I like to think about how nature intended things to be, while still asking how we can use this knowledge to be profitable and clever in our farm businesses. What I have learnt from my discussion with Fred Provenza this week, about animal behaviour and grazing, is the perfect example of this. Our agricultural sciences are sometimes much focussed around reductionist techniques and the physiology of plants and animals. While we can learn a lot from this, there is also merit in standing back to observe a living thing interacting in its natural system (its ecology) and then discovering how we can use this to our advantage.
This is just what Fred Provenza, Professor Emeritus of Animal Behaviour and Management at Utah State University has done. Fred’s real-world observations of wild and domestic animals along with his research of the past 40 years are all about how animals make a living through where they live and how they forage. If I were to pick out a few words from his writings and my discussion with him that reflect the work it would be: Animal Health through Nutrition.
Fred and I also had some fascinating discussion about how much could be learnt about our own eating habits and health from this work with animals.
This is important in our grazing enterprises because true animal health will reduce the need for remedial animal health costs in our businesses. It will also help to achieve high calving, lambing and weaning rates – an important profitability factor in breeding enterprises. It will also limit costly inputs of forage crops and pastures, by having our animals learn how to utilise diverse native pastures.
With animals, CHOOSING what to eat is actually a LEARNED behaviour, from the mother and from the various feedbacks from EXPERIENCE. More and more we are realising the influence of environment on animals and that their genes are not necessarily their destiny. Hence the advent of epigenetics.
The 3 Principles of Animal Behaviour
These three words highlighted above bring us to the three basic principles that Fred has observed with regard to animal behaviour and feeding.
1. Experiences in utero and in early life are important for animals to become locally adapted to their surrounding social and physical landscapes.
2. Animals receive feedback from their organs and organ systems – digestive system, lungs, heart, and so forth – from the forages they learn to eat that help them to become locally adapted and in tune with need, a palate in tune with the landscapes it inhabits.
3. Biodiversity of plants creates choice and ability to choose, which is critical for animals to meet needs for nutrients and to self-medicate.
These three principles are merely just that, principles – they are not intended as prescriptive. Indeed, when thoroughly understand these principles enable a variety of practices often considered to be unconventional from the view of ‘genes as destiny.’
I have wanted to write about animal nutrition for a while, but I have regularly thought “Where do I start?” Well, I am now satisfied that this is a great place to start, and with the links back to human health as well, it gels well with me.
What’s in a feed?
While Fred’s work is much about animal behaviour, I would like to start by going back to the basics of animal feedstuffs. Typically with animal nutrition, the primary components of feedstuffs are where the focus lies. These you will be familiar with. They are:
- Energy
- Protein
- Minerals
- Vitamins
- Water
These are most certainly important and definitely related to short-term weight gain performance of animals, but can we achieve overall animal health, immunity, fertility and more by simply satisfying these primary components?
To have full animal health, we must look further to the secondary components of animal feedstuffs. These are equally as important but often overlooked. These secondary compounds are things like:
- Phenolics
- Terpenes
- Alkaloids
- Tannins
These secondary compounds can exist in varying levels in plants depending on species, season, region, time of day and the resources available to the plant. They can be anything from toxic to nutritious – and this can vary depending on the quantities and combinations in which they are consumed by the animal. The dose makes the toxin both for nutrients and secondary compounds.
These phytochemicals (primary and secondary compounds together), are responsible for flavour of a plant, as well as for the satiety that they provide. They allow animals to self-medicate – “to alleviate bloat, enhance protein utilisation and immune responses, and increase resistance to gastrointestinal nematodes and to improve reproductive efficiency.”2
If we look back to the three principles, we can see how these phytochemicals are relevant.
- Animal offspring learn from their mothers, both in utero and as young to become locally adapted to their landscapes. They learn which plants may be toxic, which are nutritious and which will help to solve ailments (given the effects of the different phytochemicals). They learn these things relevant to the plants in their area. Take these animals to a different area and it can, at worst, be fatal, as the local knowledge is lacking. It can take adult animals up to 3 years to adapt to the point of performing at their peak in a new area. These effects of moving are worst when taken from a ‘soft’ environment to a ‘harsh’ environment.
- Animals receive feedback from their organs and systems that help them to become locally adapted. There are amazingly complex systems in animals that provide feedback to the animal via hormones, neurotransmitters and more. “Animals learn to associate flavours of foods with their post ingestive consequences”.5 Amazingly, various organs of animals will vary in their form and the way that they function as they adapt to different feedtypes! And all of that actually begins to develop in utero and early in life.
- Choice and ability to choose, and to have a variety of alternatives, is important for animals’ nutrition and self-medication. We feed animals on monoculture pastures and forage crops, where their ability to select for specific health giving phytochemicals is dramatically reduced. What we consider a ‘weed’ may well be a highly useful plant to livestock. It is important that we give animals choice in their feed, and they will reward us with performance and good health (when done in a locally adapted landscape).
These three principles apply directly to human beings. We as humans have all but lost the intuition to know what foods will heal us, domestic animals still have it to a degree and wild animals most certainly know. The conclusions he reaches regarding how we as a species have dulled or eliminated our ability to adjust diets to meet our true nutritional needs is sobering if not frightening. Of course, as humans we are hampered by the quality of the food we are offered and by the food industry’s treatment of food.
As Fred notes, “Agriculture practices in industrialised countries have increased yields of fruits, vegetables, and grains two to three fold … but these increases in growth came at the expense of phytochemical richness”.3 This has ongoing effects for animal health, but also for us as we consume the plants and animals from these production systems. “Phytochemical richness has declined 5%-40% in 43 fruit, vegetables and grain in the past 40 years”4. They are lacking in the foods we eat and in the feed our animals consume. And that which is not in our livestock is then not in the meat we consume, which has issues for flavour, hunger satisfaction and, importantly, our health.
I believe we will see more and more research into the behavioral ecology of farming and grazing, because it deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings1. It is a more holistic view. Let’s support our domestic livestock to keep this skill by the farming and grazing systems that we choose.
Over the next few weeks I will take the 3 principles described above and explain the on farm application for each, giving examples of real life situations and ideas for how they can help your business.
Fred and the team at Utah University bring all this together with their BEHAVE programme, which is
Behavioural
Education for
Human
Animal
Vegetation and
Ecosystem Management
Fred Provenza will be visiting Australia in mid March of next year, so there will be the opportunity to hear him speak about this fascinating subject. As for the US subscribers, you have him all the time!
References
2, 3 & 4.Provenza, F.D., M. Meuret, and P. Gregorini. 2015. What humans can learn from herbivores about nourishing links between palates and landscapes. Appetite, submitted.