VTechWorks staff will be away for the Thanksgiving holiday beginning at noon on Wednesday, November 27, through Friday, November 29. We will resume normal operations on Monday, December 2. Thank you for your patience.

Browsing by Author "Pent, Gabriel"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Building Partnerships to Address Social and Technological Challenges to Enhance Farm Profitability and Improve Water Quality Through Better Grassland Management
    Stafford, Carl; Clark, Robert; Ritchie, Liesel A.; Pent, Gabriel; Fike, John H.; Benner, John; Swanson, Carrie; Baker, Scott; Mize, Timothy; Temu, Vitalis; Payne, Kathryn; Gill, Duane A.; Mullins, D.; McGuire, R.; Teutsch, Chris; Thomason, Wade E.; Grev, Amanda; Blevins, Phil; Clarke, C.; Poore, Matt; Booher, Matt; Stanley, Tom; Halich, Greg; Bovay, John; Love, Kenner; Byington, amy A.; Baldwin, Elizabeth; Haugen, Inga (2023-05-15)
    With 2.1 million acres of pastureland and 1.25 million acres of hay land in Virginia, the rural Virginia landscape is predominately grassland. These lands form the base of the $3.96 billion-dollar livestock and dairy industry in Virginia. Managing these livestock in a profitable manner for farmers and beneficial to the environment is important. A cultural tradition with roots in colonial times has been to run animals in large fields year-round throughout Virginia. Livestock often graze from spring until fall (about 220 days), and farmers feed hay the remainder of the year. Spikes in the cost of fuel, fertilizer, and equipment are making traditional grazing/haying systems less profitable. The Virginia Cooperative Extension Farm Enterprise budgets show that that the cost of hay accounts for over 50% of the cost of sustaining livestock annually. University of Kentucky shows that most cow-calf producers maximize their profitability by shifting from grazing 220 days to grazing 275 to 300 days. Extension agents working with livestock producers found that they could improve their profitability by at least $75 per cow by extending their grazing season. The same phenomenon applies to other types of grazing livestock. If ten percent of the livestock producers in the state adopted better grazing management to extend their grazing season by 60 days, profitability is expected to for Virginia grazing livestock producers by over $5 million per year. Practices such as rotational grazing and stream exclusion are directly tied to National and State goals to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. Virginia’s Phase III WIP (Chesapeake Bay Watershed Improvement Plan) seeks the exclusion of livestock from all perennial streams and achieving good rotational grazing practices on 347,000 acres of pasture. A number of agencies and private sector groups have been providing cost share and technical guidance to incentivize livestock stream exclusion and the installation of pasture management infrastructure. Installation is only part of the challenge. Farmers also need to be taught how to how to manage the system in a profitable manner and have been slow to adopt good pasture management practices. Preliminary data show that 87% of Virginia’s cow-calf producers manage their grasslands using traditional methods. Only six percent have extended their grazing season beyond 265 days.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Clipping Heifer Hair Coats Can Briefly Reduce Fescue Toxicosis Symptoms
    Beard, Christopher T.; Pent, Gabriel J.; Swecker, Terry; Abaye, Azenegashe Ozzie (Virginia Tech, 2022-11-10)
    A substantial challenge for many beef cattle producers is developing beef heifers into mature, productive cows in a timely and profitable manner. At the Shenandoah Valley Agricultural Research and Extension Center (SVAREC), fall-born replacement heifer candidates are artificially inseminated (AI) in December at 14-15 months of age with a target weight of 350-380 kg. Achieving this level of weight gain through the summer months has been difficult due to heat stress and the utilization of toxic endophyte-infected tall fescue. Tall fescue is the predominant species of forage found at SVAREC. The purpose of this project was to determine if clipping the hair coats of beef heifers would reduce the heat stress that the heifers experience during the summer months. Heifer hair coats were scored in the spring when they were approximately 9 months old and had an average weight of 200 kg in year one and 256 kg in year two. Heifers were scored on a five-point ranked scale, with a score of 1 indicating complete shedding of hair and a score of 5 indicating that no shedding has occurred. Heifers with a hair coat score of 4 or 5 were utilized for this project. The selected group of heifers scoring a hair coat score of 4 or 5 (32 in year one and 23 in year two) were randomly assigned to a control cohort and a clipped cohort. The heifers in the clipped treatment group were sheared with variable speed clippers along the body of the heifer, but not from under the belly or along the legs. Heifer hair coats were scored again at the end of the study on day 113. Vaginal temperature loggers were used to record core body temperatures every ten minutes during several sampling periods. At the conclusion of these 16-week trials, most of the control heifers retained their hair coats while the heifers that had been clipped regrew their hair coats. There was significant period by treatment interaction for the response of heifer average daily gains to clipping (P=0.0002). Average daily gains of the clipped heifers (0.4 kg/day) exceeded the average daily gains of the control heifers (0.1 kg/day) only in the first four-week period of each year (P<0.0001), but there were no differences in total seasonal average daily gain (0.3 kg/day; P=0.1631). There was significant treatment by hour interaction in the analysis of heifer vaginal temperatures (P<0.0001), with clipped heifers cooler than control heifers through most of the night and morning hours, but not in the afternoon. In conclusion, clipping heifers resulted in only short-term benefits to weight gains for heifers stocked on toxic endophyte-infected tall fescue pastures, but clipping did result in reduced core body temperatures throughout the summer months. Additional work could explore the effects of clipping heifers at regular intervals during periods of high temperatures and humidity, such as at monthly intervals.