Forage Management: Grateful for 2024, Looking Ahead to Greener Pastures in 2025

Dec 18, 2024

By Dr. Bruno Pedreira

Leading the UT Beef and Forage Center (UTBFC) this past year has been a rewarding experience, made possible with the great support of David McIntosh as our coordinator. Over the year, I’ve learned more about Tennessee’s forage and livestock industries, built strong connections with agents and farmers, and worked to improve the Center’s activities. Our goal remains the same: to support Tennessee’s beef and forage producers by providing research and sharing practical, science-based information.

In 2024, we reached some exciting milestones. We launched the Live.Stock Podcast and Companion, which you can find at utbeef.tennessee.edu/live-stock, giving producers access to helpful and engaging content. Our YouTube channel also grew, with 23.2K views, over 1,000 hours of watch time, and an increase in subscribers from 322 to 641. The UTBEEF.COM website received 171K views from 139K unique users. Social media allowed us to share timely information, including a post about armyworms in pastures that reached over 70,000 people and was shared nearly 300 times. We also continued sharing articles with Tennessee Cattle Business Magazine, which reaches over 7,000 producers across the state.

The Forage Laboratory analyzed more than 1,500 forage samples for producers and processed over 9,000 research samples using NIRS technology, saving nearly $400,000 compared to traditional testing methods.

Our forage variety trials made progress this year. New reports for Tall Fescue, Orchardgrass, and Annual Ryegrass are available at utbeef.tennessee.edu/forages-tennessee-variety-trials/. We also expanded warm-season trials to include Brachiaria and are planning trials for alfalfa, mixed pastures, and winter/early spring annuals.

We updated and developed several new Extension publications, including The Forage and Field Seeding Guide, Strategic Resource Management for Forage-Livestock Systems in Drought, Longhorned Tick and Bovine Theileriosis: Tennessee 2024 Update, Weed Control Strategies to Maximize Cool-Season Pasture Productivity, Buying Hay vs. Raising Hay for Beef Producers, among others.

We also welcomed Malerie Fancher as a new research assistant, along with several undergraduate students and visiting scholars who have brought fresh energy and ideas to the team.

As the year wraps up, I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together and excited to see what 2025 has in store for Tennessee’s beef and forage industries. Here’s to another great year ahead!

Source : tennessee.edu

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”