Advancing Knowledge Translation and Transfer to Support Sustainable Livestock and Forage Prodution System

Under Outcome 1 of the National Beef Research and Technology Transfer Strategy one of the objectives is to establish collaborative working groups to assemble, update or create comprehensive technology transfer resource packages focused on a particular topic or outcome and encourage industry wide-utilization of the resources to reach and maintain desired adoption levels. With that outcome in mind, this project is intended to create a comprehensive extension framework in key focus areas that can be utilized as a model by other organizations (e.g. provincial government extension staff, industry groups, applied research and forage associations, post-secondary educators and others) and individuals focused on KTT for other topics of interest.

The key focus area for this project are grazing and feeding management, which supports all of the Alberta Beef, Forage and Grazing Centre (ABFGC) strategic outcomes. While this is a broad focus area, we will focus on the following main themes:

Managing grazing in average and extreme weather conditions
Perennial and annual forage variety selection for regional applicability
Critical elements of animal nutrition and feed quality
Each theme will also include an economic component in order to quantify the cost-benefit of adoption, with the possibility of developing economic scenarios modelling the conditions under which certain practices may be profitable or unprofitable.

Ultimately, the resources developed through this project will support sustainable livestock and forage production systems by providing producers with easy to understand tools and information in order to advance profitability, competitiveness and sustainability, and more fully realize the value of past research. In turn, increased awareness and adoption of beneficial management practices, innovations and technologies, will support improved growth and value of the beef and forage industries. This project will also provide a process that can be easily adopted by other groups, individuals and organizations for effective KTT as resourcing permits.