 My name is Michael Undi. I'm the animal scientist here at Central Grasslands. Today I'm going to talk about determining what grazing animals are eating on rangelands. If you're talking about feeding and you compare how the animals such as dairy cattle and feedlot cattle and grazing animals, one of the major differences is that for how the animals such as feedlot and dairy animals, we know exactly what they're eating. We know how much they're eating and we know the quality of the diet they're eating because we are providing that diet to those animals. Now when it comes to grazing animals, normally we will know the quality of forage on pasture and we will know how much forage is available for the cattle to eat. But what we don't know is we don't know how much they're eating on pasture. We don't know the diet that they're selecting on pasture because the nature of grazing pasture is such that it's very difficult to obtain such information. There are many methods that have been used on grazing lands to try to find out what grazing cattle are consuming. And that includes methods such as even following grazing animals and trying to find out what they're eating. But the most common methods are those where you collect fecal samples and then you analyze the fecal samples to try to find out what the grazing animals are eating. The theory behind that is in fecal samples we have a lot of undigested plant paths which will tell you what the animals are selecting. So we are actually right now trying to determine what cattle are eating on pasture right here at Central Grasslands. What they're selecting on grazing pasture and the quality of the diet that they're eating. In that case we are looking at if we have different pasture treatments do they select the same diet? So we are collecting fecal samples from continuously grazed pastures, rotationally grazed pastures and patch-bend pastures. These are treatments that have been ongoing for a while here at Central Grasslands and it's a multi-system study which is collecting a lot of data. So we just imposed our study right onto those systems. We are also collecting fecal samples at different times of the season starting in early June into late May. So once we collect those fecal samples we are using two methods to try to answer the question what are these grazing cattle consuming at different times of the year. And we are using two methods. One is called fecal NRIS profiling. This is simply just collecting the fecal samples and sending them for near-infrared analysis and that will tell us the quality of diet that they're consuming. This is not a new technology that's been going on for a while and the nice thing with near-infrared profiling is you get your results very quickly because it's a very rapid method and also the method is becoming more and more accurate as more samples are going into the equations. To try to find out what the animals are selecting when they're grazing, we're using a new methodology which is called fecal DNA barcoding. So what is basically happening is we have fecal samples of a lot of plant fragments and those plant fragments when you submit them for DNA analysis they'll tell you the composition of the feed that these animals on grazing animals were eating on pasture. This is a pretty new method I think in the last 20 years or so but it's becoming very popular because it will tell us the composition of the forages that the animals are eating when they're grazing. So that is very important and this method also has been used a lot now in the last 20 years even for wildlife to try to find out what wildlife are eating when they're grazing out in the forest. So these are the two methods that we're using. So far we have collected samples for in two sessions in early June and mid-July. We are going to collect some in August and in September. We are hoping that this work will give us insight into whether when cattle are grazing in these different grazing systems, whether they select the same type of feed and whether they collect the same quality of diet. Thanks.