Livestock

Antibiotics and manure. You probably don’t think of them at the same time. But across North America, manure and antibiotics often share the same pile.

When soybean was popularized in the U.S. in the 1800s, farmers eagerly embraced the legume from East Asia as a forage crop. Today, it is more commonly grown as an oilseed crop rotated with corn throughout the Farm Belt.

Western hay producers, though, hope the high-protein crop could work yet again as a cost-reducing annual forage that could replace or compliment perennial hay crops like alfalfa and timothy.

More than 600 million acres of grassland, pasture, and rangeland are found in the contiguous United States, much of which are fertilized with nitrogen to improve forage production. But as fertilizer costs and concerns over surface runoff from pastures and hay lands have risen, there has been renewed interest in nitrogen-fixing crops as an alternative to commercial fertilizers.