Homeowner Forum / Rural Living / July 2008

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/jul/21/cow-school-teaches-bovines-munch-weeds/

Cow school teaches bovines to munch weeds

Grazing cattle help to rid open space of invasive plants

By Laura Snider (Contact)
Monday, July 21, 2008

When Kathy Voth honks her horn, the cows come running — all 90 of
them, including 44 calves and two bulls — with saliva slinging off
their wide lips as they lope toward her white pickup truck.

This week, Voth is training the herd of cows grazing just west of
Superior to widen its culinary horizons beyond the typical diet of
native grasses to include invasive species, essentially creating weed-
munching machines. The hope is that the cows, which are already
grazing on county open space land, can eat the undesirable plants and
fatten themselves up in the process.

“We want strong, healthy animals who eat the things we want them to
eat,” Voth said.

This is the second year of Voth’s cow school, which is being funded by
a small research grant from Boulder County Parks and Open Space. Last
year at about this same time, Voth taught a group of heifers to eat
diffuse knapweed, which the city of Boulder’s Web site calls the “King
of Noxiousness.”

“I was a little skeptical to begin with,” said Steve Sauer, weed
coordinator for Boulder County Parks and Open Space. “This time of the
year (diffuse knapweed) is pretty nasty, real dry. It’s real rough and
if I was a cow, I don’t think I’d want to eat it.”

But with a little creative behavior-reinforcement training, Voth got
the cows eating the knapweed — a lot of it — and now the cows, all new
moms, are teaching their calves to chew on knapweed as well.

This year, the target weed is Dalmation toadflax, a waxy-leafed plant
with yellow flowers that can produce half a million seeds over its
three-year lifespan.

“Oh, that guy’s eating a big bite,” Voth said Monday as she leaned
against her truck, pointing her video camera at an Angus who was
chewing with a toadflax hanging of his mouth. “Good job.”

The cows clustered around Voth’s truck were shoving their heads into
buckets filled with a mix of rolled oats laced with molasses, wheat
bran and Dalmation toadflax.

Since late last week, Voth and her assistant, Leah Ashley, have been
feeding the cows tasty foods they don’t recognize. The idea is to use
positive feedback to get the cows used to eating the unusual. Starting
Sunday, Voth pulled the switch, mixing the weeds in with the good
stuff. The hope is that the cows recognize the weed and begin to graze
on them out in the pasture.

Voth’s idea of training cows was born during her tenure with the
Bureau of Land Management in Utah. There she worked in conjunction
with scientists on a seven-year project using goats to eat invasive
plants. The problem, she found, was not with the goats (they’ll eat
anything), it was with the ranchers, who weren’t too keen to mix goats
in with their livestock.

“It’s easier to teach cows to eat weeds than it is to teach ranchers
to include goats,” she said.

Since then, Voth has started her own company, Livestock for
Landscapes, and has taught cows how to eat non-toxic weeds from
California to Wyoming. The newly trained Boulder County cows will head
to a test pasture next week to see whether toadflax has caught on as a
favored treat.

The prognosis is good, according to Voth, who has so far never met a
cow she couldn’t train to eat a weed.