Shade – Livestock Do Better With It – And Here’s How to Add It

In this week's Livestock article we talk about how to start down the road of raising more heat tolerant cattle. But what can you do in the meantime? For this week's Classic by NatGLC, we've drawn on two articles we've published in the past to give you some ideas for adding shade to your pastures. We thought you'd like a more immediate solution to go this week's livestock article about breeding heat tolerant animals. Enjoy! Shade Is Good For Gain The first thing that happens to any creature when it gets hot is it slows down.  It eats less, and its body focuses on the minimum to get by until things cool down again.  For cattle producers that's bad news because average daily gain will go down.  What's the difference when animals have shade? • In a study by the University of Kentucky Animal Research Center on cattle with shade in late spring and early summer they noted these weight gains over those animals without shade: - 1.24 lbs/day for cows - .41 lbs/day for calves - .89 lbs/day for steers • University of Missouri researchers found that cattle who had shade while grazing endophyte-infected pastures  gained .72 lbs/day more than those without. • Finally, resea