Beef Buzz News
K-State Researcher Sees Industrial Hemp as Stress Reducer for Cattle
Tue, 12 Apr 2022 15:29:40 CDT
KSU’s beef production medicine veterinarian, Dr. Mike Kleinhenz talks about some of his latest research on feeding industrial hemp to cattle essentially as a stress reliever.
Dr. Kleinhenz said his work started with figuring out how ingestional hemp enters the body of an animal, including at what levels it enters, and what the ultimate impact would be for animals exposed to ingestional hemp.
“For this study, we fed ingestional hemp to a group of Holstein steers,” Kleinhenz said. “I want to stress this was high cannabinoid industrial hemp, so we had a high amount of cannabinoids, specifically cannabidiolic acid, which the precursor to CBD you see in gummies and things like that outside pharmacies and all over the place. It is a similar compound to that we fed to these cattle.”
Our main goal, Kleinhenz said, was to see if we feed industrial hemp for multiple days if there were any impacts in terms of stress. Our big areas we worked on in our lab are stress and inflammation, he added.
Kleinhenz said they put accelerometers on the calves to monitor the amount of activity each animal had during the day.
“We monitored how much time they spent laying around, amounts of steps they took during their day and the amount of general motion index,” Kleinhenz said.
To measure inflammation and stress, Kleinhenz said, we used biomarkers.
“We used cortisol for stress, and for inflammation in cattle we used prostaglandin, which is commonly blocked by things like Ibuprofen or Flunixin in cattle,” Kleinhenz said.
By watching the cattle’s activity throughout the day, Kleinhenz said the industrial hemp fed calves spent more time laying down.
“That shows us they are a little less stressful,” Kleinhenz said. “It was a complete inversion, so our groups monitored them about four days before we actually started feeding.”
The hemp fed calves, Kleinhenz said, spent less time laying down and were more active before they were fed the hemp. After being fed hemp, they started to lay down more, he added.
“This was also supported by our cortisol results,” Kleinhenz said. “Cortisol is a stress hormone, so if someone is standing in front of a crowd, that’s that hormone that is released and shows you that stress.”
Kleinhenz said when measuring cortisol levels in the cattle, the hemp fed cattle had less.
“We felt pretty comfortable that we had a nice stress reduction there,” Kleinhenz said.
By measuring levels of prostaglandin to track inflammation, Kleinhenz said a reduction was seen over time in the hemp fed calves, whereas the control calves increased prostaglandin over the course of the study.
“When we look at this, it has a really nice nutrient profile,” Kleinhenz said. “Twenty percent crude protein, looks to be digestible and things like that, so there is a use for it, we just have to figure out where that use is and how to strategically use it in these animal systems.”
Click on the LISTEN BAR to hear Ron’s full interview with Dr. Mike Kleinhenz and more on using industrial hemp to reduce stress and inflammation in cattle.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR below for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
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