This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Kaitlyn Preszler is a student at South Dakota State University who heads into her home state's pastures and grasslands for her research. She studies wildflowers in the diets of grazing cattle.
She joins us to explore the nutritional benefits of native flora in South Dakota.
Plus, we learn how she set up an experiment that used lab equipment to simulate a cow's stomach.
____________________________________________________________
The following transcript was auto-generated.
Lori Walsh:
Now, we are going to dive into some interesting research on cow cuisine. Kaitlyn Prezsler is a student at South Dakota State University who researched the nutritional relationship between grazing cattle and wildflowers.
She studied whether rangeland with wildflowers is better for cattle than rangeland with only grass.
And she's with us now from SDPB's Jeanine Basinger studio in Brookings with an update on that research. Kaitlyn, welcome to "In the Moment."
Thank you so much for being here.
Kaitlyn Preszler:
Hi Lori. How are you?
Lori Walsh:
I am doing well. So you are studying at SDSU and you have an opportunity to do some pretty serious research. Tell me why you wanted to explore this topic.
Kaitlyn Preszler:
Well, diversity is kind of a very important thing for native plants, diversity, things like that in the natural resource world. So we wanted to see how diversity related to the nutritional value and how it was increasing for cattle and trying to promote it for a producer.
And so wildflowers kind of stood out to us because they're kind of an iconic species. You get the big flowers and you hear about pollinators and things like that, and you need to promote biodiversity for pollinators.
But we wanted to focus more on the cattle aspect of that and kind of relating to the economics. Are they having value to our producers? Are they having value to our cows, a forage value?
Lori Walsh:
And you grew up on a cow-calf operation. Had you seen this in real life and then checked in to see if it had been studied?
Help me understand if anything from growing up on that operation made you lean into this particular area of inquiry.
Kaitlyn Preszler:
Yeah, I always loved plants. Always loved being out there as a person that would go out and check cows. I always loved to stop and see, "Oh, what's this new plant that I found in our pasture today? What's this going to do for my cows?"
And so that's kind of why I like to see those and why I wanted to research. And then we kind of didn't see any research out there on specific species. There's been research on kind of the nutritional value of more diverse area versus a less diverse area. But there's never any research on prairie coneflower is more nutritional value than prairie cinquefoil. Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
Alright, so let's talk about, did you have to grow some plants then?
Kaitlyn Preszler:
Yeah. I grew all my plants in our greenhouse here at SDSU. And then after I got enough biomass from them, we harvested them, put them in oven and dried them, and then we were able to run them through our lab for a digestibility test.
Lori Walsh:
How does that work? So there's no cow involved in that. It's lab work. Tell me about that.
Kaitlyn Preszler:
So after you get them dried, you grind them all up and put them in these filter bags. And then there's a couple different chemicals that you use. There's an ADF solution and an NDF solution.
And then you have a big thing that kind of mimics a cow's stomach. It's like a pressure cooker that they agitate in this solution for a couple of hours or an hour, little over an hour. And then you do a couple separate things.
But the whole process takes about six hours or something like that in a couple days to let them dry out.
Lori Walsh:
You did find that monoculture is not as beneficial as that diversity or that variety. Are there some native plants that are better for the cows than others?
Kaitlyn Preszler:
Based on my findings, there's certain species that are more digestible. And what that means is there's just more percentage of the plant that's going to be used by the cow.
So prairie cinquefoil was kind of the one that hit the home field there. It was the highest in digestibility. Lowest in lignin percent, which is the percentage of material that's not digested by the cow.
Lori Walsh:
How do you hope that your research might be used? First, you're going to present this at an event as I understand it, but then beyond that, how do you hope that the knowledge might help the ag community?
Kaitlyn Preszler:
Yeah, I hope that more producers will see this and say, "Oh, these things that I'm seeing in my pasture aren't a weed." It's a big problem for a lot of people to look at a plant that's not grass, and they're like, "Oh, it's a weed. I'm going to go blanket spray my pasture."
So we're hoping that more people are paying attention to what's native, what's supposed to be there versus what's an invasive weed. And kind of seeing the benefits on their bottom end with maybe they're getting more economic value with the nutritional value added with these plants.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. What year are you at SDSU? How close are you to graduation?
Kaitlyn Preszler:
I graduate in May.
Lori Walsh:
In May. Alright. What do you want to do next? Do you have thoughts on what kind of work you want to do?
Kaitlyn Preszler:
Yeah, I actually have a job lined up with NRCS to work with producers doing this type of education promotion type stuff.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Nice. Well, congratulations Kaitlyn Preszler at South Dakota State University. Thanks for stopping by and telling us about your research, and I suspect we'll be talking to you in the future as you continue this work.
Kaitlyn Preszler:
Thank you.
