A cow’s diet just might be a surprising one for many

By JANE W. GRAHAM
AFP Correspondent

Wytheville, Va. — “What do cows eat?” Kathy Voth of Livestock for Landscapes asked a packed conference room during one of the Virginia Forage and Grasslands Council’s winter meetings on Jan. 17.
“Weeds,” is the answer she wanted from her listeners, acknowledging that most farmers who feed their livestock on grass and other forages spend a lot of time and money fighting weeds.
Using a slide show to help her make her points, Voth maintained that livestock will eat weeds if they are taught to do so. She used pictures of sheep first, showing how she introduces lambs to weeds during a week of planned steps.
Voth is known nationally as an expert in using livestock as a land management tools. In bringing her to Virginia, VFGC recognized that she used “decades of university research and practical hands-on experiences” to invent a process for teaching cows to eat weeds and other non-traditional forages.”
Her methods make use of livestock’s natural behavior as an inexpensive alternative for managing weeds and other vegetation on pastures and other landscapes.
She told the farmers that an animal’s mother is the most important factor in teaching it to eat.
The young will eat what its mother eats. Voth said she has been surprised at how hard it is for animals to learn to eat something new.
She noted that like humans, animals suffer from neophobia, the fear of something new.
Voth contended that animals will eat more than humans think they can.
She startled the crowd with a slide she said haunted her for months as she tried to find out “why?”
It was a slide made in the Netherlands that showed a big steer eating a rabbit carcass.
Her research led her to learn that the animal had just found the body and begin chewing on it and learned it met a nutrient requirement.
The Dutch soil is low in phosphorous and rabbits have a lot of phosphorous in their bodies, the Dutch scientists found out as they tried to figure out what they had taken a picture of.
The animal had found a way to satisfy a nutritional need, she reported.
Animal are much better at mixing their feed to meet their nutritional needs that humans with all their science, she stressed.
They learn what foods have toxins that make them feel sick or that taste wrong and which one meets their nutritional needs by tasting good or making them feel good.
“Animals can mix their own diets,” she said.
She went on to explain that if animals are given the things that are in a total mixed ration they will subconsciously mix them and achieve the same rate of gain at 20 percent less cost.
One of the surprising things Voth said she has learned is that flavor does not determine palatability that palatability determines flavor.
While the animals’ bodies and brains work together to recognize toxins in plants, people need to know what plants contain toxins as they seek to use Voth’s methods.
She noted that a good number of plants considered to be weeds are higher in nutrients than grasses.
“I began to rethink my assumptions about cows,” she said. She pointed out that in earlier centuries cattle had been wintered on giant turnips, carrots and potatoes.
She wondered why farmers are spending so much money on wee eradication when these plants have so much nutritional value.
She introduces picked weeds to small groups of animals, treating the weeds with something that tastes really good to the animal, then works with the animals with varying “treats” and plain weeds until in about a week they are eating the weeds she wants them to eat.
She prefers putting the feed in tubs where about three calves can eat but have to compete for the food to use the competition to help the learning process.
She said she has found weed-eating cattle to be healthy cattle in the eight grazing seasons she has worked with this method.
To learn more about Voth and her livestock methods go to www.livestockforlandscapes.com.
The winter conferences moved across the state Jan. 17-20 with meetings taking place in Weyers Cave, Gordonsville and Chatham as well as Wytheville.