Near Infrared Spectrometry

Prior to starting my current position with the U of A at the V Bar V, I worked for the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station 20 years, the last 9 years of that in College Station as Director of the Grazingland Animal Nutrition Lab, better known as the "Gan Lab". In this capacity I was tasked with developing and providing tools to monitor the nutritional and physiological status of grazing livestock and wildlife. The primary focus of the Gan Lab is the use of near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) of manure to determine diet quality. This information is then used to make better informed grazing or supplemental feeding decisions. Plans are to continue this work in Arizona, both as a user of the current technology and by developing new applications here. We have acquired a portable NIRS instrument and will be implementing a "take the lab to the sample" approach to practical nutritional monitoring and rangeland research. Once developed, this technology can be used to make real-time vegetation and animal information available to ranchers and resource managers.

Drought has and will continue to be an important topic for all of us who make a living from and caring for, the land. Obviously, drought is at the forefront of issues facing all Arizonans. For the last several years I have worked in the Livestock Early Warning System (LEWS) programs implemented in East Africa, Mongolia, and soon to be, Afghanistan. These areas are expansive, mostly arid, range is shared by livestock and wildlife, and much of the land is "public". Sound familiar? Smaller, regional pilot LEWS projects have also been started for producers in Texas and Oklahoma. As a result of this experience I hope to not only address our reactions to drought through management options, but also to help develop pro-active drought planning tools for producers and managers in Arizona. Two of my favorite sayings are: "we can all ranch when it rains" and, "chance favors the prepared". Ranching in a drought is not an activity for the ill-prepared. In the pre-Gan Lab era, I worked on experimental ranches in southwest and northwest Texas, both drought prone, brushy regions with relatively large operations. We also did a lot of work with cooperators; some of which were good grazing managers, some were not.