Researcher’s book explores Cow Patty Critters

Southern Alberta is definitely cattle country, but we don’t often think about one of the main byproducts of this multi-million dollar industry … the cow patty.

In Canada, an estimated 110 million dung pats, the weight of 13,000 combines, are deposited every day. This cattle dung is home to a whole community of insects, bacteria and other organizations that are critical to a healthy pasture ecosystem. BCN’s Brett Browne spoke to scientist at the Lethbridge Research and Development Centre who has written a book on the subject.

For the past 30 years, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada senior scientist  Kevin Floate has been studying the over 300 insect species found in cattle dung. Recently, Floate published a book which summarizes his work. He says the book, Cow Patty Critters, was developed as a comprehensive guide to help ranchers understand the community of insects at work in their pastures.

“I stayed away from the scientific jargon as much as I could,” says Floate. “I included a lot of color illustrations in the book, some diagrams, and I focused on the types of questions that I had been receiving over the past 30 years from farmers and ranchers from across North America related to critters and cow patties. And that’s the title of the book.”

Floate says the books is also designed to be an educational resource for students and researchers. He says the many creatures which inhabit cow patties play an important role in breaking down cattle dung and maintaining a healthy soil ecosystem.

“Things like dung beetles. They’re very important in taking fresh cow pie and scattering it on the pasture because the nutrients that the cattle acquire by grazing it becomes dung and are deposited back on the pasture. So anything that affects the normal biological activity of the cow pie affects the return of nutrients back into pasture soils,” he says.

Cow patties may seem like a fairly obscure topic for a book, but Floate’s work has attracted a relatively large audience. One thousand copies of Cow Patty Critters were initially printed and Floate says those are long gone now. However, a free on-line version is still available and at least 7,000 copies have been downloaded from one-site alone.