Dr. Hersom has experienced the difference between Northern and Southern cattle first hand. He grew up in Iowa and attended Iowa State University before earning his doctorate at Oklahoma State. He got to know Midwestern cattle and their nutritional requirements eye-to-eye, you might say.

His career path headed in a Southeasterly direction, though, taking him to the University of Florida where he’s an assistant professor and Extension Beef Cattle Specialist doing research in the nutritional requirements of Southern cattle. And there is a difference, he noted, especially when it comes to forage.

 “Southern grasses are much different than the legumes and grasses that grow on the Great Plains,” he said. “We’ve got tropical and subtropical grasses here that stop growing when the temperature drops below 60 degrees. Our warm season forages don’t tolerate cold weather and forage quality drops off quickly. We have lower quality grasses with less degradable protein. We need to understand the strategies required to supply proper nutrition, especially for rumen health.”

Talking about supplemental protein resources, he said, “We’re starting to look at DDG’s for the first time. We haven’t done much research because distillers grains weren’t generally available in Florida but we have a new ethanol plant in south Georgia, now, so we need to do some research on how DDG’s effect our feeding strategies.

Dr. Hersom pointed out an advantage enjoyed by Southern cattle feeders; access to other protein resources that give them more flexibility in building an adequate ration. “We can use whole cottonseed and wet brewer’s grains which makes our rations unique,” he said.

Hersom is finishing a study on including soy bean meal as part of the cattle ration. “With soy bean meal, we had good weight gains with heifers. We followed it up with two years of feeding without a soy additive and couldn’t get the gains we wanted. Right now, we’re trying to identify the optimum level. We’re trying to find out how much we need to include with DDG’s but we’re just 56 days into those trials.”

 “The feeding phase should be concluded in late spring next year. We’ll have the data ready mid-summer and take it through peer review. We plan to make our findings available in 2011.”

Hersom is concerned about ‘nutrient synchronization’ which he defines as the balance of nutrients within the rumen to optimize feed utilization and improve animal performance.

Simply put, synchronized cattle nutrition increases ruminal metabolism which causes an increase in intake and digestibility. Your herd benefits by an increase in nutrient extraction. In laymen’s terms, it means they get more out of their feed.

It’s a concept that’s not familiar to many cattle feeders but understanding it can mean the difference between profit and loss. With the recent increases in feed component costs, extracting more nutrients per pound of feed is an attractive concept. Corn prices have been particularly volatile, for instance, creating some serious losses recently. The price of feeder hay has almost doubled in the last half decade and its availability has been spotty.

It might have been a back hand suggestion at a method of reducing those ballyhooed green house gasses emitted by bovines worldwide when Dr. Hersom was quoted this way: “In optimizing the use of the feed going into our cattle, we can minimize the outputs that come out of the back end of the animal.”

In fewer words, Hersom was saying better rumen health can mean fewer methane emissions and less solid waste. “The more efficiently our cattle use their nutrients, the less impact they will have on the environment.”

It seems like a concept that will delight cattlemen everywhere – better use of feed means lower feed bills without losing weight or quality – and please the environmentalists, too.

Source: www.cattlenetwork.com

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