Dr. Bart Lardner is well known in the beef industry across the western Prairies for his work on beef cattle management and forage production. At the end of January, he provided information to the industry on his research once again as he presented at the Saskatchewan Beef Industry Conference.
He says lately a lot of his research has focused on things that are important to the beef industry right now, like the environment.
“There’s a lot of really good news stories in the industry that producers are doing that we need to talk about going forward,” Lardner says.
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One of Lardner’s recent projects consisted of small plot work, looking at how several different treatments performed under grazing conditions.
The treatments consisted of different varieties of alfalfas, sainfoin, birdsfoot trefoil, cicer milkvetch, meadow bromegrass and orchardgrass. There were three 13-acre blocks divided into strips where the treatments were planted. The study was a five-year study from 2019 to 2023 and was done at Clavet, Sask. However, Lardner says they couldn’t get the cicer milkvetch or the birdsfoot trefoil to establish.
Lardner says they “put the critters out there” to see which treatments they preferred “to spend more time on over that grazing period, and then see if we can correlate that preference ranking with actual forage yield and the nutritive value of these treatment species.”
He says they were looking at biomass quality, nutrient value, energy, protein, fibre and how well the different species do under a mob grazing situation. They researched etiolated growth, or how well the plants grew in the absence of light, to get an indication of root reserves. Lardner says they also looked at what species the cattle preferred. This was done using drone footage and visual observation.
For results for etiolated growth, Lardner says 38 per cent of the growth occurred in the first 14 days and 99 per cent within 56 days. He says Cronus alfalfa had the greatest growth of legumes and Armada meadow bromegrass had the greatest growth overall.
For steer preference, Foothills alfalfa seemed to be the most popular, with Killarney OG alfalfa being the least popular. Varieties such as Cronus alfalfa and other mixed treatments all ranked relatively closely. However, Lardner says dry conditions limited the yield and quality of these 14 treatments, and preference was related to yield and quality.
“The alfalfa outperformed others,” Lardner says. “Sainfoin was high quality and least preferred and less economical versus the other treatments.”
When it comes to soil, Lardner says the different rooting structures in the different treatments and cover crops are a useful thing, especially in times of drought.
“Obviously, soil moisture was utilized more consistently in the perennials versus the annuals, but that shallow moisture did benefit those annual treatments that we had in this study,” Lardner says.
The environment is a frequent topic of public conversation right now, and often a contentious one for producers. But Lardner says the industry is “very important to the environment.
“There’s a lot of forage acres in this province, in Canada as a whole. And you producers are managing those resources and it’s your intent to leave them in better condition than when you inherited them.”
