Water is a valuable resource and Oklahoma State University will be looking at ways the cattle industry can reduce it water demands. OSU recently received a million dollar research grant from the US Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture to look at water utilization by beef cattle. Lead researcher Dr. Megan Rolf, animal science assistant professor with OSU's Division of Agriculture talked with Ron Hays of the Radio Oklahoma Network about the research project.
The cattle industry has worked for decades on feed usage and feed intake, but research on water usage has been limited. Rolf said there was a research project back in the 1950s and 60s that collected individual animal water intake on small number of animals. Recently there has been some recent work on water consumption of animals in large feedlots, but that has been based on group of animals.
"One of the unique things about our study that has been enabled by the Instatech facility that we've got out at the Willard Sparks beef research center is that we can actually collect individual animal water intake on a really large number of animals," Rolf said.
The OSU research project is focused on natural resource usage in terms of feed efficiency, water-use efficiency and water as a economically important use. Rolf said they have found the animal that drank the most drank about three times as much water on a daily average as the animal that drank the least.
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