The horse evolved primarily as a grazing and browsing, hindgut fermenting herbivore, with a range of hydrolyzable and fermentable forage carbohydrates as its main source of energy. Pastures provide the primary habitat and nutrition for most horses, and the remaining stall-confined horses have approximately one-half of their nutrition supplied by conserved pasture, i.e., hay. Pasture composition...

In the last three decades or so there has been a significant increase in fodder trading, both in terms of the quantity of fodder traded and in terms of its economic value to the industry. Often, this fodder type may be supplied free of charge to graziers in distress due to circumstances that follow natural disasters such as bushfires, drought, and flood. However, because of the obvious urgency ...

The objective of the study was to determine if exposure of young lambs to leafy spurge (Euphorbia e&u L.) would increase the consumption of this plant. Orphan lambs were exposed to leafy spurge from birth to 11 weeks of age as a water soluble extract mixed with milk replacer and as freshly harvested plants. Ewereared lambs were exposed to leafy spurge by grazing them on a leafy spurge-infested ...

These results support the earlier findings by Dr. Bill Kunkle and his research involving limitcreep supplements based on cottonseed meal and salt mixtures. Calf performance responses, as measured by the added gain realized by creep supplementation, are highly variable and cannot always be described by amounts of creep feed consumed. This variability has large and direct impacts on the cost effe...

Fescue foot, summer syndrome, reproductive problems, and ryegrass staggers are all diseases of livestock related to endophyte toxins in pasture grasses. Range finding experiments and case studies of fescue foot relative to ergovaline toxin found in endophyte infected tall fescue and lolitrem B present in endophyte infected perennial ryegrass were conducted. Within 42 d of initiating a feeding t...

Three experiments were conducted to determine the efficacy of limit-feeding corn-based diets as an alternative to hay for beef cows in gestation and early lactation. Seventy or 71 mature, pregnant Simmental crossbred cows (average weight = 589 +/- 10 kg) were used in each trial. Each of 29 or 30 cows was fed approximately 5 kg of whole shelled corn, 1.2 kg of a pelletted supplement, and 1 kg of...

Pasture-based automatic milking systems (AMS) require cow traffic to enable cows to be milked. The interval between milkings can be manipulated by strategically allocating pasture. The current experiment investigated the effect of replacing an allocation of grazed pasture with grazed soybean (Glycine max) with the hypothesis that incorporating soybean would increase voluntary cow traffic and mi...

This study was conducted to investigate the infl uence of pasture intake on meat quality, lipid oxidation, and fatty acid composition of geese. One hundred twenty Dongbei White male geese (a local breed; BW = 878 ± 13 g; 28 d old) were randomly and equally divided into 2 treatments with 6 pens of 10 geese per treatment. The 2 treatments consisted of birds fed ad libitum a corn-based feed. One-h...

The aim of this modelling study was to investigate the effect of large herd size (and land areas) on walking distances and milking interval (MI), and their impact on milk yield and economic penalties when 50% of the total diets were provided from home grown feed either as pasture or grazeable complementary forage rotation (CFR) in an automatic milking system (AMS). Twelve scenarios consisting o...