Livestock Wala'au
Welcome to the Livestock Wala’au podcast. Brought to you by the Livestock Extension Group of the University of Hawaii Manoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources and the Center for Ag Profitability of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A podcast aimed to provide educational support, information, guidance and outreach to livestock stakeholders in Hawaii and the rest of the U.S. Hosted by Extension Professionals Melelani Oshiro of UH Manoa CTAHR & Shannon Sand of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Livestock Wala'au
Livestock Wala'au S4 Ep 6 Transforming Agriculture: The Role of Leucaena Trees in Sustainable Silvopasture Systems
Ever wondered how integrating trees into pasture systems could revolutionize sustainable agriculture? Join us as we discuss this innovative practice with Travis Idol from the University of Hawaii. Discover how the Lucena tree, a nitrogen-fixing powerhouse with high protein content, is transforming silvopasture systems across tropical and subtropical regions. Our conversation highlights successful implementations in Queensland, Australia, and South America, and explores the potential of this remarkable tree to enhance livestock nutrition and pasture productivity.
Travis Idol shares insights into the practicalities and challenges of silvopasture, focusing on manual harvesting techniques from Southeast Asia and the impact of mechanical mastication on Lucena's nutritional value. Get a glimpse into the promising results from a pilot project at Waimanalo, where Lucena trees have shown impressive growth, facilitating intensive grazing cycles. We also address the unique opportunities and obstacles presented by topography and soil conditions in adapting silvopasture practices.
The potential of drought-tolerant trees to sustain pasture systems during dry spells is another compelling aspect of our discussion. We explore propagation methods, collaborations with commercial nurseries, and carbon sequestration efforts that align with NRCS conservation programs. Hear about exciting updates on a project in Hawaii, involving seedless Lucena hybrids for pasture-finished beef cattle, as we share plans for disseminating findings and presenting at the Hawaii Agriculture Conference. Uncover the strategies behind balancing tree and grass growth for optimal agricultural output, while reducing costs and enhancing sustainability.
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https://cms.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/Forestry-Agroforestry-Trees/Leucaena-leucocephala
Aloha. Today's episode is sponsored by the Livestock Extension Group out of the University of Hawaii Manoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, the Center for Ag Profitability out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.
Speaker 1:Aloha and welcome to the Livestock Balao, a podcast aimed to provide educational support, information, guidance and outreach to our livestock stakeholders in Hawaii and the rest of the US. We are your hosts, Belio Shiro and Shannon Sand, and today we're going to talk with Travis Idol from the University of Hawaii and we're going to share and talk a little bit about some projects that he's working on, that we all are working on. So thanks, Travis, for joining us today.
Speaker 3:Oh, thanks for inviting me. Glad to be back.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're coming to be a regular, I think, on the podcast. Now. This is what show number three, four maybe.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I appreciate it. So it's a neat project, happy to share, kind of where we are right now with it, and great to have you two helping out with some of the extension education parts of this project.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe you want to just quickly introduce yourself again to those that are listening.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I'm Travis Idle, a professor of tropical forestry and agroforestry here at the University of Hawaii at Manoa on Oahu and in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management. So I've been working with kind of this amazing agroforestry tree called it's, in the genus called Lucena. It's a nitrogen fixing tree. It's been used for a lot of different things in the tropics by small farmers, but one of the things I want to talk about today is how it has been used and how we're planning to use it and are beginning to use it for silvopasture, meaning that it's actually serving as a tree in pasture systems and, in this case, actually as a forage crop for the animals to eat.
Speaker 2:That's cool because I feel like silvopasture is not really talked about a whole lot. Can you kind of explain that, because I think you're the only one we've had on that has talked about it in the past? Just for the folks that haven't heard it before.
Speaker 3:Sure. So silvopasture in a real simple sense is incorporating trees into pastures and grazing systems. This can be done a lot of different ways and normally people think of it as trees, as overstory plants, of course, things that can provide shade for the animals. So especially in the tropics, here you know, giving them a place to get out of the sun in the middle of the day to relax and for cows, obviously, to chew their cud. In Hawaii in particular, because we've got pretty windy conditions throughout the year, they're often used as a windbreak, so kind of providing that sort of protection and shelter for the animals as well.
Speaker 3:But in our case and we're not, certainly not the first place to try this the trees themselves are actually a food source for the animals. So this has been done in small farms where the trees, maybe as a windbreak, can be pruned back routinely and then that green material, the leaves and small branches, can be fed to the animals. But actually for our project, what we're doing is planting trees in rows within the pasture and then the animals actually browse that down regularly as a high protein food source, because Lucena, much like alfalfa and clover, are in the legume family, so they are nitrogen fixers, meaning they tend to have a high protein content in that leafy material.
Speaker 1:Excellent, excellent little overview of what that is and I think, important to understand. I think it's becoming more regular common right to see these types of systems being incorporated into grazing management. So that's.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's. You know this is again. The tropics are places where these are a little bit more common. The subtropics as well are a possibility for these sort of infield trees for forage and for browsing. This is done, has been picked up and used extensively in a few places elsewhere, so in particular Queensland, australia. They've developed a system that works pretty well for them and then this has spread to other places where grazing is important, such as Argentina, colombia, even Cuba, and there's a lot of small kind of small animal livestock systems where maybe more what we call cut and carry, where again you sort of prune the trees back and then bring that to the animals, so like sheep, goats, that kind of thing. But again, because it's a high protein food source and because it's a perennial, it's a tree tends to grow back well. Because it's a high protein food source and because it's a perennial, it's a tree tends to grow back well. That's a fairly sustainable system and tends to be pretty productive, not only from the plant production standpoint but from the animal production standpoint as well.
Speaker 2:So it can be used for small remnants as well as like cattle, horses, all of the livestock that are on land, at least kind of thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's been tried for a lot of different things. It's obviously things like grazing mammals sheep, goats, cows. It's been tried with pelletized fish food, poultry food. People have tried it in lots of different combinations and situations, but typically cattle, sheep, goats are the primary ones where this has been a successful system.
Speaker 1:Oh, very good. So I think that's a great way to lead us into sort of the project that you're currently working on right now, right, and you maybe want to share a little bit about that and sort of take us to where you are right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so on our first podcast we had. So I want to encourage folks to go back and see that one episode we talked about kind of this project as its beginning. So the Western Sustainable Ag Research and Education Program through US Department of Ag, is funding a project for us to look not just at Lucena silvopasture here in Hawaii but the use of seedless or sterile varieties of this tree for that purpose. So anyone who knows Lucena as its more common name in Hawaii, koa Haole, knows that it can be a pretty nasty weed. Once it gets established in a pasture, an ag field or even in your backyard, it is really hard to get rid of. The seeds can last a long time in the soil. So you know it's just tough to really get rid of it and so it's kind of gotten a bad reputation in here. But really around the world. I mean it is considered a noxious weed in many, many places of the world, including in parts of Australia. But through a lot of tree breeding work done here at the University of Hawaii over the years by other colleagues of mine, before even I got here, they developed some hybrids. So there are about 20 species in this genus of tree and so crossing some of those species results in sterile or non-seeding hybrids, and so those are the varieties that we are working with specifically because we'd like to use this tree and take advantage of the benefits it can provide, but we don't want it spreading outside of the areas where we're planting. And so this is it kind of changes the way the system is established, the way we think about it, including things like the propagation of the plant, because now we're not starting from seed, but we think there's a lot of potential for it and to again, you know, take advantage of the benefits of a high protein feed for animals that is fairly hardy and rugged, and so the fact that you can't get rid of it also means that it should be able to persist in pastures and other kinds of systems Once you get it established. We just don't want it spreading from where we would plant it in the fields.
Speaker 3:So where we are now is we have a research station here on Oahu in our Waimanalo area, where we have established several varieties, so different hybrids, about four or five different seedless hybrids, so that we can compare how they grow, how they do. We're propagating them, planting them and then, as they grow up, we're pruning them back to kind of simulate livestock grazing or browsing and seeing how the trees respond to that, how much production we get, how well they re-sprout. We're even looking at the forage quality. So in other words, what's the nutritional value of this plant material for livestock animals? So that's been going on for about a year and we've got some good results. We can talk about that in a little bit.
Speaker 3:The other projects or installations we're close to getting ready to establish are in actual cooperating ranchers pastures on Hawaii Island. So we have a couple of locations currently in South Kona region, the big island, where it's existing pasture, and we're planning to put in one of our more promising seedless varieties to grow that up for about a year let it get established and then we'll let the cows back in to begin eating that down and then we'll see how the plants themselves respond to this actual browsing. These are small plots so we don't think we'll be able to get much data from the animals directly. Think we'll be able to get much data from the animals directly, but we'll certainly be able to get some good observations of how you know how enthusiastic they are about this as a food source and then kind of really try to get a sense of the grazing cycle that's necessary to keep this tree under control, while also providing enough material for the animals on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think for me that's interesting is to see kind of how the animals are going to see how palatable it is to them.
Speaker 2:So it's like, is it more appealing to like goats or sheep or cattle, or I will be interested in that. But it is really exciting to hear that you've got taken what four or five varieties and have been trying to do I'd been doing kind of I don't want to say mock trials, but trials basically to see how they grow back and forage quality. Have you noticed a lot and I don't know if you can get into this or not, but have you noticed a lot of differences between the varieties or there definitely are some differences.
Speaker 3:So in some cases two different varieties share one of the parent lines is the same species, lucena leucencephala. It's a subspecies, it's a giant type subspecies of that leucencephala, and that one tends to be the one that over time has proven to be fairly palatable, grows pretty well, and so that's one of the parents. But then we'll bring in another species to cross with that, and then those are the ones that end up being sterile. But we've got some varieties where it's two totally different species, and so the way the plant looks, the way it grows, even its tolerances to things like cold or acidic soil conditions may vary quite a bit. So we're really just getting into the beginning stages of evaluating these. So, for example, we have one site, one location, one soil type, one climate, where four or five of these are being compared next to each other. But you go to, obviously Hawaii has lots of different growing environments. So you take those four or five varieties, put them somewhere else and the comparative performance may vary. So there's a lot we could do, you know, in the future, but at least we're getting that first crack at it. So the one variety that seems to be performing the best and we kind of had a hunch this might be the case is what we call variety KX4.
Speaker 3:So that one is a cross between two particular species. I can give you the details of that in writing later, but it's Leucocephala is one of the parent lines, the other one is Lucena esculenta. So those two crosses provide a pretty vigorous kind of progeny. It's seedless, does produce flowers, but almost never see a seed pod on it. It grows pretty fast, responds well to pruning or simulated grazing, responds well to pruning or simulated grazing and it's relatively easy to propagate.
Speaker 3:So again, if you recall, these are not from seed, so we have to vegetatively propagate them, and so we've tried different ways of doing that and we have a system of taking kind of young green shoots or cuttings and then bringing those into the greenhouse, putting a little bit of a rooting hormone, misting them for a few weeks until the roots start to develop, and then we can treat them like a seedling and grow them up until they're ready to go in the field, so that one just has a nice combination of properties in terms of propagation and performance in the field that we like. We don't have a whole lot of forage quality data yet. We've got some initial data but we need to compare that with some of the other varieties we have which don't have quite the same level of performance in terms of growth. But if they have better forage quality then that nutritional value can balance out a difference in actual just quantity or biomass of production.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I mean, if it's really high nutrition content, similar to like, I think like alfalfa year, right, I mean that's a high dollar forage product period and I don't know. I'm going to ask a really dumb question, travis probably, but like it sounds like you can prune the tree and take it down to the end, so is it like transportable? So in my head I'm like boy. If this works out, I was like, could you figure out how to like, not bail it, but some way to make it into a feedstuff? It sounds like potentially, since it's been used for aquaculture feed.
Speaker 3:So yeah, yeah, definitely get a good ag engineer in there to think about how to work with that you know, maybe later down the line. Yeah, no. In this case a couple of things. One is that, yeah, we're looking at the very young, the leaves and the young branches, so those are fairly easy to harvest, to bale, I mean, like I said, cut and carry systems. In places like Southeast Asia. These are all done by hand, like machete essentially.
Speaker 2:And guys, with a horse drawn With a bag.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so they carry that into town and then they can either sell that or feed it to their own animals or sell it to other folks with animals.
Speaker 3:So that's the case. But we even had a study done here at UH where they actually kind of what they call massacrated or mechanically sort of pulverized that fresh material just a little bit and that actually helped improve the nutritional value by breaking down some of the one main toxic, mildly toxic chemical in leucina, which is called mimocine. It's an amino acid but it's not something that animals are used to, so they can't break it down very well. So we're looking for varieties that have low levels of mimocine. But in this case this mastication process, just kind of grinding it up a little bit, reduced that mimocine concentration just by releasing some enzymes and that made it more palatable, more nutritious for the animals. So definitely there's some things that can be done if you want to do this for more of a cut and carry system. So we're open to folks who might be interested in trying this out outside of a typical cattle pasture, which is the focus of this project right now.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, I believe in some areas some of that cotton carry makes sense, right, because you may not be able to access, or the trees are too tall. Animals are not going to get it at that point. So a good way to say it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, one of our locations where we're planning to put it in the field, it's got a slope.
Speaker 3:It's fairly rocky soils, which is one of the reasons it's a pasture right, not used for coffee or something else, so getting trees in that field is going to be a little more challenging, so the cost of installation is going to be higher. So in that kind of a situation it might make sense to find areas that are easy to plant, put lots of trees in there, and then I mean, if it's in a huge cluster, you can just turn the animals in every once in a while, or you can cut and bring that material to the animals as they would. If they're already importing high protein feeds already and feeding it to the animals, then this is something where you can produce it. You can grow it yourself. So there are definitely situations where that might make more sense, and so that's why we want to work with actual ranchers, grazers, because they're going to know this better than we are. We think in terms of nice, neat experiments. They think in terms of what. This is the reality I have in the field.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3:So I'm giving a little update on the Waimanalo kind of where we are. So this is a fairly low elevation site, soils are pretty good and we were able to get some irrigation water to the plants the first year just to get them established. So, you know, kind of really nice ideal conditions for the most part. But our KX4, we have the most data. So this is our kind of poster child for silvopasture right now. That one we put it in the ground for about, really about 10 months and by then we had, you know, the trees themselves had grown probably 15 feet tall. They had.
Speaker 3:The main stem that we planted in the ground was maybe, you know, three inches in diameter. I mean, just really took off. And so then what we did after about 10 months is we cut them back, we pruned them back, stumped them to about 18 inches off the ground. Cut them back, we pruned them back, stumped them to about 18 inches off the ground. So we wanted to let the shoots come up to the grazing height or browsing height of the animal, the cattle. And so, based on some earlier work, we figured, you know when that biomass kind of got to the point where we would want to let the animals in to browse it. We had about three feet of new shoot growth from the trees and so they were kind of bushy at that point, right Shoots coming out everywhere on that stem that we had pruned, and so the height and diameter of that shrub, if you want to call it that, at that point was about three feet or so in height and diameter. So the whole thing was maybe four feet, four and a half feet, five feet in height, which is fairly easily reachable by the animals, especially with young branches. They can pull it over and eat it down.
Speaker 3:So we planted rows of this tree. Each of the tree trees themselves, planted in a row, was about three feet apart. So as they grew back together they kind of created this sort of fully filled in hedgerow of Lucena in the field. And so then we started harvesting it back, just basically kind of simulating browsing by cutting it back to the main stem and then weighing all of that material and taking some samples to do forage quality analysis. So grew back pretty well. Obviously we've been doing that since the spring. We've been, we've done several rounds of that here over the summer. We're going to give it a quick rest for a few months as we work on some of the other varieties and to start their grazing cycle. And then we're going to go back in the winter time, when it's a little bit cooler, a little bit wetter, to see how that changes in a different season of the year. But for this summer period the primary thing that we've noticed is, about every four to five weeks the trees are ready to harvest or they're ready to go back in.
Speaker 1:Oh that's good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so if you think about kind of an intensive grazing sort of cycle where you send the animals in for a day or two just to graze everything down and then let the pasture rest, that would be the ideal situation for working with Lucina, because it just needs a few weeks to get back up large enough to really, you know, withstand.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean to give it enough time to re-sprout and recover material, yeah, for the animals to have something meaningful to eat. So we just left a couple of animals in there to slowly eat it down over time. What's going to end up happening is some of the branches are going to be way too big by the time they get to them, and the other plants you know where they can reach them they're going to be nibbling them down every week to the point where you know there's very little coming off. So this really is made for an intensive grazing cycle where the animals go in, they come out, they come back in when the trees and the grass, hopefully, are about both right, and so that balance is something else we need to look at under a lot of different situations is, what is that balance between the growth of the grass and the growth of the lucena trees, Because we want them, you know, kind of at about the same stage when the animals go in. So you know, so for the summertime, one month cycle is about right for KX4.
Speaker 1:And I think that for most folks that's probably the typical cycle that they're using. Is that four to five weeks of breast?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so we have a site on the Big Island where we're planning to plant this little bit lower elevation. I think guinea grass is the primary grass species that animals will be eating, and there the rancher has them browse or graze the grass back to about knee high, so about 18 inches or so off the ground. So that would be just about perfect for our trees, because the animals will be both kind of about the same height of the trees and the grass as they take it down every month or so, and I think our Lucina can keep up with the Guinea grass. The other site we have is a little bit higher elevation and they're using kind of a Brachiaria grass hybrid which can grow pretty fast. But there it's a cooler site and we've noticed the grass grows slower. So we're kind of hoping once we get the Lucina in there it will also slow down a little bit so that it doesn't get too far ahead of the grass for the animals. So we got a couple of sites where we can be testing this.
Speaker 1:There's lots of different combinations we could think about in the future other, what forage types do the best? Kind of with that lucina in there and kind of you know, sort of symbiotic relationship to each other to be more productive on one or the other right and thinking about drought and stuff like that just to have an alternative forage in there is kind of yeah, that's a real big advantage.
Speaker 3:We think not just besides the production and the forage quality is you'll have. These trees, once they get established, should be able to stay green longer than the grass and dry.
Speaker 2:Are they pretty drought tolerant? For the most part, then, yes.
Speaker 3:I say yes, a little bit qualified, because that's fine If you don't call howly at all. Do you ever try to dig it up rather than just cut it back? You know it's got a pretty decent taproot on it, but taproots just a little plant biology here. Tap roots form from the seed. It's that first little radical that comes out of the seed, the first root. That's what forms a tap root.
Speaker 3:If you are taking plant cuttings and little adventitious or side roots form from the stem, you don't get a tap root formally but we plant them in sort of conical shaped tubes. So the roots were growing down in the nursery. So we have a decent root depth, rooting depth when we put it in the ground with the hope that those kind of new roots will also kind of form, get down into the ground and be able to take up water much like a taproot does. So we think they'll be fairly drought tolerant. We've seen that with other trees we've just planted for windbreaks and other purposes. But that's another thing we'll be testing is how well they can do under dry periods when the grass pretty much has stopped growing. You know, the hope is that you'll still have some kind of forage for the animals during that time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, a lot of things and exciting things. So I think look forward to and see what comes out of this project to be able to get more resources and things you know, options for our producers.
Speaker 3:So yeah, yeah, and we certainly have. One of the things we talked about was the propagation end and that's something where we've figured out what we think works best. But you know, we're not. Again, we're not we're. You know we're. We're university kind of researchers with our own little greenhouse growing up plants for an experiment.
Speaker 3:We're not a commercial nursery doing this by the thousands, which would have to be done to plant out in a pasture, because we're probably looking at several thousand plants or trees per well. Maybe a thousand or two trees per acre would be necessary, based on the spacing. Well, maybe a thousand or two trees per acre would be necessary, based on the spacing. So the within row spacing would be about three feet. The between row spacing kind of depends upon the balance of grass versus lucena that you want the animals to eat. That's a nutritional but it's also a production issue, right? How fast are those two plants grow relative to each other?
Speaker 3:But right now we're looking at about a 15 foot spacing between the rows. So you kind of do that math in your head and you end up with about a thousand or 2000 trees per acre. So we're talking about, you know, tens of thousands of trees would be needed just to put in a, you know, decent size pasture somewhere. So we're working with the commercial nursery to have them try out some of the propagation methods that we've developed and obviously, you know, adapt and innovate based on what works for them, with the hope that it's not a chicken or egg thing where there's, you know people who want to plant it but not enough plants. Or you know a nursery that's ready but they don't have anybody, you know, ordering the number they need to keep it going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was thinking when this gets to a stage where it's commercially viable, I wonder if it's something because I've been doing a lot of work in like carbon credits and carbon sequestration lately in carbon markets and I'm like to me this is like a potential thing that could be used for that and so you could do some offsets and credits potentially to help offset the cost of that if a producer decides to go that route later on.
Speaker 3:Sure, I had a former student of mine was from New Zealand and so he went back to work there and their forestry research agency. And yet he was looking at that as well, just planting trees in pasture, just for the carbon itself. Yeah, because they were going to come under some cap and trade type system there, sort of similar to what California had, and they were going to include the ag industry.
Speaker 3:So they're like where are areas that are poor for grazing purposes? Plant the trees there and take the carbon, but here there would be a working part of the pasture, but yeah, and then you could look at that. Of course we have the soil health project and the Climate Smart Commodities Grant that our University, of folks in our department and our college got recently. So these are the kinds of things they're looking at as well from soil carbon, not just from the plant carbon perspective, but the other way I think that this can really help from the cost perspective is NRCS. So if we can develop or adapt conservation practices that are accepted by NRCS, then that can help with the cost share upfront which is yeah that EQIP program is great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so these are contour plantings or there's several kinds, I think, of practices we could adapt. And so, again, once we kind of get this established in some of these private ranches, that's the time to go to NRCS and say, okay, let's look at this and see how we can go forward. And they even have their own conservation innovation grant program to help support these kinds of projects, which this is something we'll definitely be looking at for the future.
Speaker 2:Oh, and I know you've mentioned you have a few ranches you're cooperating with on Big Island. Are you looking for any additional cooperators right now, or are you kind of like you're done at this moment in time, but maybe in the future?
Speaker 3:Always willing to talk to folks about it. There definitely is another rancher who's interested. I need to get these first two in the ground and kind of say, okay, I got these done, now let's talk to you. The grant itself we have can probably accommodate one more the ground. And then kind of say, okay, I got these done, now let's talk to you. You know, the grant itself we have can probably accommodate one more. Okay, so you're almost full. Basically, okay, we're almost full, but anybody who's interested you know we can talk about. You know how else we could accommodate those folks. Because, again, we do have a you know small ability to propagate you know plants on the hundreds basis and then, like I said, we do have a nursery working with us. So, you know, if we needed a couple thousand more, you know that wouldn't be too much of an expense for us just to provide the plants if they can say, yeah, I've got a place to plant them, nice, yep. So we're making some progress.
Speaker 3:The other thing we're working on is getting this information out there in more than just podcast form. So we've got a website that is under development and about ready to release. So that'll provide kind of the background, some of the things we've talked about. We'll definitely provide sort of general updates and progress on the project, pictures, videos. I think we'll also have a kind of an interest survey. So if there are folks who are interested, there'll be a way for them to let us know and give us some information, and we're also planning to present some of this early work at the Hawaii Agriculture Conference which is coming up in November. When is that again?
Speaker 1:I forget November 7th and 8th, I believe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so November 7th and 8th we're hoping to have either a talk or poster. We'll try to have a display table set up so folks can stop by and chat and see a little bit more about the project. So happy to be able to share it that way as well.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. So be there. Yeah, and Hawaii Eye Conference is a good one. Talks a lot about all everything else that's going on too. Yeah, and I think for me, I'm excited to see this Lucina project. I mean, we've seen it established in some of the other areas and how much it improves daily gain in the beef cattle production. So for me, with our grass finish folks here, I think that's going to be an exciting point if they can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's been the folks with the most interest. Are those doing I say pasture finished? Yeah, yeah, that's true. Doing I'd say pasture finished.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3:Not to introduce a new, the change in terminology, but, yeah, pasture finished beef for sure, I think this is a good one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so those have been the folks who've been most interested, but definitely there's lots of different, you know, kind of situations in which this might be useful from a silvopasture perspective. So happy to chat with anybody who you know and think about creativity and innovation. You know that's what this is really meant to stimulate and also get some folks who can propagate it so that we can do this at a larger scale. You see, our next phase really is to try to get this at a grazing scale. We want to see how the animals respond. As Melee said, there has been a little bit of work, but that was with the kind of seeded variety that they have in Australia, and so you know, I think that's that insulation is still going, which is great, and they have some really good results, and so we're hoping to just be able to see how that works with these seedless hybrids as well yeah, yeah, great, great good to hear all the updates yeah, yeah, and obviously the other one that the producer might be interested in.
Speaker 3:Well, you, what's it costing you to get this in the ground? And certainly because we're doing this at small scale, you know, with a lot of control, you know it's not, you know it's not cheap, right to get this in, but there are definitely some things that can help reduce that cost. The first one is the fencing issue. So if you've got paddocks already kind of fenced off where you can move animals in and out, and so fencing is not something you have to put in specifically for this project, then that can save a lot of upfront cost.
Speaker 3:In that case, the main thing would be, you know, the the planting of the trees themselves. You got to get that in the ground, so some site prep work would be needed. The planting itself is done, although that can usually be done in about a day, depending upon the size of the crew and the pasture, and then a little bit of a follow-up. Probably weeding will need to be done, because once you disturb that soil, it's not just the grass coming back off and you can get weeds and things moving in there, but then you just have to keep the animals out of there for about a year, so that you know that's an opportunity cost to the producer because they can't use that pasture for well, eight, 10, 10 months, 12 months, until the trees are large enough that you can cut them back one time and let the animals start going in there and grazing them back down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think fencing and exclosures are an important part, especially when you start to have to keep the animals out of it and once they get a taste of it. Because from what? I understand, they like it so.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the producer's most interested, like I already have koha haole in my pasture and I know the animals like it. Yeah, they keep them browsed down pretty well, they know they like it. And that was actually one of the reasons koha haole was a widespread in Hawaii was actually it was in C-TAR way back when actually did promote this a little bit as a potential supplement for grazing in areas that had, you know, not the best forage grasses. So, you know, put this in there. We know the animals will like it. Problem was it was a seeded variety and so it just kind of spread around. But definitely, you know, the ranchers themselves know, you know they're experiencing animals as they know they like it. So we're hoping we can do it in a manner that's controlled and productive, yeah, To help them to make it worth the cost of putting it in there on purpose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great, anything else.
Speaker 3:That's most of the things we have right now.
Speaker 3:Okay, the main thing is get this into our once we get these in the ground at some of our cooperating producers we're hoping next summer that they'll be at a stage where we can then have a field day, invite folks out to see it rather than just sort of talking about it, and then, you know, we can kind of get really out and kind of start talking about the questions of how we got it in, how it's been doing, what their concerns are. You know different ways they could see that it could be utilized. And that's really where you know getting the juices flowing and the conversations going is really going to help us think about how to work with this in the future.
Speaker 2:Well, good, good. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, travis. We hope our listeners found this informative and that it will be useful to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah make sure to follow us on our social media pages the Livestock Palau Livestock Extension Group, if you haven't already, and be sure to visit the UH CTAHR Extension website and the YouTube channel listed in the show notes, and we'll also list the website for the Lucina project.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and, as Mele said, for additional information about this topic, see those show notes of the podcast below. Thanks for listening to the livestock of all out before we go show some love for your favorite podcast. Thank you for making us number three educational podcast in Hawaii, by the way, and then stay tuned for next month's episode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks again to our sponsors the Livestock Extension Group of the University of Kaua'i, manoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, the Center for Ag Profibility of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. Mahalo for listening. A hui hou, a hui hou. Mahalo for listening. Ahoi ho, ahoi ho.