cattle to clear brush

Donn:

I have a friend with Scottish Highlanders. He claims that they do a decent job on brush, but nothing like goats :). I attended a workshop with Kathy Voth who has done extensive research on training cows (all breeds) to a eat a variety of target weeds http://www.livestockforlandscapes.com/. She has a pretty simple training system and I saw some pretty impressive results of jersey heifers learning to eat Canada thistle, milkweed, and spotted knapweed.

Good luck.

George

Donn,
I have used my big team of oxen to clear brush to some extent. I just rotate them into an area where there is some brush and make sure the area is small enough that they have to eat the brush or go hungry. They will eat nearly everything when they don’t have the option of filling up on grass (they still won’t eat thistle). I have heard that some breeds will browse more readily, but i always wonder if they would really choose to eat leaves and weeds if there was fresh green grass available. I have also used goats on brush too and they are clearly happier at this job, you don’t have to starve them to get them onto the brush and weeds. I have been keeping my calves and goats together lately and I have been very happy with how they graze/browse the pastures they are in. The goats keep the weeds down and the cattle harvest the grass efficiently. Thier prefered diets don’t seem to overlap much and mixing allows both to have access to as much forage as they want. You could probably limit feed calves and get them to eat brush just like mature cattle without having goats in the mix, but i am hesitant to do this with younger animals as i want them to grow too. In my mind, this is easier to do with animals that aren’t growing anymore and have some fat reserves to draw from.

PS. I try to make sure the brushy areas I put the mature oxen on have some grass too. Its a balance to keep them healthy, but also hungry. Cattle tend to be perpetuly hungry and carry good sized fat reserves, so it’s not a hard balance to strike.

PPS. My mature team are Shorthorn Jersey crosses, but I am not sure breed has much to do with it if you rotate pastures and keep them hungry. I have never had Highlands, though, so can’t speak to that.

PPPS. I do also worry about if I am forcing my cattle to eat something poisonous by pushing them to eat everything in a small paddock. I do a careful scan of the area when I am fencing it in for poisonous plants. I am not sure if this is truly critical, but it made sense to me.

i got herefords and they really raise hell with brush. i turned them into a small field overgrown with red whips and they completely killed them in short order. the grass was belly deep and they ate the leaves off all the bushes before they ate the grass. second year their isnt even a stick of red whip and all the bigger stuff is ate as far as they can reach. about all i have left is apple trees with no low branches and they arent hungry as they have access to near 30 acres of pasture.

@Donn Hewes 36370 wrote:

In the places I am hoping to go I think it will be much easier to put in a temporary fence for cattle than for goats.

Electric netting for the goats.

This is an interesting conversation, and it is also intersting to see how different grazing techniques can frame one’s understanding of forage preferances. At first glance, it seems there that the feeding patterns of cattle might differ between if they are grazed under intensive vs extensive management. I was curious about this and did some reading. I put a link to a good article below, in case anyone else wants to do some reading too. I would hypothesize that diet preferances might not actually be different, but simply might apear different because of grazing styles. Let me explain… I believe that when cattle are grazed under an intensive system (like what I do), where they are moved every day and “clean thier plate” before they are moved, thier rumens are not full when they are moved. Thier first priority is then to fill thier enormous rumens, which might be why they focus on the grass first when I rotate. They are well adapted (wide mouths, thick tongue, heavy jaws) to take up large amounts of grass quickly. I am uncertain when they switch to brush and forbs in my system if they are doing so because they ran out of grass and their rumens still aren’t full or if they simply like the taste of some browse. Studies where cattle are given free choice (like the study below, and experiences of others listed here) seem to indicate that cattle do prefer to incorporate browse at a rate of about 7%, but this can range from 1% to 15% depending on season, study, region, etc. No matter what study I have looked at the vast majority of what cattle prefer to eat is grass. Thier might be potential to alter this somewhat with selective breeding, but I am skeptical how this can be altered and most of the reports I have seen are anecdotal. The paper below lists several key adaptations that browsers have that make them better browsers. Key adaptations include narrow mouth openings, flexible lips, narrow flexible tongue, sharp teeth, large salivary glands, altered distribution of rumen papilea, large liver, etc. These important features are clearly evident when you compare goats to cattle, but are there clear differences in these features when you compare different breeds of cattle? I am skeptical of this…

This is not to say that cattle are not good eaters of browse, as many people have pointed out. Even though thier natural preferance would be to eat a relatively low percentage of browse, thier overall vastly different total intake makes them competative with goats. Using the figures from the reference below, a 900 lb steer would prefer to eat about the same amount of browse as 150 lbs of goat(s) (900lbs x 2% DMI x 7% = 1.3lbs : 150lbs x 2% DMI x 43% = 1.3 lbs). The steer needs to eat 4 times as much total food, though, and this would require almost 10 times as much grass and forbs (900 x 2% DMI – 1.3lbs = 16.7lbs : 150 x 2% – 1.3lbs = 1.7 lbs).

So, all together, it seems there might be two different strategies to use cattle to eat brush, with potential advantages and disadvantages to both. One would be to supply cattle with plently of grass and let them choose to supplement thier diet at a low percentage with browse. The downside is you have to the extra grass to support their daily needs (which is a limiting factor for people like me without a lot of land). Alternatively, you can graze with limited paddock sizes so that they are forced to utilize browse, and monitor thier intake and condition carefully. The disadvantage of this is that it is management intensive and requires more observation.

For me, the choice of goats for some of this work was simply a matter of not having enough total biomass on the farm to feed enough cattle to do the brush clearing I wanted to do. I think this is where goats truly shine, clearing brush preferentially without requiring intensive management to force them onto a diet they don’t prefer and without making a big impact in the amount of grass I have to feed other animals.

I hope this it interesting food for thought for others. It was interesting reading for me.

More reading:
http://trinitywaters.org/media/4521/what_range_herbivores_eat.pdf

That was indeed a interesting article. This topic has been on the top of my mind for a while now. I call myself and forester and do prefer that work however the past several years I have concentrated on invasive plant control for the summer months. Its kind of a love hate relationship. I hate running through multiflora rose and barberry all day with a tank of herbicide but I love the pay check it provides. I have been trying to figure out if I can use animal power to do this work for clients. My instinct is to go for cattle because of the ease of temporary fence for them verses electric netting for goats, that I would guess would be a royal pain in a mass of invasive shrubs. I was expecting I would have to supply some amount of hay to sustain the animals and they would browse shrubs and brush out of boredom when the daily ration of hay was gone. Not to steer this too far of topic but any thoughts are welcome.
~Tom

I have tried some techniques with the animals I have, but haven’t been doing it for long enough to know for sure what works best.

Tom, I have run multistrand electric fence (not net) through some previously very brushy areas. I use a walk behind string trimmer with a chainsaw blade attachment (link below). Two passes with this tool and you have a good clear fenceline.

http://www.drpower.com/twostepmodeldetail.aspx?Name=trmbeaverblade

That said, I wasn’t incredibly impressed with the areas I exposed to goats alone. They do a bang-up job at defoliating brush and small trees, but they only eat a moderate amount of weeds and grass. On all of these plants, they tend to eat only the best parts (leaves on the browse, the new growth on weeds, any seed heads on grass, any lush new growth on grass, etc). This leaves a substantial amount of ugly “stuff” behind (stripped twigs that used to be brush, the woody parts of weeds, tall mature grass, etc). I was wanting to go from brush and weeds to pasture, and I like the results of cattle and goats together a lot more. In my still evolving system, the cattle do much of the “heavy lifting” of eating the easy to get to vegetation (both young and mature grasses, many weeds, some browse), and this forces the goats onto the vegetation that is not so easy to get to or is less desireable to cattle (some types of thorny bushes, thick brush with leaves burried under and behind branches, weeds and brush unpalatable to cattle). I think this allows both animals to do what they do best. The cattle also provide some trampling action in some areas, which is nice, and they seem to do this more when the bush is reduced to twigs and/or stripped brambles. My cattle tend to have to be pushed hard to get onto some types of thorny plants with small leaves especilially those that form thick brambles. Goats are great as defoliating this stuff. Despite the moderate limitations of cattle with respect to browsing, they are definately the backbone of my grazing system. I use the goats as specialists that don’t cost much to keep around and can be brought in for specific jobs in specific situations. I think they are both useful and prehaps a “perfect” biological brush/weeds to pasture system would include mixed grazing.

More reading, which addresses the seasonality of control systems
http://www.caf.wvu.edu/~forage/control_plantings.htm