Increased pasture intake and reduced supplement requirements of sheep and cattle

Summary

Low live weight gain or live weight loss occurs in cattle and sheep when they graze nutrient (crude protein, phosphorus) deficient diets. Supplementation with limiting nutrients addresses this issue to some extent, but supplement intake and live weight responses are variable and supplement costs are often high.

The overall aim of this project is to utilise novel, non‐nutritional approaches to increase feed intake of cattle when grazing nutrient deficient pastures and reduce the cost of production by decreasing supplement requirements.

If outputs were to deliver increases in intake of low-quality forage of 20-30% then increases in liveweight gain of 0.2kg/day may be achievable; without the use of supplementation.

Objectives

The primary objectives of this project are to:

• identify critical genes and gene pathways in ruminants to target non‐nutritional compounds to increase feed intake
• identify non‐nutritional delivery methods to increase intake of nutrient deficient (crude protein and phosphorus) pastures or crop residues by ruminants.

Benefits to industry

The practical issue that this project seeks to solve is that ruminants consume diets that are deficient in nutrients (e.g. protein in the dry season) and therefore productivity is low due to both the low quality of the diet and the accompanying reduction in voluntary feed intake.

The issue is of relevance to most grassfed beef and sheep producers, especially in the northern beef sector, which faces protein and phosphorus deficiencies in the dry and wet season, respectively.