Chip Poland

I'm Chip Poland, Livestock Specialist at the Dickinson Research and Extension Center. One of the station projects that we work on here, is how can we utilize grazing pastures (particularly marginal crop ground and native range) to shorten the amount of time that we keep beef cattle in confinement during the year. We are operating under the presumption that other states have shown it is economically better to keep cattle out as forage harvesters compared to harvesting that forage somewhere else and bring it to those cows and feeding them in confinement. We have two projects right now that are on going. One of them is looking at grazing unharvested corn, as an alternative to feeding cows in dry lot. The other is looking at cattle on native range and supplemental requirements for cattle on winter range. In both cases, we are attempting to minimize the number of days that cattle are managed in confinement, and reduce some of the negative aspects associated with confinement feeding and manure handling by allowing cattle to be the harvesters of forage as much as possible. Hopefully in the future we devise management systems that will allow producers some options or alternatives to fit some of these programs into their operation. Ideally, we would get to the point that we minimize that amount of time that we have to bring cattle (particularly cow/calf pairs or dry cows) into confinement, so that we minimize manure build up and associated water quality problems.