12 Our Advertisers Appreciate Your Business Better Farming | February 2024 Beyond the Barn SASKBARLEY ANNOUNCES 2023 AWARD WINNERS SaskBarley recently announced the recipients of its 2023/2024 scholarships. In November, the University of Saskatchewan’s Jenna Salmon, Ashlyn Mooney, Catherine Seidle, Suma Ghosh and Nathan Gyan were selected as the award winners. Annual scholarships are awarded to university students who are involved in research related to barley production. Often awarded to graduate students, 2023 marks the first year that a SaskBarley scholarship was awarded to an undergraduate student (Salmon). “On behalf of our board of directors, we would like to congratulate the well-deserved scholarship winners,” said SaskBarley chair Keith Rueve. “We received a record number of applicants this year and our winners’ outstanding portfolio of projects are sure to positively impact the future of barley.” Salmon was given a $2,000 award for a study investigating the effect of structure and nutrient composition of barley on microbial degradation in the rumen of cattle. This study was part of an undergraduate thesis project. Awards of $4,000 were received by MSc students Mooney and Seidle for Mooney’s work improving barley salinity tolerance and Seidle’s work investigating barley grain as feed for feedlot cattle. The PhD scholarships of $6,000 were awarded to Ghosh and Gyan. Ghosh’s research is investigating interactions between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and different forage plant species to inoculate barley. Gyan is studying the relationships of carabid beetles in barley agro-ecosystems. Rueve says that research is the key focus at SaskBarley, and their investment demonstrates their commitment to the future of the industry. “Over the past five years, we have awarded $76,000 in scholarships for barley specific research.” BF A recent study from the United States suggests that beef operations which keep cattle on lifelong grassbased diets may have an overall higher carbon footprint than those that switch cattle to grain-based diets partway through their lives. The experiment was led by Daniel Blaustein-Rejto of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research centre in Berkeley, Calif. The results were shared in the open-access journal PLOS ONE in December. The goal of the study was to explore all aspects of beef production systems that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to the direct emissions from beef cattle, which has been the focus of previous studies. These prior studies have suggested that pasture-finished beef operations have a higher carbon footprint than grain-finished operations. To investigate this objective, the research team calculated carbon footprints for 100 beef farms in 16 countries. Their calculations included direct greenhouse gas emissions from cattle, soil carbon sequestration, and carbon opportunity cost. The carbon opportunity cost was defined as the carbon that would have been sequestered if the land had native ecosystems instead of being used for beef production. After calculating and comparing direct emissions across the farms, the analysis suggested that grain-finished operations were producing 20 per cent less greenhouse gas than pasture-finished farms. When soil carbon sequestration and carbon opportunity cost were accounted for it was found that this number increased – as pasture-finished farms had a 42 per cent higher carbon footprint. “Our research reveals that the carbon cost of land-use accounts for the largest part of beef’s carbon footprint. Therefore, there is an even larger carbon cost than typically found in land-intensive beef operations, such as many grass-fed systems, even when taking into account potential carbon sequestration due to grazing,” said the authors in a release on EurekAlert.org. These findings demonstrate the importance of accounting for all relevant factors when calculating and comparing carbon footprints. BF - Emily Croft Ragles/iStock/Getty Images Plus photo NEW STUDY ON BEEF EMISSIONS
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