It’s still hot and dry at the Kerr Center, and, while the staff are working hard, the livestock are taking it easy:
Recently, the livestock team, accompanied by Kerr Center President and CEO Jim Horne, met to discuss the pastured hog operation here at the ranch.
Jim Horne (president and CEO) checks out Pongo the breeding boar
All of the Kerr Center hogs are purebred Large Blacks, a heritage breed that is heat-tolerant and exceptionally good at foraging. The hogs are kept on pasture year-round, even building their own grass nests before birthing and having their piglets out in the field.
The large majority of hogs raised today in the US are raised in indoor intensive systems, not on pasture in free-range systems as were common only a couple of generations ago. For this reason, there has been little to no research done recently on the ability of good-foraging hogs to reduce their feed consumption by consuming pasture. Through observation of our Large Black hogs, we estimate that forage makes up about half of their current diet, with a commercial pig ration making up the other half. With the cost of commercial feed rising weekly, it would be extremely beneficial to us to see whether we can increase the percentage of our hogs’ diet that is forage by placing the hogs on high-quality pasture and/or planting high-energy crops for them like radishes or sorghum-sudan.
Large Black hogs have fallen out of favor with producers because they are slow-maturing and take about a year to grow out before they can be turned into a pork product. However, we think that if we can find a way to use the traits particular to their breed (foraging ability, mothering ability, heat tolerance) to produce a pork product that requires much fewer inputs than products from other breeds do, they can still be profitable.
While out in the pig pasture, we discovered a different hard-working kind of animal:
Dung beetles! We observed about a dozen large dung beetles working hard at disassembling a pile of pig manure. It was fascinating to watch the beetles form the manure into balls and push those balls along the ground and down into the holes where they live, where the nutrients in the dung will feed their larvae. We are always excited to see dung beetles in our pastures because their presence is proof that we are doing a good job at integrating livestock into the natural working system that already exists in our pasture environment. As the hogs and other livestock provide food for the dung beetles, earthworms, and other species that live in the soil, the soil-dwellers will in turn use that manure to fertilize the soil and promote grass growth to feed the livestock.
Different species of dung beetle prefer different types of manure and have different methods of breaking that manure down for their use. When we observe dung beetle activity in cattle manure, we usually don’t even see the beetles themselves, just the evidence that they have left behind. These dung beetles are much smaller and, instead of moving balls of dung along the pasture’s surface, instead prefer to drill little holes through the cattle patties, tunneling into the soil beneath the patties and bringing bits of manure with them. The dung beetles also drain the moisture from the patties, quickly turning this:
into this:
Removing the moisture from the cattle patty like this ensures that the patty is no longer a hospitable environment for the eggs and larvae of internal and external parasites, which can harm livestock and inhibit production.
For these reasons we love our dung beetles and call them, earthworms, and other creatures that live in the ground and break down manure our “soil livestock”. We care for them the best we can by limiting the use of dewormers in our animals. Deworming will kill soil livestock when remnants of the dewormer make their way through the wormed animal and into the manure which the soil livestock consume.
We at the Kerr Center are also continuing to work with the 57 bucks that are currently participating in our Oklahoma Forage-Based Buck Test, which measures the ability yearling bucks to gain weight and maintain a low parasite load on pasture.
We recently brought the bucks up from their pasture to the working facilities to get a current weight and a fecal sample to measure for parasites.
We collect a weight and fecal sample every 17 days for the entirety of the test, which runs each year from the beginning of July to the end of September.
Carrie Shirley (livestock intern) holds a buck while Rock Gremillion (livestock intern) takes a fecal sample and Erin Campbell-Craven (livestock program assistant) adjusts the buck’s ID collar
After the buck work is complete, the bucks are free to go back to their pasture where they can continue to eat and grow….
…while the livestock team uses microscopes to read the fecal samples for signs of parasites that can be harmful to the bucks.
Health-wise, the bucks have been doing well in this hot and dry weather, which inhibits parasite growth. However, with little grass and forb growth happening during this drought, they have had to find some alternate sources of nutrition.
The bucks have been munching on honey locust trees, which ran rampant in some of our pastures and are seen as invasive by many ranchers and farmers because they can spread rapidly and out-compete desirable grass species, especially during hot and dry weather. Honey locusts also have a nasty reputation for harming livestock and damaging tires with their long, sharp thorns.
The bucks are helping control the spread of new honey locust seedlings in the pasture by eating the leaves and stripping off the bark of the seedlings, stunting the growth of the young trees or killing them completely. They also eat leaves from the lower branches of taller honey locust trees, stunting the tree before it has a chance to develop new pods which will be sent out to grow into new seedlings.
Andy Makovy (ranch herdsman) helps the bucks out by bringing some taller branches of a honey locust tree within their reach
In cattle or hay production systems, goats can be used to great effect to control or even eliminate the spread of invasive species, like the honey locust, in pastures where those species are unwanted and detrimental to production. Using goats to replace the mechanical and chemical methods used to control and remove honey locusts (like cutting, burning, or spraying) can save a rancher huge amounts of time and money, as well as providing an alternate source of income through goat production.
For more on the Oklahoma Forage-Based Buck Test, go to http://www.kerrcenter.com/stewardship/ok-ram-and-buck-test.html
For more on brush control with goats, go to http://www.kerrcenter.com/publications/brushcontrol_goats.html
– Erin Campbell-Craven, Livestock Program Assistant
Kerr Center: day to day on the farm & ranch 