Teacher’ s Guide
Ag in the Classroom- Helping the Next Generation Understand Their Connection to Agriculture
Additional Resources growingyourfuture. com- connects you to Colorado’ s Agriculture in the Classroom program. A variety of resources are available at this site. Need a lesson about food, fiber & more? Find it here.
These related lessons can be found by going to www. growingyourfuture. com and clicking on the curriculum matrix. Type in the name of the lesson.
Build it Better In this lesson students investigate animal handling preferences and design a cattle corral system that is durable, efficient, and effective. Students will also discover the skills needed to be an agricultural engineer.
Caring for the Land Students will explain why people have different opinions regarding soil management and identify cause and effect relationships relating to agriculture and the environment.
Got Guts? In this lesson students will investigate the different digestive systems of livestock and learn how animals have unique nutritional needs based on these structures. Students will also discover the responsibilities of an animal nutritionist.
Homes on the Range In this lesson students will design a board game that reinforces how rangelands provide habitat for livestock and wildlife while benefiting humans, animals, and plants. Students will also learn about the responsibilities of a range manager.
Making a Brand for Ourselves the“ Cowboy” Way Students will explore cowboy culture and history and learn about 19th-century Texas cattle trails. Activities include writing cowboy poetry, mapping historic cattle trails, and creating cattle brands.
Hay
We would like to thank Vincent VanHook for his help and resources for this reader. He has put a PowerPoint on YouTube that shows the haying process. You can view it here https:// youtu. be / bPQ-tkPb6o8.
Hay or grass is the foundation of the diet for all grazing animals and can provide as much as 100 % of the food required for an animal. Hay is usually fed to an animal in place of allowing the animal to graze on grasses in a pasture, particularly in the winter or during times when drought or other conditions make pasture unavailable. Different types of animals require hay that consists of similar plants to what they would eat while grazing, and likewise, plants that are toxic to an animal in pasture are also toxic if they are dried into hay.
The proper amount of hay and the type of hay required varies somewhat between different species. Some animals are also fed concentrated feeds such as grain or vitamin supplements in addition to hay. In most cases, hay or pasture forage make up 50 % or more of the animal’ s diet.
One of the most significant differences in hay digestion is between ruminant animals, such as cattle and sheep; and nonruminant, such as horses. Both types of animals can digest cellulose
Comments, questions, suggestions and feedback about the Colorado Reader are welcome. Contact: Colorado Foundation for Agriculture Bette Blinde, Director PO Box 10 Livermore, CO 80536 Phone 970-881-2902 bblinde @ growingyourfuture. com www. growingyourfuture. com in grass and hay, but do so by different mechanisms. Because of the fourchambered stomach of cattle, they are often able to break down older forage and have more tolerance of mold and changes in diet. The single-chambered stomach and cecum or“ hindgut” of the horse uses bacterial processes to break down cellulose and are more sensitive to changes in feeds and the presence of mold or other toxins.
Different animals also use hay in different ways: cattle evolved to eat forages in relatively large quantities at a single feeding, and then, due to the process of rumination, take a considerable amount of time for their stomachs to digest food, often accomplished while the animal is lying down, at rest. Sheep will eat between two and four percent of their body weight per day in dry feed, such as hay, and are very efficient at obtaining the most nutrition possible from three to five pounds per day of hay or other forage.
Unlike ruminants, horses digest food in small portions throughout the day, and can only use approximately 2.5 % of their body weight in feed in any 24-hour period. They evolved to be continuously on the move while grazing,( covering up to 50 miles( 80 km) per day in the wild) and their stomach digests food quite rapidly. Thus, they extract more nutrition out of smaller quantities of feed.
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