The Florida Cattle Enhancement Board encourages research into Producers questions that impact their operations. We caught up with Dr. Marcelo Wallau with the University of Florida to discuss one of his research projects to learn how these projects would not be studied without the Board’s funding and where the research questions come from.
“This is the type of work that the support from the cattle industry and the enhancement of the cattle enhancement board are essential. They are simple questions, they’re very practical, very applied, they’re very local. And this is normally the type of work we have a hard time getting support from other agencies. So, the cattle enhancement board funds are extremely important here,” said Wallau.
Wallau also said “Now, if I can go deeper into this and look into the mechanisms and more of the environmental impacts, if this was a good solution and I can lever this work into bigger grants, bigger national grants. It’s not the route I’m pursuing with this, not, again, not my area of expertise, but also, we didn’t see anything groundbreaking here to warrant a bigger grant. I think there is other fish to fry, especially my area in forage management, there is a lot of other things I’m curious about.”
“But this type of funding from the cattle enhancement board is essential for us to respond to those questions. Why we have those questions many times because farmers ask us. They are doing, they’re using the products, they are interested in the practices, and they come to us with the questions and then we need to find answers for them,” added Wallau.
Wallau finished by saying, “That is why we have this type of product. Very applied, very simple, but very meaningful for our clientele because it can save a lot of money here.”
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.