In an ideal situation, ranchers and range managers like to see cattle actively grazing on a broad spectrum of the range. Especially on hot summer days, some cattle like to hang out in the shade and creek-bottoms to stay cool. Often times, it requires herding cattle uphill to move them away from streams and riparian areas. But what if a cow is genetically inclined to climb hills?
In a new research study, University of Idaho Beef Specialist Jim Sprinkle and his partners have identified a genetic marker for hill-climbing cattle. These animals hiked more and ate less but still had optimal weight gain. The implications of the study are significant for overall range health, experts say.
“All things considered, when we can get cattle that really will venture out and utilize better, the range stays in better condition, and especially riparian areas stay in better condition,” said Scott Jensen, a study participant and University of Idaho Extension Educator in Owyhee County, based in Homedale.
“I really think for the long-term health the range, which includes those riparian areas, it’s going to help provide folks to do a better job of managing livestock,” Jensen said.
Cattle use of riparian areas is a big deal on public lands. For ranchers, meeting required riparian standards is important for maintaining their grazing permits. It’s an important issue for anglers, hunters and the general public as well. Many species of birds and wildlife benefit from healthy riparian areas. Healthy riparian areas also provide quality fish habitat, reduced water temperatures and good water quality.
From the standpoint of Wyatt Prescott, range manager at the University of Idaho Rinker Rock Creek Ranch, the study’s findings are significant.
“We’re trying to understand how we can use livestock as a tool for conservation and to enhance wildlife habitat,” Prescott says.
“I think this information is very significant,” Jensen adds. “It’s like most things, the more we learn, the better we’re able to manage.”
Tracking cattle movement
Sprinkle created one-of-a-kind collars for cattle equipped with an accelerometer and GPS to track their movements. The Accelerometer measures the cow’s activity 25 times per second. The GPS tracks movements every 2 to 7 minutes.
“It’s pretty powerful, the accelerometer they’re using on rockets, it measures velocity up and down, side to side, backward and forward,” said Sprinkle. “The GPS tells you where they’re at, and the accelerometer tells you what they’re doing while they’re there.”
Sprinkle and research assistants ground-proofed the data by recording cattle activity on tablets while riding horseback.
“We’ve got lots of data. Millions of lines of data, millions!” Sprinkle said. “Each cow, each day, we get 2.16 million lines of data; we average it down to 180,000 lines of data, for each day, and we have 35 cows.”
For the research project, Sprinkle and his graduate student, Landon Sullivan, compared the movements of 18 efficient cows versus 18 inefficient cows over several grazing seasons at Rinker Rock Creek Ranch. To get started, they ran mother cows through a squeeze chute to place the collars on the animals.
Sprinkle and his crew had all of the collars laid out and organized. They painted numbers on the mother cows for easier identification.
Sprinkle wanted to see how cattle with different eating habits in a feedlot setting would perform on the range. In the study, “efficient” and “inefficient” cattle were observed in a true rangeland setting at the ranch.
“They’ve done this work since the 1980s, but never on rangeland, so when I came here in 2015, I saw a real opportunity to evaluate efficient versus inefficient animals on rangeland to see if there was any difference,” Sprinkle said.
Using a car analogy, the inefficient cows in a feedlot setting were heavy eaters and required a lot of fuel, like a 1970s muscle car. The efficient cattle ate less in a feedlot but still had the same amount of weight gain, more like a turbo-charged sports car. And the efficient cows turned out to be the champion hill-climbers.
The inefficient cattle were more lazy, hanging out in the creek-bottom, especially when temperatures got hot in August.
“My original thinking was that we probably want inefficient animals out here. Because we want animals with a lot of drive and appetite that’ll get out and forage,” Sprinkle says. “And that’s the beauty of science, when we did the experiments, it just turned that upside-down.
“We’ve determined that those efficient animals, when you have steep terrain and hot temperatures, they seemed to handle that a little better.”
Ranchers may want to select for hill-climbing cattle, if they have a range operation.
“If you do have an opportunity to select an animal that is going to eat a little less and use more rugged country, especially when it’s hot, might be something to consider,” he said.
Prescott sees a lot of value in the research findings for Idaho ranchers because the study was completed in a true rangeland setting at Rinker Rock Creek Ranch.
“We’re really trying to make sure the research conducted is super applicable to those ranchers who want to use cattle as a conservation tool to create a better environment and better years to come and for them, the wildlife and the public to enjoy,” Prescott said.
Sergio Arispe, a professor of range science for Oregon State University, has been assisting in the research.
“What I’m excited about is we’re truly at the forefront of understanding and learning more about cattle behavior. It’s important for landscape management in the sagebrush steppe,” Arispe says.
“The project is answering questions that cattle producers have—not only cattle producers and public land managers as well academia—all coming together to promote healthy ecosystems. This project is at the forefront, we’re all learning from so it can move beyond Idaho to the rest of the world.” — Steve Stuebner, Life on the Range
