March 2001
Operators in Alberta's feedlot alley say bigger is better
by DON STONEMAN
More than a decade of change and tremendous growth in the Alberta cattle industry have challenged feedlot operators. Feedlots have grown larger to meet the demand from huge packing plants in the province and also in the United States. And their operators claim that their modern operations are friendlier to the environment than the older ones they have replaced.The major change has been in the switch to year-round feeding. Until a decade ago, feedlots operated in winter only, taking in calves in the fall and emptying as the cattle went to market. In the summer, feedlotters went farming, says Jack De Boer, owner-operator of Monarch Feeders, west of Lethbridge. At Monarch, 20 acres is devoted to outdoor corrals housing about 15,000 cattle. About 1,600 acres grow crops to feed the livestock. The feedlot employs 15.
The Lethbridge-Picture Butte area of Alberta is so dry that crops are maintained only by intricate irrigation systems. It's a wonderful place to take off hay, watered with centre pivot systems. De Boer says he gets six to seven tonnes of hay per acre in three cuts off fields around his lot. He also harvests corn silage grown under irrigation. His area gets the equivalent of about 2150 corn heat units.
Year-round feeding poses some serious challenges, among them odour and dust. De Boer dismisses odour as merely a nuisance, but admits that dust, especially from manure, is a proven health concern. If left unsuppressed in the summertime, the powdery manure drifts in clouds off the feedlots and onto neighbours' houses at night. "That's one area where (area homeowners) have the right to complain," De Boer says. "We are addressing it, and we are proactive."
Feedlot operators have reacted by installing sprinklers to water down the dusty feedlots. De Boer runs the sprinklers two times a week in the summer for 60 to 90 minutes to settle the dust. Last year, there were four or five feedlots in the Lethbridge area with sprinklers and De Boer says "another 50 were thinking about it." In 10 years, he expects dust suppression systems to be mandatory.
Dust is a major issue in Lethbridge county, where there are only a couple of inches of rain a year, and crops grow only with the help of an intricate irrigation system which supplies water through canals to fields where farmers can apply it to crops with centre pivot irrigation systems. The irrigation canals are filled beginning in early May and turned off about Oct.10, with farmers getting unlimited access. When he's hauling corn silage, De Boer also sends a truck to water the roads to keep down the dust as a courtesy to his neighbours.
De Boer says the province's voluntary code of practice says that manure must be cultivated into the ground within 72 hours of spreading, and he ensures it gets worked in within 48 hours. If that code was to be made mandatory, he says, it would have to be province-wide and he doesn't think that will happen. "The province knows the value of agriculture," he says.
When De Boer built his feedlot he could see that times were changing. His new feedlot is "landscaped" so that the rare rainfall and snow runoff flows into poly-lined lagoons. Water that might run into the yards is diverted around them. The two lagoons have capacity to hold the equivalent of seven inches of rainfall in runoff -- more than 2.5 times the standard. De Boer says a heavy rainfall can be expected three times in a season. Once in five years, Environment Canada predicts the area will get 76 millimetres of rain in a single storm. Once in 100 years, a storm is expected to dump 114 mm of rain in 24 hours.
De Boer soil tests every year for N, P and organic matter. There is a requirement to have access to a certain amount of land to spread manure. The soil test is a new requirement, he says. But the cattle feeding industry is relatively clean, he asserts. "We don't have stacks going up in the air."
De Boer insists that while new feedlots are being built, cattle numbers aren't increasing in Lethbridge County any more. New feedlots being built are replacing older ones that were less friendly to air and water quality. Fewer operations are feeding cattle, but they are doing it in better facilities. Farmers are no longer "slapping up a pen" to feed cattle in, De Boer says, noting that smaller operations can't afford to do the type of landscaping that he has done.
"Bigger operations are spending huge amounts of money to protect the environment," he says. But he adds that "bigger operations" don't mean that corporations are taking over the feeding industry, or that people are losing jobs. Eighteen years, ago, he says, the quarter section of land where his feedlot sits pastured 30 cows. Now, with employees, 15 families make a living off those acres. "Intensive livestock is bringing lots of people and lots of jobs to the area," he insists.
De Boer says three brothers and three nephews run Monarch Feeders. "It's not Cargill that owns the land, or IBP," he says. Bigger operations "see the environmental issues better than our forefathers did," he argues. "We are better stewards of the land. "We don't have on blinders. We can see it as an issue and we are addressing it. Our kids drink the water too."
Bright future for composting
On the east side of Lethbridge, Alberta cattle feeder Les Wall has a problem. Two years ago he bought a feedlot on the edge of the major cattle feeding concentration that is known as "feedlot alley," towards Picture Butte. But he lacks a major land base on which to spread manure. He owns 200 acres on which he can spread, but his size of feedlot requires a permit from the county to spread on 900 acres.Wall has found two solutions. One is to haul manure to spread on farmland several miles away. On a late September day, trucks roar in and out of his feedlot and the neighbours are ringing to complain about the dust, so Wall dispatches a water truck to soak down the road. But he has another manure plan as well.
Wall now has a four-year contract with Agricore, the former Alberta Wheat Pool, to dispose of his manure. He is responsible for hauling it from pens and stacking it in seven-foot high windrows on a four-acre site that has been approved by the provincial environment ministry and the county. One third of his operation's manure is involved in the composting project.
To prepare the site, Wall scraped off topsoil to the hardpan, and then built a berm around the lot to contain runoff. Periodically, Agricore personnel roll in with a special machine called a Scarab, to turn over the windrows and add moisture if necessary. Wall monitors the temperature with a probe driven deep into the windrows. Composting heats the manure and Wall says it is supposed to maintain an internal temperature of 60C degrees for two to three weeks, killing pathogens and weed seeds. During the two-to-three-month composting process (a little longer in winter) each row is turned four or five times.
The manure's volume shrinks by about half during this process, Wall says. Much of that loss is moisture content. The resulting compost is more than 40 per cent organic matter. Using GPS-equipped trucks, Agricore applies it at two to six tonnes per acre. Some nitrogen is lost but phosphates stay intact. Agricore hauls the manure to potato and onion farmers. Some is hauled to reclamation sites for oil wells.
Wall says the pH buffers soils made saline by irrigation and increases water-holding capacity. If the plan takes off, he expects to be able to renegotiate the contract. Moreover, there's an incentive for Wall to promote it. He will get paid if his neighbours take the compost.
Wall buys barley silage and fall triticale, storing as much as 11,000 tonnes. The farmers who grew his feed want to buy his manure. Wall believes composting has a bright future. Last year Agricore sold 3,000 tonnes of compost to the city of Lethbridge to use on its parks.BF
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Ministry spreadsheet helps cattle farmers
by DON STONEMAN
Estimates of average daily gains on feed have too often been just that -- estimates.Enter the Beef Cattle Economics spreadsheet, an easy-to-use spreadsheet program developed by Ontario agriculture ministry staff to help cattlemen determine throughput in the feedlot.
Feedlot operators who run more or less all-in, all-out operations can benefit from calculations made on the program, as can operators who fill their barns with cattle bought on different dates at different sales, says Dennis Martin, a Clinton-based feedlot specialist for the agriculture ministry.
The program is available free of charge. The ministry supplies spreadsheets that will run on Quattro Version 6, Excel 95 and Lotus Version 4, all common software programs available on PCs. (The Excel version also works on many Macintosh computers). The spreadsheets are suited to calculate the production on different sized feedlots.
When a farmer buys cattle, he inputs the weight of the cattle purchased, as well as the date they arrived. As cattle are marketed, the weight of cattle shipped is entered. When the pen or barn is closed out, average days on feed and daily gains are calculated. If feed weights were inputted, the ratio of feed to weight gained can also be calculated.
Martin says that the spreadsheet can be used with a group of 30 or 300 cattle. (At press time, Martin and agriculture ministry computer technician Bill De Jong were adapting the spreadsheet to fit larger groups of more than 1,000 cattle.)
With the information collected, the operator can calculate average daily gains and days on feed, both critical to the efficient operation. If days on feed and average daily gain are out of line with industry norms, the operator needs to look at the ration being fed, Martin says. "I've tried to make these programs fairly user-friendly and simple to perform," Martin says.
There's also a page to measure the inputs fed to the cattle. With the information there, feed conversion can be measured along with average number of days on feed, average daily gain and money received per pound of gain. The program can be used to calculate weight gains and feed efficiency on feeder pigs as well, he says.
There's also a cost of production formula which a feedlot operator can use to evaluate the profitability of the cattle, or to project ahead when making purchases.
Martin can be reached at 519-482-5976. BF
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Get to know your potential 2001 crop pest enemies
by PAT LYNCH
Will the crop pests of 2000 return in 2001? I am referring to two in particular -- the Alfalfa Weevil and the Cereal Leaf Beetle (CLB). In case they do, you had better get to know something about them.The two have certain similarities. Both over-winter as adults and both were a problem in field crops in the late 1960s. They were both brought under control by parasites and, in each case, the parasites were wasps and fungi.
Damage from these insects leveled off in the 1980s and they were relatively unheard of in the '90s. As they disappeared, so did the parasites that kept them in check. Now they may be a problem until the parasites build up again.
In 1998, alfalfa weevils increased in number so that some fields had to be sprayed and this weevil did a lot of damage in the two years that followed.
The alfalfa weevil overwinters as an adult. In early spring, it emerges and lays eggs in the stems of alfalfa plants. These eggs hatch in 7-14 days. The larvae then feed on alfalfa plants for 10-14 days and, under hot and dry conditions, can eat up to 10 per cent of the field in the later larval stages. They can typically be found on the new growth and reach a peak around alfalfa bud stage. The amount of heat to get them to this stage is similar to the amount required to get alfalfa to the bud stage. At bud stage, fields should be scouted weekly. At this time the best option will be harvesting.
If you cannot harvest, consider spraying. The economic threshold developed in the early 1970s is: "if 25 per cent of the buds show feeding damage control is warranted." I cannot find research to back this up, so I suspect it is the best guess of the people working with this pest at the time.
The larvae then pupate and in 10-14 days adults emerge. These new adults can significantly damage regrowth of alfalfa. They eat on the newly emerging growth and, if this new growth is set back, they can affect the second cut. The adults feed for a short period, then go into summer hibernation. They emerge in September, feed, breed, and lay some eggs, then hibernate to emerge the next spring.
As for CLB, we started to notice it about six years ago in routine wheat field scouting. There were many acres sprayed for CLB in 2000 and more acres that suffered damage.
Cereal Leaf Beetles winter as adults, emerging in the spring and flying to cereal fields such as wheat. They lay their eggs on the upper surface of the wheat leaves. These eggs hatch in 7-14 days. At first glance, the larvae look like slugs and, to feed, they strip the upper surface of the leaf. They are surrounded by a grey mass, which is their fecal matter.
These larvae feed for 10-14 days, pupate and emerge as adults. These adults may feed in the field they emerged from, or fly to nearby cornfields. They can do considerable feeding in cornfields, but this feeding is not suspected to hurt yield.
The economic threshold for Cereal Leaf Beetle is "two larva per stem." Again, I can find no research to back up this threshold and imagine it was arrived at similarly to the threshold for alfalfa weevil.
When I scout for CLB, I check for larvae and adults. Then I try to decide if the adults are ones from the previous year that are still laying eggs, or this year's emerged adults whose feeding is just about done.
Another factor is the threshold basis. I look at how much green tissue is left on the flag leave. If the flag leaf has a lot of disease and the larva is eating the little bit of green tissue left, I believe the threshold level is different than if there is no disease.
When checking for control of any insect, you must take parasites into account. If you have high insect levels but many are parasitized, spraying is of little benefit. Furthermore, generally the insecticide you spray can kill the parasite and delay their buildup.
Finally, remember that insecticides are much more hazardous to you than either fungicides or herbicides. Read and follow the label carefully.BF
Patrick J. Lynch, CCA (ON), is Head Agronomist for Cargill in Ontario.
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