NDSU Extension Livestock Water Quality Program Nationally Recognized

Jul 21, 2022

The North Dakota State University Extension Livestock Water Quality Program received the national Search for Excellence award in the Livestock Production category from the National Association of County Agriculture Agents (NACAA). The program was recognized at a ceremony held July 19 at the NACAA Annual Meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Search for Excellence in Livestock Production award recognizes an outstanding extension educational program in livestock production.

“The Livestock Water Quality Program was developed to raise awareness of the impacts of water quality on livestock health and performance, increase the number of producers screening and testing livestock water sources, resulting in reduced livestock losses due to toxic water condition and the development of alternative livestock water sources,” says Miranda Meehan, NDSU Extension livestock environmental stewardship specialist and a leader of the program.

The program team created an on-farm monitoring program involving 38 Extension agents who sampled water sources in 39 counties for total dissolved solids and sulfates. Extension agents screened 1,841 livestock water samples from 1,481 locations in 2020 and 2021.

TDS screenings identified 136 sources that may contribute to poor livestock performance,146 sources with the potential to negatively impact livestock health, and 20 with deadly TDS levels. Sulfate screenings (2021 only) identified 329 sources that may be toxic to livestock.

The results of screening resulted in management changes at 24% of the locations with water quality concerns in 2020 and 65% of the locations in 2021. Management changes included the additional monitoring of water sources, livestock being excluded or moved, water hauling and ranchers evaluating alternative water options.

“The screenings saved approximately 40,000 head of livestock and had the potential to increase health and performance of an additional 34,000 head,” says Meehan.

Follow-up surveys indicated 50% of participants intended to monitor water quality and/or install water developments and 28 participants had installed a livestock water development.

NDSU Extension used the data collected through this program to demonstrate drought impacts to livestock water availability and quality in 2021 to state and federal agencies, resulting in approximately $7 million allocated to livestock water improvement projects.

Source : ndsu.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids