Production Systems Involving Stocker Cattle and Soft Red Winter Wheat

A three year study at the Livestock and Forestry Research Station near Batesville, Arkansas evaluated production systems involving stocker cattle and soft red winter wheat. Grazing of soft red winter wheat forage from October through February followed by harvesting wheat grain or grazing through April with stocker cattle offers an alternative to conventional farming. Soft red winter wheat, when planted by September 15, produces an ample supply of high-quality forage that supports rapid growth of stocker cattle during October through April. Net income from stocker cattle averaged over $100 per acre. A normal wheat grain crop can also be harvested. These alternative production systems could increase the agricultural income by over$75,000,000 per year if 750,000 acres of wheat are grazed

Evaluation of Small Grain Forage Crops and Cultivars of Soft Red Winter Wheat for Stocker Cattle

Use of small grain forage crops for stocker cattle production was extensively evaluated in two separate three-year research projects at the Livestock and Forestry Branch Research Station near Batesville, Ark. The first section of this Research Report presents results of a study in which 216 commercial crossbred steers (Avg. body weights 463 lb) grazed forage of wheat, oats, rye, ryegrass, wheat + rye, wheat + ryegrass, rye + ryegrass, and wheat + rye + ryegrass during the winter and spring months from 1999 through 2002. Grazing of these forages during the winter and spring provides excellent gains in stocker cattle and could increase the agricultural income for the state by over 100 million dollars per year

Dynamic Phenotypic Clustering in Noisy Ecosystems

In natural ecosystems, hundreds of species typically share the same environment and are connected by a dense network of interactions such as predation or competition for resources. Much is known about how fixed ecological niches can determine species abundances in such systems, but far less attention has been paid to patterns of abundances in randomly varying environments. Here, we study this question in a simple model of competition between many species in a patchy ecosystem with randomly fluctuating environmental conditions. Paradoxically, we find that introducing noise can actually induce ordered patterns of abundance-fluctuations, leading to a distinct periodic variation in the correlations between species as a function of the phenotypic distance between them; here, difference in growth rate. This is further accompanied by the formation of discrete, dynamic clusters of abundant species along this otherwise continuous phenotypic axis. These ordered patterns depend on the collective behavior of many species; they disappear when only individual or pairs of species are considered in isolation. We show that they arise from a balance between the tendency of shared environmental noise to synchronize species abundances and the tendency for competition among species to make them fluctuate out of step. Our results demonstrate that in highly interconnected ecosystems, noise can act as an ordering force, dynamically generating ecological patterns even in environments lacking explicit niches