Dan Gary, an Amarillo, Texas, ranch consultant, suggests that you can use cow-pie-ology to monitor the nutritional status of a cow herd. He relates cow pie configuration to nutrient balance. If nothing else, we believe you’ll get a chuckle out of the discussion of the perfect cow pie.
Source: Beef, September 2016.
‘There is no better method of determining the nutritional condition of cattle than the visual observation of manure,’ Gary says. Years of research have documented that, as manure piles stack up, more protein is needed. That’s because passage rate through the digestive system slows down and instead of a cow pie, there’s a cow stack. Conversely, excess protein results in thin manure.