By Hilary Edmondson

 Facts about the new beef research barn:

• The barn is 312 feet long by 73 feet wide.
• The barn holds a maximum of 192 head in 12 pens
• The 48 state of the art electronic feeders measure the time each animal ate, when they ate, how much they ate and their visit frequencies.
• The feeders were imported from Holland .
• The barn also has two specialized water intake systems for research purposes.
• The barn was designed by Larry Argue of RJ Burnside and Associates. Argue also designed the old Elora beef research barn – built in 1972.

 A new beef feedlot barn at the University of Guelph ’s Elora Research Station is fine-tuning the way animals are fed and maintained. The facility will be used to study the genetic, nutritional and management aspects of feed efficiency and meat quality in beef cattle – which researchers hope will translate into higher quality meat products at lower costs and reduced impact on the environment.

The barn is unique in Canada for its technological capabilities, which includes a feedlot that can monitor feed intake of 192 beef cattle and a handling unit for ultrasound, blood testing and body composition measurements. Prof. Steve Miller, Department of Animal and Poultry Science, hopes the new facility will provide researchers with the advanced tools and techniques they need for innovative developments in beef production.

“The old beef barn in Elora was built in 1972, so there’s a strong need for updates,” says Miller. “This new facility has great research capabilities using technology we never had available there before.”  

The 22,464-square-foot beef research barn has two main components. One section of the barn, which was completed late last year, contains the feedlot, where feed intake of each animal can be measured through electronic feeders. The cattle wear radiofrequency ear tags that signal to the feeder which animal is eating at a certain trough at a given time.

In the old feed system, animals would wear transponders around their necks and only have access to one feed station, says Miller. Now, animals can walk up to various feed stations to eat, while a load cell transmits to a central computer how much food is in the trough before and after feeding. While the researchers have feed intake data for individual animal, this new system allows them to look at a wider array of feeding behaviour – something they couldn’t do before.

The second component of the research barn is a handling area, which is slated for completion in the coming weeks. This area will be used for taking blood samples, testing heat production through an infrared camera and conducting ultrasound tests to measure body composition. The new facility is complemented with improved equipment at the University of Guelph campus to measure beef quality characteristics such as tenderness.

Research surrounding the facility will focus on meat quality and feed efficiency. Miller is currently figuring out the genetics behind efficiency and beef tenderness.

“I’m trying to identify why some animals are more efficient than others,” says Miller. “Like a car has fuel mileage, cattle have feed mileage, which can be measured by performance in terms of growth and quality.”

In the future, Miller hopes researchers will be able to offer beef producers recommendations and services to help improve meat quality while lowering costs. These would include better tools for breeding decisions and genetic marker tests, and even identifying specific forms of desired genes using a hair sample. Down the road, the facility could sell semen from cattle with unique qualities.

“We hope this facility will accommodate research projects that will help us give farmers appropriate suggestions so they will be able to use practices that are more cost-effective, more environmentally friendly and less wasteful,” says Miller.

The feedlot has been operating at full capacity since December 2004. An opening ceremony is expected to take place this spring, after the handling area is completed.

This research facility was built with support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Ontario Innovation Trust, Ontario Cattlemen’s Association, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Ontario Realty Corporation.