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New treatment may lift the curse on alfalfa grazing

There's a hopeful, but also skeptical crowd out there that has to be convinced high risk legumes can be grazed safely and economically. Armed with a new bloat control product, Dr. Merle Olson is up to the job.

Safely including more alfalfa in livestock grazing plans may not only help Western Canadian livestock producers increase production, but it could also open the door for those looking to produce more grass finished beef.

That's the belief of a Calgary-based researcher who has developed a new bloat control product that takes the high protein, high quality legume out of the "high risk" category for grazing. He sees alfalfa becoming a worry-free forage, already well known for its benefits of increasing meat and milk production in all classes of grazing cattle.

Admittedly, Dr. Merle Olson, a veterinarian, microbiologist and gastrointestinal specialist with the University of Calgary, knows it will take a Missouri-style "show me" mission to convince a largely skeptical crowd that alfalfa can be grazed safely under almost any conditions.

Winning over the skeptics

To win over the skeptics, Olson has co-ordinated a three-year prairie wide grazing project, involving about 8,000 head of beef and dairy cattle and sheep from 80 farms and ranches. The cattle all graze high percent alfalfa pastures and are treated with Olson's new bloat control product, called Alfasure.

One of the first producer field days to showcase the grazing projects is on July 27, at Burdett in southern Alberta. More field days are planned over the summer across the prairies. (For more information on field days contact Leanne Thompson, grazing project co-ordinator, at (403) 317-3426.)

Alfasure was registered in Canada last year, and Olson and independent researchers say it is an effective product for preventing bloat in grazing cattle as well as livestock fed alfalfa hay and silage.

"If cattle are on Alfasure as directed, we've found we can't make them bloat," says a confident Olson. Working with a New Zealand-developed bloat control product, Blocare 4511, Olson formulated a product for use in Canada. Alfasure is marketed by the Calgary-based Rafter 8 Products.

The product could be a major development in the decades-long search to make alfalfa a safer livestock feed. While its virtues as a high quality, high protein legume for grazing, hay making and silage are well known, alfalfa (and, to a lesser extent, related clovers) have one major drawback - they can cause frothy bloat in cattle.

New opportunities

"If we can eliminate or greatly reduce the risk of bloat, it opens up several opportunities to increase the use of alfalfa by livestock," says Dr. Tim McAllister, a research scientist and livestock nutritionist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's (AAFC) Lethbridge Research Centre.

While several factors contribute to bloat, the fine point is that cattle grazing alfalfa are unable to eliminate gas that builds up in the rumen due to the formation of a stable foam. In minor cases, bloat puts cattle off feed; although in more serious cases, it can result in significant death losses in a relatively short period of time.

Bloat is difficult to predict. A wide range of variables such as forage type, forage maturity, rate of digestion, animal behavior, genetics, air temperature and moisture all have potential to influence bloat. These variables cause most livestock producers to approach alfalfa, particularly for pasture, either guardedly or to avoid it completely.

But that fear could be dramatically eased for producers able to administer Alfasure to grazing animals. The product, administered through drinking water, enables cattle grazing alfalfa to eliminate gas. Technically, Alfasure is classed as AEPD, which is a combination of alcohol ethoxylate and pluronic detergents. It acts as a surfactant, which reduces the stability of the foam in the rumen. Destabilizing the foam can eliminate gas.

Does Alfasure work? Research to date says yes. "We found the AEPD product to be 100 percent effective," says McAllister referring to an AAFC study conducted at three Western Canada locations involving both sheep and cattle. His research using the Blocare product pointed the way for the development of Alfasure.

In McAllister's study , control animals not supplied bloat control product, developed 102 cases of bloat out of 262 animal days on pasture. In the treated group, there were zero cases of bloat out of 715 animal days on pasture. Results of the study were published in the American Journal of Dairy Science.

Olson also points to his own research, which shows that in 100,000 animal days of grazing on high-risk pastures, there wasn't a single case of bloat. Alfasure costs about $0.15 per head per day for animals under 450 kilograms (less than 1000 pounds) and about $0.05 per head for animals over that weight. Over a 120-day grazing season that works out to $18 to $24 per head.

Critical to Alfasure's effectiveness is that it must be administered through a single water source on pasture, such as a water tank or other type of watering system. A tank with treated water, for example, has to be the only source of water for grazing livestock. Any bloat losses reported during product testing involved situations where cattle also had access to untreated water sources.

Feed efficiency

According to the AAFC research, access to higher protein alfalfa pastures could reduce beef finishing times by as much as one month, says McAllister. AAFC trials showed steers grazing alfalfa were ready for a finishing feedlot 30 days sooner than cattle on grass.

In the longer term, Olson sees the opportunity to finish more cattle on pasture rather than in feedlots. Particularly, calves from fall-calving beef herds could have access to good alfalfa pastures during the fall, be backgrounded over winter, and then finished on pasture the next summer, and ready for market that October.

Spring-born calves could be weaned earlier too, he suggests. For example, they could be removed from often less productive summer pastures in August, and placed on good alfalfa pasture to improve weight gains before being marketed.

One other potential benefit of increasing alfalfa production and grazing is a reduction of greenhouse gases. The vigorously growing pastures can help sequester more atmospheric carbon and improved feed quality can also reduce the amount of methane produced by livestock. For more details on the environmental benefits, visit the Canadian Cattlemen's Association website at: www.cattle.ca and go to their Stewardship section.

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