Winter feeding cattle on pasture, either through whole bale or processed bale grazing, can save prairie cattle producers thousands of dollars per year in feeding costs and dramatically improve soil fertility, says the lead scientists with a Saskatchewan-based beef research centre.

The costs will obviously vary with each operation, but the savings are in the order of 40 to 50 cents per head per day, says Dr. Bart Lardner, senior research scientist with the Western Beef Development Centre (WBDC) in Humboldt, Sask. For a 200 head cow/calf operation over a typical 120 winter feeding period, for example, that amounts to a cost savings of about $12,000 per year.

Along with reducing costs the practice of feeding on pasture puts roughly twice the nutrients back into the soil, compared to applying a similar amount of manure with a mechanical spreader.

“It’s good for the animals, good for the land, good for the pocketbook and good for the environment,” says Lardner of pasture feeding after evaluating winter feeding systems in a two-year research project.

The research project compared pasture-based feeding systems to more conventional dry-lot feeding systems. In a dry-lot system, cattle are confined to a relatively small area and feed, such as hay and silage, is hauled to the herd daily. In pasture-based systems cattle winter over open hay or pastureland. They feed on large round bales that were spotted across the field during the summer, or on hay that is chopped or processed and spread on the field in windrows. Pasture feeding systems often provide enough feed to support the herd for 2 to 3 days at a time.

The feeding research, which continues this year is supported in part by the Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Program for Canadian Agriculture (GHGMP). The national program is designed to demonstrate and increase awareness of livestock production practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The beef sector of the program is administered by the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association (CCA). For the full feature article on this project visit the CCA website at www.cattle.ca, go to the Environment and Stewardship button and follow the links.

Of the three feeding systems evaluated in this project, the conventional dry-lot feeding system is the most straight forward. Hay was hauled to cattle in a yard and put into feed bunks on a daily basis. In the round-bale pasture system, whole round bales were spotted over a field in the fall, and with the use of portable electric fencing, cattle were given access to only those round bales the herd would likely consume over a two to three-day period.

Under the bale processing system, large round bales were shredded using a bale processor and spread in a windrow on pasture. Enough hay was shredded to support the herd for 2 to 3 days. The project tracked the impact of about 96 head of cattle over a 120-day feeding period. While none of these systems may be as economical as swath grazing or saving standing forage for winter grazing, there were some obvious benefits and differences, says Lardner.

Aside from feed cost savings, a major benefit, he estimates, involves manure and nutrient management. “With cattle in a dry lot for winter feeding, you have all the manure in a dry pack or straw pack and it needs to be spread sometime the following year,” says Lardner. “Whereas with the round bale or bale processing systems the manure is automatically deposited on the land.”

The project found that soil nitrogen was 2.5 to three times higher in the soil on fields where cattle bale grazed or processed-bale grazed than on land where there were no winter feeding cattle.

“In comparing soil nutrient levels, we found there was 1.8 to two times more nitrogen in the soil on the pasture grazing sites than on those fields where manure was applied mechanically,” says Lardner. The difference was, in the dry-lot system, where manure sat in dry packs for the spring and summer, nitrogen was lost through volatilization, runoff and leaching.

Researchers also observed on the pasture feeding sites, forage production the following year was 1.5 to two times greater than on sites where manure was mechanically applied.

The bottom line is that feeding cattle on pasture can reduce winter feeding costs and at the same time improve the productivity of the soil where cattle are fed. “From an environmental standpoint, pasture feeding can reduce the amount of hours on a tractor which reduces the amount of fossil fuel being burned,” says Lardner. “But perhaps more importantly, pasture feeding makes greater use of nutrients compared to the dry-lot situation where there’s a great risk of nitrogen being lost to the atmosphere or leached away into ground water.”

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For more information contact:

Dr. Bart Lardner
Western Beef Development Centre
Phone: (306) 682-3139

Pat Walker, Beef Project Co-ordinator
Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Program for Canadian Agriculture
Calgary, Alta.
Phone: (403) 601-8991