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Show Cattle Make Good Gains on Crested Wheatgrass Pasture Floyd C. Noel, local forest ranger ran-ger on the Dixie national forest, reports results of a grazing study stu-dy conducted at Pine Valley the past eight years to determine gains made by cattle on crested wheatgrass and the open mountain moun-tain range. I The over-all average gain for the einht vears of the study is 1.97 pounds per head per day for the cattle on crested wheat-grass wheat-grass pasture as against a gain of 1.1 pounds per day made by cattle on the open range. For a grazing season of 120 days, this would amount to a gain of 236 pounds for the pasture cattle and , 132 pounds per head for the I open range cattle, or a difference of 104 pounds per head. With a market price of 20 cents per pound, the pasture cattle would bring an average return of $17.20 per head gained while on pasture, and the open range cattle would bring an average return of $26.40 per head. The diffierence of $20.80 per head indicates the gross profit gained by grazing on the crested wheat-grass wheat-grass pasture. Assuming that the proper carrying capacity of the reseeded pasture is l's acres per cow month, and the open range is 10 acres per cow month, the gross profit per seeded acre would be $7.86 compared to 06 cents per acre on the open range. Results of this study show that western sagebrush range can b? reseeded to grass and produce pro-duce about 10 times the amount of beef per acre than they produced pro-duced before reseeding. |