With the fiscal year coming to an end on September 30th, Congress has limited time to pass stopgap legislation to avert a government shutdown. While there is broad recognition that a continuing resolution is needed, there are differing approaches being considered.

Recent studies have shown that in pre-weaning ruminants, the addition of alfalfa hay is beneficial for growth and rumen development. However, the effect of alfalfa supplementation timing on the growth of pre-weaning lambs remains still unclear.

In this study, researchers focused on addressing the crucial issue of global warming by tackling methane (CH4) emissions from chickens, an important source of greenhouse gases. We investigated the impact of adding alfalfa meal and sorghum distillery residues (SDRs) to the diets of Taiwan’s native black-feathered chickens.

Preconditioning constitutes management practices that help reduce steers’ transition-related stress from a ranch to a feedlot. Auction-derived (AD) steers, generally exposed to various stressors over a short period, are often commingled with preconditioned (PC) steers in feedlots for homogeneity.

Duckweed, an aquatic plant rich in protein, holds promise as a sustainable plant-based protein for companion animals. However, the potential of duckweed protein in dog and cat diets has been relatively unexplored. In our study, we assessed the viability of incorporating duckweed protein into dog and cat diets by examining nutrient digestibility, stool consistency, and diet palatability.

The aim of this meta-analysis was to examine the effects of dietary betaine supplementation on dairy cows’ dry matter intake, milk production, milk composition, non-esterified fatty acids, and β-hydroxybutyric acid. The results indicated that the supplementation of betaine increased dry matter intake, energy-corrected milk, milk fat yield, milk protein yield, and lactose yield.

The fisheries and aquaculture sectors are vital in ensuring global food and nutritional security. As per FAO (2022), the global production of aquatic animals was a staggering 178 million tonnes in 2020, with aquaculture contributing a significant 87.5 million tonnes. This means that almost half of the global aquaculture animal production, at 49%, is due to the aquaculture sector.

Aquaculture represents the fastest-growing farmed food sector globally, surpassing total capture fisheries at approximately 90 million tons for human consumption (FAO, 2022). However, due to the rapid increase of farmed fish production to meet the protein demands of an increasing world population, marine feedstuffs are now considered finite resources and are transitioning to strategic ingredients in the diets of most carnivorous fish, and are largely omitted in the diets of omnivorous species such as Nile tilapia and channel catfish except in early life stages.

The first explorations into utilizing insects as a food source due to the foresight of impending food demand occurred in the 1930s, the period between the world wars (Bodenheimer, 1951). By the 1980s, more structured research underscored the tangible advantages of incorporating insect larvae into animal and aquaculture feeds (Newton et al., 1977; Bondari and Sheppard, 1981, 1987).

Aquaculture produces roughly half of the seafood consumed worldwide, yet in the United States, the industry remains strikingly limited relative to its potential capacity (Lester et al., 2021). At present, U.S. marine aquaculture (mariculture) consists mostly of small-scale shellfish farming within state waters, with some states boasting well-established shellfish industries and others having entered the industry in earnest only in the last decade.

The September Edition of The Giving Herd, an ASAS Foundation Newsletter.

No obvious pathological symptoms such as inflammation were observed in fatty goose liver, suggesting that there is a unique mechanism to inhibit the development of inflammation during the goose fatty liver formation. Previous studies have shown that high glucose activated the ubiquitin–proteasome.

Body size is a crucial economic trait in donkeys, as it is closely related to meat and skin production. The aim of this study was to identify the genes and loci associated with body size traits, using the Dezhou donkey as an experimental population. The study findings make contributions to a better understanding on the molecular genetic mechanism of body size traits.

The U.S. livestock industry incurs over one billion dollars of economic loss every year due to fescue toxicosis, caused by consuming ergot alkaloids produced by an endophytic fungus in some grass species. Identifying means to mitigate the negative effects of fescue toxicosis is needed for U.S. beef producers.

This review provides a comprehensive overview of the different modeling approaches taken in the prediction of dairy cattle methane emissions.
Mechanistic models, which mathematically simulate the methane production process of the dairy cattle rumen, are both accurate and adaptable, yet their necessary input data is difficult to obtain and if imprecise, can produce misinformative results.

Incubation temperature is a crucial environmental factor affecting embryonic development and chick quality. The liver is the primary tissue of lipid metabolism in poultry. During incubation, it is responsible for converting yolk fatty acids into forms usable by the embryo. However, it remains unclear whether changes in embryonic incubation temperature can affect liver lipid utilization.

Dietary manganese supplementation regulates lipid deposition in broiler chickens, with the liver being a significant site of lipid metabolism. This study investigated the effects of different dietary forms of supplemental manganese on hepatic lipid deposition, gene expression, and enzyme activity in the liver fat metabolism of broiler chickens.

Climate change has increased the frequency of extreme weather events and raised global temperature. Grazing systems need to increase their resilience to adapt to these changes. Enhancing forage species functional diversity and species richness in space and time is an alternative to improve resilience.

Promoting sustainable breeding programs requires several measures, including genomic selection and continuous data recording. Digital phenotyping can be used to track animal activity and behavior like feeding and walking time and distress continuously. Coupled with machine learning techniques, any feature of interest can be extracted and used as phenotypes in genomic prediction models.