great work by hitting the share button or re-tweeting their content.

Find common ground Think about what someone outside of ag might want to know – walk a mile in their shoes. Speak to issues that matter to them using terms and information that are accessible and responsible.

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A picture (or video) is worth a thousand words Share images or videos of your farm or your role in agriculture online to help others see “behind the barn doors.”

THE REAL STORY OF AG

e a social life

d simple channel to tell agricultureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s story

Keep calm, and agvocate on! Online and off, it can be frustrating to hear misperceptions about the industry we love or to deal with people who misrepresent who we are and what we do. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important for us to stay calm, keep our cool and focus on answering questions, sharing our stories and experiences, as well as the facts and resources that can paint a more accurate picture of our industry.

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We all live off the land. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work together to find common ground.

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Build bridges, don’t go under them Dealing with Internet trolls takes patience and a thick skin Be it on a social media feed or the comment section of your favourite blog or site, the Internet has become the great equalizer, where anyone can share their point of view. And while most people are looking to engage in respectful conversation, even if they have differing points of view, there are people known as “trolls” who are only looking to disrupt and criticize. Bolstered by the relative anonymity of hiding behind a keyboard, these trolls’ main objective is to disrupt conversation with often hurtful and off-topic content. They can be a frustrating part of any online conversation, but it’s a little easier when you have a strategy to deal with them. Don’t take it personally

Here are some things to consider:

Trolls want a negative reaction and to do it, they will resort to some very hurtful tactics. Take it for what it is and don’t let it get to you.

Don’t engage Trolls are looking for attention. They crave it. Don’t give it to them.

Stick to the facts It’s not always clear that someone is a troll at first. If you suspect someone you’re engaging with is a troll, keep your comments to a minimum and stick to stating your case. Usually trolls will reveal themselves in their response, then you can simply move on.

Look to the moderator When all else fails, most sites will have some sort of channel to report offensive comments or users. Unfortunately trolls are a reality of having an open dialogue. But if you remain positive and patient, you can keep the trolls under the bridge where they belong.

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THE REAL STORY OF AG

Learn more AgMoreThanEver.ca is filled with resources to help you be an agvocate online or off. Here are just a few: Webinar: How to use social media to tell ag’s story Social media guru Megan Madden will tell you everything you need to know to join the ag and food conversation online. She’ll help you decide which tools are best for you – and show you how you can get in on the ag and food conversations happening online today.

Webinar: How to get in on the tough ag and food conversations Andrew Campbell talks about the importance of using social media to foster a positive perception of the industry – and shows some real-life success stories. He also covers how to deal with some of the not-so-positive dialogue out there. It’s not always easy, but it’s important – and everyone can do it.

Video: The power of social media in Canadian agriculture Lyndon Carlson, a driving force behind Ag More Than Ever, recently sat down to chat about the power of social media in an agricultural context with our partners at the Canadian Association of Agri-Retailers (CAAR). In this podcast, Lyndon outlines how we as an industry can leverage the power of social media to tell our story.

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THE REAL STORY OF AG

AGvocates unite! Looking to channel your passion for ag? Adding your name to our agvocate list is a great way to get started. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll join a community of like-minded people and receive an email from us every month with agvocate tips to help you speak up for the industry. Visit AgMoreThanEver.ca/agvocates to join.

2016-01-29 8:49 AM

 vet aDvi c e

grazing management: the essence of ranching

attle are unique: they came to us as creatures capable of grazing; as ruminants with the ability to convert roughage to energy; and, ultimately, energy to protein. Grazing is how ranches create value. Grazing management is maintaining the balance between soil health, plant growth, sunlight, and moisture on rangeland. The amount of effective moisture — moisture available to plants — is highly manageable. This month’s article is a compilation of gems collected from a series of articles about grazing and pasture management; articles written and published by academics, range consultants and those who harvest grass for a living. Manage for what you want, not what you don’t want. Early season grasses like crested wheat and Kentucky blue become less desirable for cattle once they mature. Subjecting these grasses to early grazing pressure, rather than trying to eliminate them, keeps the species in check so they don’t crowd more palatable grasses that follow. Plant diversity is beneficial. Variety increases the amount of forage cattle graze while keeping the natural ecosystem in check. In the view of some ranchers: “Even if it’s considered a weed, as long as the cows eat it and it’s not toxic, it can be beneficial.” Availability and location of water is a huge factor in how land gets split. Grass farmer first, beef producer second. Splitting pastures and managing how they are grazed can nearly double grazing capacity. Delaying turnout on grass until pastures have roughly six to eight inches of growth and encouraging cattle to graze fresh growth rather than trampling down taller, older forage helps extend the grazing season. If in doubt: take half, leave half. Rotate, let it grow, rotate, let it grow… There is no magic answer to rotational grazing. Rotational grazing is about better forage utilization so spring pastures are not undergrazed and summer pastures overgrazed. The process of sectioning larger pieces of land into smaller paddocks and adopting rotational grazing eases pressure to promote new forage growth. Healthier stands result. Delay spring grazing. Early spring grazing affects season-long forage yields

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unless managed carefully. Grazing native range before the third-leaf stage can reduce carrying capacity up to 50 per cent. Early grazing on improved pastures can reduce carrying capacity by 10 to 30 per cent. Typically, turnout on native range should be delayed until the heights of key forage species are at least four to six inches (end of May, first part of June). While native, warm-season tall grasses can benefit from early season grazing, waiting for warmseason tall-grass species to reach the thirdleaf stage, or about 10 inches in plant height, is recommended. Time and timing. Time and timing of grazing reduces overgrazing; neglecting either affects plant vigour, recruitment of new plants, and ecosystem improvement. Basic ecosystem processes require water, nutrients, sunlight, and a system of biological succession. Improving any one of these elements starts a chain of events that involves them all. Good grazing is a catalyst for efficiency. Good grazing reduces feed costs, increases grass and forage production, reduces labour and equipment costs, and increases land productivity. Overall, it enables more cows to be kept without adding land. Carrying capacity can be created “cheaper” by using fences and water than by buying land. Though interactions of production, environment and economics are complex, incorporating practices that include incorporation of ecosystem health in day-to-day management of the ranch work helps everyone. Bottom line: those in the beef industry need to ensure all efforts are positive. Livestock producers often focus on “productivity per cow” and forget that “revenue per acre” is paramount. The intensive selection for growth hasn’t done much to improve ranch profitability over the last 50 years. In fact, it could be argued that in constant dollars or buying power, profit per acre has decreased. Remember: fertilizer pays. Research has shown one pound of additional calf or yearling gain for every pound of nitrogen fertilizer applied to improved pastures. Efficiently harvesting extra growth through grazing management is fundamental. Understanding concepts around overgrazing . While animal numbers can accelerate overgrazing, it’s not always numbers

that count. Overgrazing is best defined as the failure to move or rotate animals in harmony with forage growth. Proper grazing management is a matter of moving animals before they have the opportunity to re-graze the lush growth after plants have been browsed. Unfortunately, grazing animals don’t utilize grass and forages equally. By instinct, they eat palatable grasses to the ground, while unpalatable plants are left untouched. In time, the cycle has a deleterious effect on plant diversity, soil quality and moisture utilization. Evaluate stands of alfalfa and ways of utilizing it in grazing programs. Legumes can play a huge role in maintenance of dairy and beef herds. Alfalfa, the most productive and versatile forage legume grown in Canada, has the highest yield potential and feeding value of all perennial forage legumes. Alfalfa’s value increases as we learn to incorporate it into season-long grazing strategies. Managing the potential risk bloat alfalfa presents is a critical reason it hasn’t been more widely incorporated into spring and summer grazing programs. Approval of products like Alfasure in 2011 and its availability through veterinary clinics without prescription presents a significant opportunity for cattle producers to recapture the benefits of grazing alfalfa. Alfasure changed paradigms around bloat prevention on legume pasture. Cattle grazing alfalfa can achieve pasture weight gains exceeding 1,000 pounds (453 kg) per acre (1,120 kg per hectare). Under irrigation, production yields of 1,370 pounds of beef per acre (1,555 kg per hectare) have been reported. Typically, yearlings grazing quality grass gain approximately 1.5 pounds per head per day, while cattle grazing alfalfa (with Alfasure) gain 2.5 pounds per head per day — production levels comparable to those achieved in feedlots. Grazing pure alfalfa stands has the potential to more than double net farm income generated from mixed grass-legume pasture. c Dr. Ron Clarke prepares this column on behalf of the Western Canadian Association of Bovine Practitioners. Suggestions for future articles can be sent to Canadian Cattlemen (gren@fbcpublishing.com) or WCABP (info@wcabp.com).

www.canadiancattlemen.ca

 prime cuts

By Steve Kay

Grading above the norm

s befitting the title of this column, it’s appropriate to note that fed cattle in the U.S. graded a record percentage of USDA Prime and Choice for three consecutive weeks in February. This was despite miserable feedlot conditions that took a lot of weight off finished cattle. A combination of better genetics, improved feeding techniques and a longer time on feed are the main reasons why cattle are grading at such high levels. The number of cattle grading Prime set a new U.S. record in seven out of nine weeks last fall. The record stands at 6.69 per cent set the week ending November 20. Choice grading this February exceeded its previous record of 70.65 per cent set in late February last year. The record is now 71.96 per cent. This meant a record 77.75 per cent of cattle graded either Prime or Choice the week ending February 19, while a record-low number (16.83 per cent) graded Select. This is far above the same week five years ago. That week saw 69.87 per cent of cattle grade Prime or Choice and 24.84 per cent grade Select. Such improvement would not have occurred without a higher uptake of Prime and Choice beef. Wholesale club Costco led the way some years ago by offering Prime beef at affordable prices. Its members could buy a high-quality steak for less than $15 per pound, onethird the price they would pay at a top steakhouse. At the same time, supermarket chains moved to more Choice beef programs, in part to differentiate their beef from Walmart’s. The latter, a major user of Select beef, was then forced to introduce its own Choice selection. The result is that Choice beef at the wholesale level is currently selling at quite a premium to Select beef, despite the record small number of cattle grading Select. The price spread between the Choice and Select cut-outs on March 11 was US$8.93 per cwt, versus US$2.59 the same day last year.

The strong Choice cut-out in March reflected another aspect of the U.S. beef market that has retailers concerned. Ground beef sales have been disappointing for some time and were weak in January despite aggressive retail features. Ground beef ’s woes likely began after its average monthly price rose above US$4 per pound for the first time in September 2014. It is still above that level. Ground beef was the one beef retail item that competed price-wise with pork and chicken. It doesn’t anymore. During the recession many Americans were forced to trade down from the most expensive items to ground beef to get their beef “fix.” Now ground beef “fatigue” might have set in. In addition, the retail price of steaks has moderated. Ground beef sales were so disappointing in January that after that retailers featured steaks more than normal despite February and March being the two weakest demand months of the year. Consumers responded because prices are lower than a year ago, and they are treating themselves more to a steak at home. End meat prices meanwhile are weak in part because of the weak ground beef market. A stronger market would see more chucks and rounds going through the grinder. USDA’s comprehensive boxed beef report for the week ending March 4 showed that the price of ribs and loins, which represent 25 per cent of the carcass, were five per cent below a year ago. In contrast, chuck and round prices were 24 per cent and 22 per cent below 2015’s, respectively. However, the start of the grilling season is just around the corner. Packers and retailers both hope Americans will grill even more steaks but also a lot of hamburgers, thus reviving the ground beef market. c A North American view of the meat industry. Steve Kay is publisher and editor of Cattle Buyers Weekly.

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C a t t l e m e n · A p r i l 2 0 1 6 45

 labour

By Debbie Furber

URGENT: More temporary foreign workers needed

eef producers and packers may not always see eye to eye, but on two things they definitely agree — there’s a critical and chronic labour shortage at farms, ranches, feedlots and packing plants across the country and this issue needs a quick fix. Not a BandAid-style quick fix, but a well-thoughtout strategy put into action — yesterday. The Canadian agriculture and agri-food sector has been proposing such a strategy since last spring. It’s called the Canadian agricultural and agri-food workforce action plan and it was developed over three years by a labour task force representing the food business from farm to retail. One recommendation calls for a dedicated program that industry can depend on to provide consistent access to international agriculture workers. So when Employment, Workforce Development and Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk told the Globe and Mail on February 17 that she would ask a parliamentary committee for proposals to fix the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program, the Canadian Meat Council (CMC) was quick to press the point that time is of the essence. Under current legislation the cap on the maximum percentage of

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temporary foreign workers drops to 10 per cent as of July 1. This is the final step in the Conservative government’s three-step reduction of the TFW. In 2014 the maximum percentage of temporary foreign workers was frozen at 30 per cent for businesses with 10 or more employees, then dropped to 20 per cent on July 1, 2015, and finally 10 per cent this July, although the government of the day did say it could be lowered another notch. In this way the government expected to reduce the total number of temporary foreign workers by 50 per cent over the three years. In retrospect, that might seem a wise policy move given all of the Canadians looking for work these days, but it has been devastating to Canada’s meat packers and processors who already employ 65,000 people and are frantically looking to fill upwards of 1,000 positions at any given time. The reality is western Canadian packers and processors have seen only a small increase in the number of applications for jobs since the TFW was overhauled. “The number of former oil-patch workers who are willing to become butchers is very limited and those who are willing usually intend to return to the oil sector at the first opportunity,” says Ron Davidson,

CMC director of international trade, government and media relations. “The meat processing sector is the largest component of the Canadian food processing sector and recruits constantly, intensively and nationally across this country, including among the unemployed, First Nations, new immigrants, refugees and youth. The first preference is to recruit workers from within Canada.” In order to be approved to recruit foreign-origin workers, a packer or processor must provide the government with a detailed labour market impact assessment (LMIA) as evidence that every effort has been made to recruit Canadians and that they are either not available or unwilling to move to semi-urban or rural communities to work in the meat industry. When the new program came into effect on June 20, 2014, the LMIA fee increased from $275 to $1,000 for every temporary foreign worker position an employer requests. If a Service Canada officer rejects a LMIA for any reason whatsoever, the entire application fee is forfeited without opportunity for appeal, regardless of whether the application was for one worker ($1,000) or 50 workers ($50,000). Continued on page 48

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Continued from page 46

Review to-dos

At the time of writing in mid-March, the government had formally announced a review of the TFW program. Davidson says it will be conducted by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. The CMC will make the case for relaxing the percentage limitations on the number of temporary foreign workers when it can be clearly demonstrated that Canadians aren’t willing to fill these jobs. There was no limit on the number of temporary foreign workers before 2014. “Typically, the number of temporary foreign workers in a meat plant would rise during an expansion of capacity and then trend downward from the peak as the majority of temporary foreign workers would be accepted as permanent residents,” Davidson explains. The CMC will ask the committee to restore a two-year term for work permits under the TFW plus an option for a further

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two years. The overhaul reduced the term to one year plus a year. The four years under the original program gave workers time to gain skills, learn English and become integrated into the community before they apply for permanent resident status. Two years makes it much more difficult for those who wish to become Canadians. The government instituted an electronic Express Entry management system in January 2015 to expedite applications for permanent residency for skilled workers but unfortunately industrial butchers aren’t eligible for this shotcut. Yet the meat trade is experiencing a chronic shortage of butchers and meat cutters. No surprise then that the industry’s workforce action plan calls for all agriculture and agri-food workers to become eligible for the Express Entry program. Ripple effect

The meat processing sector generates $5.7 billion a year in export sales and $23.6 billion in total. Whether it’s 100 empty work spaces at a large facility or five at a small one, the negative effects ripple through the related sectors,

hitting rural communities the hardest. For every job not filled on the production line, four others are lost in the wider community. Even government cannot escape as the flow of taxable income shrinks with labour shortages. Upstream, the livestock sector becomes less competitive. Canada is missing opportunities around the globe as it is, Davidson says, and more will fall out of reach if jobs aren’t filled as new trade agreements come into force. That’s why the National Cattle Feeders’ Association has been onside with packers on this issue since the overhaul. “For cattle feeders, a clear priority is to ensure that labour shortages in all aspects of beef production are addressed, including the labour needs of Canadian processors,” says NCFA policy and research manager Casey Vander Ploeg. Cattle feeders have seen only a slight increase in applications for employment since the oil market meltdown, even though on-farm primary agriculture, including the seasonal agricultural worker program, is exempt from the 10-per-cent cap, and other restrictions placed on the TFW program.

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labour

Low-wage tag misleading

A point often misunderstood by the general public is that a temporary foreign worker employed in a low-wage position doesn’t automatically receive a low wage. Low-wage is a program classification. It means any wage, including a starting wage, lower than the provincial average, and thus differs from province to province. Davidson says the meat industry not only recruits full-time workers, but workers receive substantive pay and benefits packages. Starting wages for butchers exceed the minimums. Scrolling through the five full pages of job listings for butchers posted on the ESDC Job Bank alone on March 7, he finds offers from JBS in Alberta with starting hourly wages ranging from $16 to $21.85, Britco Pork in British Columbia at $13 to $16, and HyLife Foods in Manitoba at $13.55 to $19.90. These three companies were advertising more than 200 positions and there were 121 companies on the list that day, leaving no doubt that there is a persistent shortage of butchers in Canada. “In addition to wages, benefits include medical, dental and vision insurance and retirement. Most meat industry workers are members of strong unions and foreignorigin workers are no exception. They become union members immediately and receive the same pay and benefits as workers recruited in Canada,” Davidson explains. Ongoing classroom and on-the-job training is provided for all workers and it can take up to a year for a meat cutter to become a highly skilled butcher. Some workers, whether from Canada or elsewhere, never reach the level of knowledge, skill and dexterity required to prepare meat cuts to Canadian and export retail specs, he adds. Companies incur additional expenses for foreign-origin workers, due to the time taken up in paperwork, LMIA application fees, support for new arrivals, language training, return airfare and ensuring that adequate accommodation is available. For the same reasons, Vander Ploeg says cattle feeders always look first for Canadians to fill openings in their operations. Only as a last resort would they turn to programs like the TFW. They do, though, because feedlots, like the packers, find too few Canadians willing to do farm work, even with an entrylevel wage of $18 to $20 per hour. “At the end of the day it would be cheaper for cattle feeders to find and pay Canadian workers. It is more expensive to find and www.canadiancattlemen.ca

hire temporary foreign workers. Applying for temporary workers costs employers thousands of dollars and there is a lot of paperwork to complete. It also takes a lot of time. Employers would not be going through the significant upfront expense and the time-consuming process if they could at all avoid it,” says Vander Ploeg. In summary, the livestock sector and the meat sector combined have thousands of unfilled jobs available across Canada at this

very moment. The negative consequences go beyond rural businesses and communities to urban areas because thousands of spinoff jobs are not created. Everyone loses. The CMC and NCFA, along with more than 60 other CAHRC partners, believe that the Canadian agriculture and agri-food sector workforce action plan offers a comprehensive roadmap for change that will benefit rural and urban Canadians across the country now and in the future. c

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