Range Management with Mitch Stephenson

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09/18/2024 Added

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Mitch Stephenson, UNL Range and Forage Specialist, gives an update on range management research at the 25th Annual Gudmundsen Sandhills Open House.

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[00:00:00.000]Thank you, Dr. Lardi.
[00:00:09.160]We're going to move now into our research updates taking place here at Goodmanson.
[00:00:16.180]First up is Mitch Stevenson, an associate professor and range management specialist
[00:00:21.600]stationed at the Panhandle Research Extension and Education Center in Scotts Bluff.
[00:00:27.380]His research focuses on understanding how grazing management decisions influence livestock production,
[00:00:33.440]grazing behavior, plant communities, and soil health in the Central and Western Great Plains.
[00:00:39.260]Let's welcome Dr. Stevenson.
[00:00:41.580]Good morning. Can you hear me all right?
[00:00:56.760]Let me get closer. All right.
[00:00:58.760]Yeah, thank you. It's always a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:03.320]There are 25 years of this open house.
[00:01:05.620]I was in high school when these started, actually, just down the road here in Hyannis.
[00:01:12.420]I grew up just over the hill here, so it's always fun to come back.
[00:01:16.320]And so I was looking through some older... They weren't the open house. They were field days, I think, at the time.
[00:01:22.380]I'm not sure if that's the right term, but this was in the 80s and 90s.
[00:01:26.140]And there was there was range updates at that time too, and they talked about new
[00:01:31.300]technologies for grazing management. And so, 80s and 90s, what do you think were
[00:01:37.380]the the topics that were discussed for grazing management that were new and
[00:01:42.640]innovative? Any thoughts? What was that? Electric fence. Yeah, they had
[00:01:51.020]demonstrations on high tinsel electric fence. Other thoughts on some other
[00:01:56.120]ones? Sorry, what was that? Intensive grazing. Yeah, they talked about, there was a
[00:02:04.500]lot of stuff on timing of grazing at the time. They were doing quite a bit of
[00:02:07.220]research on that. The other demonstration that they had in some of these old guides
[00:02:12.740]of these field days was solar panels for pumping water, and so they
[00:02:17.180]talked about a lot of those, and so we've come, those are just
[00:02:21.360]standard now, right? We all use those. They're very efficient, not all, but
[00:02:26.100]a lot of folks use those, and so I just think it was interesting seeing that and
[00:02:30.540]some of the technology. So I'm going to talk about three things here today. The
[00:02:33.780]first one is going to be some of our precision livestock management work
[00:02:36.740]that's primarily focused on virtual fence technology. If you're able to come
[00:02:41.640]this morning, a few other things, cameras and other things that were discussed
[00:02:46.500]here this morning, but talk about a little bit about that. I'm going to talk
[00:02:49.560]about our long-term data set that, looking at plant production, that's been
[00:02:53.740]going on here since 2004.
[00:02:56.080]And then I'm going to wrap it up with some work that we've done looking at timing and
[00:02:59.140]intensity of grazing on sub-irrigated sandhills meadow hay regrowth and how
[00:03:03.740]that affects it. So I'm going to start out talking about virtual fence
[00:03:08.520]and this is Kaitlyn Dozlers here. She was a master's student that just graduated.
[00:03:13.000]I believe you just walked last week, right? It was last weekend and so she did a
[00:03:17.140]really great job and I'm going to highlight some of her work here. She
[00:03:21.280]was pivotal in setting up a virtual fence system here. We got some funding
[00:03:26.060]to get some of the collars in the system. She really was the one that
[00:03:29.900]developed it here and figured out how to make it work. And so virtual fencing, it
[00:03:34.700]was it's essentially this invisible barrier much like a dog fence or a collar
[00:03:39.380]you'd put on a dog to keep them in your yard where it has cueing with both sound
[00:03:45.080]and then then shock cues to keep cattle in where you'd like them to be. So it's
[00:03:50.420]been around for quite a number of years in theory and it really started in the
[00:03:56.040]in the pet industry first. This was one of the first prototypes that was was
[00:04:01.380]developed down in New Mexico where where it worked. They was it was really rather
[00:04:09.260]cumbersome as they they put it, clumsy, but they said it was remarkably robust
[00:04:14.620]during neuromus fill trials and actually working. Cattle were able to understand
[00:04:18.760]how to how to respond to those cues and it worked. They just didn't have the
[00:04:22.980]technology at a point where it made sense to put on an animal.
[00:04:26.020]We've kind of come a long ways. It was early 2020s,
[00:04:35.560]somewhere in that time period, where this company had really got it to
[00:04:39.580]the point where they felt that it could be commercialized and put on a number of
[00:04:43.700]animals. Now there's four or five different companies, I'll show a
[00:04:47.460]graph on that here pretty soon, where they've developed this technology to a
[00:04:51.220]point where it can be put on individual animals in a reasonable way and last a
[00:04:54.880]reasonable time.
[00:04:56.000]So that started, Vance was one of the first ones on the scene and that's
[00:05:01.160]the company that we started doing research with here. Now there's Nofence,
[00:05:05.060]Gallagher, Halter that are all semi available depending on if they have
[00:05:10.340]them, but they're in the United States and they're here and so
[00:05:15.720]these other companies just started this year really starting to advertise and be
[00:05:19.640]available here in the in the United States. And so one of the
[00:05:25.980]you know within our trials the first thing we were wanting to see is efficacy
[00:05:29.980]you know is does this work in a reasonable way or our cattle just not
[00:05:35.980]going to respond to it and by and large as you see these points here this is a
[00:05:39.840]that we fenced out this section of the pasture you can see these cattle have
[00:05:43.480]been pretty well trained and as technology does it it sometimes fails us
[00:05:52.520]because it stopped there we go which is it's important to consider
[00:05:55.960]right I think we've come a long ways in our technology I think it's gonna get
[00:05:58.660]farther and farther and I'm probably doing something to make it stop at any
[00:06:02.640]rate those dots move around a lot they stay out of the place where we didn't
[00:06:06.240]want them to go and so it we found it to be effective that cattle can learn we
[00:06:11.340]can teach them how to how to go in the areas there's another one where we were
[00:06:14.440]keeping them out of this there's a creek running through there we were keeping
[00:06:17.200]them out of that riparian area you see one down there at the bottom that had
[00:06:20.320]fallen off that's not moving very far and so that becomes a challenge
[00:06:25.940]with them I you know I think there's coming a long ways in terms of how to
[00:06:29.780]keep those collars on keep them running but by and large we found that that that
[00:06:34.040]cattle that had them on were trained right that we had a fairly high efficacy
[00:06:38.480]of it working pretty well and keeping cattle where we didn't want them to go
[00:06:42.440]or where we wanted them to be so one of the first questions that we asked was
[00:06:47.060]you know if the cows wearing the shock collar are they going to be in a
[00:06:50.840]constant state of fear of being of that audio cue or that electric cue
[00:06:55.920]hitting them and so so one of the first questions that we wanted to explore was
[00:07:00.640]what does acute stress look like with cattle fitted with virtual fence and so
[00:07:05.360]there'd been some work done with looking at fecal and hair cortisol levels that's
[00:07:08.980]more of a longer-term effect of whether with virtual fence or electric fence but
[00:07:14.960]but some of the things that we did so we put these these heart rate monitors and
[00:07:19.760]these are actually heart rate monitors that are used for like racehorses say
[00:07:23.040]monitors that a runner might use you know we
[00:07:25.900]actually you can't really see it but we strapped a watch on the top to record
[00:07:30.460]the data from this and so it recorded the heart rate data and then we could go
[00:07:34.800]back and say see where they where they had a sound or an electric cue and that
[00:07:39.520]that's the zero point here and then how their heart rate responded after that
[00:07:44.260]and so this is this is one of the shortest and one of the longest here on
[00:07:47.800]tops the longest elevated heart rate and then we had a control period where we
[00:07:51.220]looked at the the baseline and so that's the dashed line there so in the in the
[00:07:55.880]cow on the top what happened is that she had the electric cue and then she
[00:08:00.200]actually had a second electric cue because she didn't move out of the area
[00:08:03.200]and that was the longest time we saw that elevated heart rate where it went
[00:08:07.000]almost 240 seconds or about about four minutes there with elevated heart rate a
[00:08:12.940]lot of them were more like this one on the bottom at about 30 to 60 seconds a
[00:08:17.240]short-term bump in their heart rate then it went pretty quickly back down to that
[00:08:21.980]baseline or below and so so what we kind of concluded
[00:08:25.860]with this study was that it was a relatively short stressful period that
[00:08:30.300]their heart rate went up as you might expect if you get a little shock but it
[00:08:33.680]came down really quick and it didn't it didn't it wasn't a prolonged stressful
[00:08:38.040]event another thing we saw was that most of the animals learned that what that
[00:08:42.980]electric and audio cue meant and so within about the first 15 to 20 minutes
[00:08:48.100]we saw cattle responding positively to an audio cue and by the time they'd been
[00:08:52.740]fully trained the number of electric cues dropped dramatically
[00:08:55.840]and as they were responding to that audio cue this is just a little bit more
[00:09:01.000]of that data what it looked like and so this is this is from when we put that
[00:09:04.380]that heart rate monitor on this is the heart rate that's going up and down the
[00:09:08.440]bars are showing movement so higher bars mean more movement of that and as you
[00:09:14.020]can see we boxed out the control period and the virtual fence period now there's
[00:09:17.260]a lot of noise in this data as a heart rate often does but a few things that
[00:09:20.920]you can start to pick out is is when we brought those cattle back into the chute
[00:09:25.820]really when their heart rate spiked that was probably the the most stressful
[00:09:30.260]period for him but it's relatively short it came back down right but when we put
[00:09:34.460]him in with the virtual fence for this individual really you know it didn't it
[00:09:38.520]didn't fluctuate much over the mean at first it did then it dropped back down
[00:09:42.200]we put him in a holding pen they were moving around they were grazing you can
[00:09:45.560]see it drops down where they were probably resting then we turned them out
[00:09:48.800]into a pasture they were grazing for a couple hours there in the pasture and
[00:09:52.760]then we can pick up in their heart rate when they when they bedded down and
[00:09:55.800]started resting there at the end as well but overall you know when we looked at
[00:09:59.700]this 30-minute control period and the 30-minute virtual fence period we really
[00:10:03.620]didn't see much difference in the mean heart rate so so if there was a little
[00:10:08.280]bit of a bump it was relatively short and if they only got one or two shocks
[00:10:11.680]in the average over 30 minutes it really didn't didn't affect that average heart
[00:10:15.960]rate both pre graze which is before they've been trained and post graze
[00:10:19.620]which is after they've been trained this is some work that dr. Yiji Zhang is doing
[00:10:24.660]we're just
[00:10:25.780]starting with with this is a Gallagher collar system and what they're trying to
[00:10:29.620]do is separate cattle in the same pasture so can we graze two herds with
[00:10:33.880]virtual fence and have them separated and this is a picture here of those two
[00:10:38.500]herds the dots up there are where the fences are at and where those two herds
[00:10:42.100]are separated and they've actually they've had it going on now for about
[00:10:46.260]five weeks and it's it they've they've actually seen pretty good results of
[00:10:51.640]cattle staying within they're given pans basically
[00:10:55.760]on those collars that are out there and so this is just a different company and
[00:11:00.980]and the virtual fence that they have and so just kind of wrapping it up I mean
[00:11:05.080]there's there's these are these are somewhat of our options here in terms of
[00:11:08.360]getting cattle where we want them to go so when we think about grazing
[00:11:10.880]management and and managing cattle you know this this conventional fence this
[00:11:15.940]four strand barbed wire is considered the gold standard that's why you see it
[00:11:19.040]along all the roads right it does a pretty good job of keeping cattle in can
[00:11:22.780]be expensive to corrupt construct and not flexible
[00:11:25.740]you know electric fence has really changed how we do our grazing management
[00:11:29.680]especially things like poly wire and you know it tends to the less expensive with
[00:11:35.320]virtual fence the really the the sky's the limit on flexibility you can be very
[00:11:39.800]adaptive in how you change that cost-effective I think it's there's
[00:11:43.980]still some questions there you know as all technology as it gets out it's
[00:11:48.300]fairly expensive to use as was mentioned before by Greg you know we're looking at
[00:11:52.860]fifty to seventy dollars per head per year
[00:11:55.720]potentially in the cost of that so it might not be something right now that's
[00:12:00.000]effective but but I or cost-effective but hopefully in the future those costs
[00:12:04.000]come down and can be more reasonable in terms of how that looks and so there's a
[00:12:09.600]lot of a lot of different things as researchers here at Goodman's and that
[00:12:12.960]we've used some of this technology for is thinking through how to better
[00:12:16.460]understand that animal how to better understand it's crazy
[00:12:19.080]behavior, how to better understand some of its responses to the environment, and how
[00:12:24.570]can we link all those together in a meaningful way.
[00:12:28.350]So this is with GPS tracking, and I think a neat thing that the virtual fence callers
[00:12:31.370]do is they allow you to visualize how cattle utilize a pasture.
[00:12:36.850]And so this is just right above us here on the hill pasture.
[00:12:40.850]And so we had three years of cattle being tracked with this GPS points.
[00:12:46.190]And really, this is a season-long continuous pasture because we oftentimes have cattle
[00:12:50.670]that we're doing research on.
[00:12:51.850]So they're out there and then they're back doing measurements on.
[00:12:55.210]But really, you could see the differences in the same pasture of areas that are heavily
[00:13:00.270]grazed and areas that are only lightly grazed.
[00:13:03.250]The white areas would be those that are lightly grazed.
[00:13:06.390]Darker purple would be the heavier grazed.
[00:13:08.570]And so I had a graduate student a couple of years ago out and basically pick points across
[00:13:12.870]this area in the purple or in the white.
[00:13:15.830]So light or heavily grazed over the growing season.
[00:13:17.950]And they found there was some differences, some similarities.
[00:13:20.630]A lot of the same species were seen in both sides, but in the heavily grazed areas, things
[00:13:25.750]like western ragweed, Scribner's rosette grass, Kentucky bluegrass, blue grama.
[00:13:31.170]Some areas had some animal invasives in them.
[00:13:34.090]These are typically species that we would associate with somewhat of a heavier grazing
[00:13:37.470]pressure and that state that it was in.
[00:13:41.370]Whereas other species like needle and thread, little blue stem, and overall vegetation,
[00:13:45.470]the vegetation cover was higher in those areas that didn't get grazed quite as much, which
[00:13:49.710]is to be expected in terms of how this is grazed.
[00:13:53.030]So, a lot of different grazing intensities across that pasture and really it comes down
[00:13:59.610]to this distribution, or often times some of our problems are more related to distribution
[00:14:04.170]of grazing as opposed to some of the stocking rates we might put out there if they're moderate.
[00:14:12.330]So the above ground plant production started
[00:14:15.110]in 2004 and it's on the other side of this hill right here, we have 30 cages that we
[00:14:21.510]move every year to capture a graze system and so they're four foot by four foot hog
[00:14:26.070]panels that we move and then every year in June and again in August we have a group of
[00:14:31.550]graduate students go and collect that data and it helps us create this better understanding
[00:14:37.350]of some of the weather variables that Eric was talking about and how those relate to
[00:14:41.530]some of our biomass production.
[00:14:44.750]Switched up with 2024 here, the crew got it weighed and put in and so this is the average
[00:14:50.630]right around 1800 pounds per acre of dry weight, so 100% dry weight.
[00:14:55.890]We saw that it was slightly above average this year, close to around 2000 pounds and
[00:15:01.050]when we look at all the data points in the system compared to May, June, July precipitation
[00:15:08.370]that puts us right here and so 2024 was actually above average year compared to where our
[00:15:14.390]model would predict that it would be based on our precipitation.
[00:15:19.390]And so there's a lot of variables we're learning about.
[00:15:21.810]Some of those are that how does previous year precipitation and temperature play into current
[00:15:26.930]year growth of those plant communities and we're finding some relationships amongst some
[00:15:31.710]of our functional groups especially things like cool season grasses tend to be higher
[00:15:36.290]if we had a wet previous year and Forbes as this in 2013 pointed out really tend
[00:15:44.030]to be abundant the year after a severe drought we see it a little bit in 2023 here too in terms
[00:15:51.770]of some of the Forbes that we picked up but but really a lot of a lot of interesting variables
[00:15:56.930]talk when when Greg talked about this climate variability that's happening you know we're
[00:16:02.450]seeing years like 2020-2012 immediately following years like 2011 that had just
[00:16:07.850]tremendous amount of precipitation in May June July similarly 2020 2021 and 2022
[00:16:13.670]were actually three years of below average May June July precipitation here and so so that's
[00:16:21.170]really why 2022 was probably below even where we would expect based on the amount of precipitation
[00:16:29.090]that we saw there that was that's been one of our lowest years actually in total production that we
[00:16:33.290]saw and so as we collect this year in year out every year we learn a little bit more about the
[00:16:37.730]model because it takes a previous year and a current year and and makes a different data point
[00:16:43.310]to look at so tied to that we've been collecting some grass individual grass samples looking at
[00:16:50.210]quality and mineral content I have a student that's that's that's looking at some of these
[00:16:54.690]now I'm just showing crude protein here but we're you know we we expect this decline in crude protein
[00:17:01.490]as the growing season progresses but what we're starting to see is there certain species that
[00:17:06.350]tend to hold on to their crude protein and other micro macro minerals more than others and and
[00:17:12.950]part of the goal of this is to see you know what species are the the most critical in our in our
[00:17:18.050]system what are cattle consuming and how does that affect some of their nutrient requirements
[00:17:23.270]that we see out there we also have a number of forbs and shrubs that that really are our
[00:17:28.670]lead plant and stiff sunflower and prairie wild rose tend to really hold on to that quality later
[00:17:35.930]in the year so this is this is kind of newer data that we've conducted a few years back but
[00:17:42.590]really are getting into an analyzing it more and so this is fecal DNA and it's a relatively new
[00:17:47.750]technology we take fecal samples and they're able to pull the the DNA from that sample and and
[00:17:54.410]basically help us construct a qualitative assessment of what's in that cattle diet and so we did it on
[00:18:01.310]nine head of cattle and we did it in June and then again in July looking at kind of early season
[00:18:07.070]versus later season and this is the percent of those cows where these different species appeared in their
[00:18:12.230]diet and so the big thing that stuck out to me and this is only for forbs and shrubs is there's
[00:18:18.350]a lot of these forbs and shrubs that end up being pretty important in that animal's diet and when
[00:18:23.390]we think about micro macro minerals other things like that I think it's valuable to look and see
[00:18:28.370]when they're grazing them and which ones they are grazing so just just wrapping up here I'm
[00:18:37.130]going to touch on this this study we did so Sandhills sub-irrigated meadows are in these herbaceous
[00:18:41.870]wetlands is what they're classified in the crops day later they cover about seven percent or so of
[00:18:48.770]our rangeland that's still in rangeland you know ninety-three percent of the Sandhills are
[00:18:53.930]classified rangeland pasture who herbaceous wetlands and of that seven percent or seven
[00:19:01.370]hundred forty thousand acres is classified as sub-irrigated meadows and here at the Goodman
[00:19:06.590]Sandhills lab we have we have a couple that had a lot of research conducted on them and looking
[00:19:11.510]at ways of making systems more efficient ways that we can look at things like interseeding
[00:19:16.910]and fertilizer Jim Nichols you know Don Adams Walt shocked and Jerry Valesky Pat Reese a lot
[00:19:26.430]of folks were involved in a lot of this research looking at how can we use meadows to be more
[00:19:30.410]efficient and that that's sometimes grazing them and other times grazing and hang one thing that
[00:19:35.390]we hadn't looked at was how does grazing during the dorm or during the offseason on hay meadow
[00:19:41.150]regrowth affect subsequent year hay production and so the goal of this this project was to look
[00:19:47.150]at grazing on this hay meadow regrowth was to look in pre-freeze so when it was green and growing in
[00:19:53.150]October and then again in post freeze period after it had gone dormant to see how does that affect
[00:19:59.930]that current the following year's hay production and we also did this at two different grazing
[00:20:05.390]intensities so the goal of this project over a number of years was to look as this timing pre
[00:20:10.790]freeze versus post freeze compared to heavy versus moderate effect that following year hay production
[00:20:17.930]and so one of the first things we found with this is that in during October we had about 3253 pounds
[00:20:26.690]per acre of biomass of those cattle had available to them when we waited another couple months that
[00:20:33.110]dropped to about 2,500 pounds and this was about 24% less biomass during that post-free period
[00:20:40.430]compared to the pre-freeze period so just that process of that plant going dormant weathering
[00:20:46.850]effect other things of that nature just caused that we had less production available for grazing
[00:20:51.950]in after it had several freezes the other thing that we found which is is is more we expected
[00:20:59.510]right is that the crude protein content dropped from about 13.6 percent to 18.4 percent if we
[00:21:05.570]waited and so there's trade-offs in waiting till later in the growing season to graze on that high
[00:21:10.070]quality forage but both both time periods had really pretty decent forage quality for grazing
[00:21:15.830]depending on what your needs were and so when we looked at that subsequent year plant production
[00:21:20.530]the the only thing where we really saw a big difference in terms of timing was in our
[00:21:26.110]graminoid production so our grasses and our sedges so if we graze during the pre-freeze
[00:21:31.010]in October our grasses and sedges were about ten percent lower than if we didn't graze it
[00:21:36.490]or if we waited until after the dormant season to graze it
[00:21:39.710]now we did see a slight bump in forbs and legumes out there and that made it so our total live was somewhat variable
[00:21:48.030]but we couldn't pick out a discernible difference among total live production
[00:21:52.730]but one of the other things we did see is if we graze we didn't I guess one thing we did see didn't see
[00:21:58.290]is that grazing intensity really didn't seem to have an effect on subsequent years
[00:22:02.530]so whether he grazed at a moderate or a heavy layer in both pre or post freeze didn't have as much of
[00:22:09.350]an influence as the timing of grazing on those graminoids so those grasses in the fall they're
[00:22:14.510]growing you graze them at that time it just tends to be a little bit more susceptible and you see
[00:22:20.090]that the following years in their production we did see though that standing dead biomass
[00:22:23.990]that as we went from a heavy graze to no graze that that really reduced the amount of the
[00:22:30.190]standing dead biomass that you would likely pick up in the bale the following year and so so we
[00:22:35.630]we learned a little bit the one the big thing is that the timing of grazing on metal regrowth
[00:22:38.990]right it's a high value forage in the fall I think you can do it and and probably be fine
[00:22:45.350]with it because over three years 10% was really the we didn't see a trend in other words we didn't
[00:22:50.390]see it continually dropping it just dropped about 10% but but over time it might be worth
[00:22:56.210]periodically rotating that from a fall to a winter graze if possible to reduce so you're not reducing
[00:23:04.010]some of the the graminoids that are out there and then I'm just going to wrap this up this is
[00:23:08.630]also a study that Caitlin Dozler conducted here one of the things that we had talked about with
[00:23:14.330]virtual fences well how can we use virtual fence to manage wildlife habitat and that becomes
[00:23:18.570]important in a conservation system of what can we do and then we got to thinking like well what
[00:23:24.470]wildlife from habitat are we gonna focus on and so the the question kind of came back to well we
[00:23:29.510]need to know better about where where animals and what wildlife are at here at the ranch and
[00:23:34.070]so she set up a number of these camera traps kind of scattered throughout the ranch different
[00:23:38.270]topographic positions either in dry valleys dune tops or sub-irrigated meadows and and really just
[00:23:44.950]we got the first year of data and and you know I think we're learning more and more about some
[00:23:49.070]of the things that where where are some of the wildlife spending most of their time you know
[00:23:54.170]some of the things like pronghorn for example we we didn't see any in some of our sub-irrigated
[00:23:58.370]meadow sites but we saw a lot in the dune top or not a lot but several in the dune tops and
[00:24:02.990]and the dry valleys you know whereas some of our deer tended to spend more time in the
[00:24:07.910]sub-irrigated meadows and dry valleys as opposed to the dune tops just relatively speaking but but
[00:24:12.470]we still we have them out again this year and we hope to learn more about what species of birds
[00:24:16.850]are out there and and more in depth on some of where these these animals are at so with that
[00:24:24.710]I'll answer any questions at the bullpen session thank you sorry I went too long
[00:24:30.530]you
[00:24:31.030]you
[00:24:31.530]you
[00:24:32.030]you
[00:24:32.530]you
[00:24:33.030]you
[00:24:33.530]Thank you.

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Range Management with Mitch Stephenson

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