product,” he explains. The limbs are chopped from the green tree rather than having to dry them. Feedlot lambs responded well in
feed trials comparing the ground product with oat hay. “When we replaced either 33 percent or 66 percent of the oat hay, the lambs actually did better than the ones on just oat hay. I think the additional fi ber in juniper may be helping the rumen environment, altering rumen
bacteria and increasing digestibility effi ciency. All of these diets included 40 percent dried distillers grains, which contain a lot of highly digest- ible fi ber. The lignin in the juniper wood may be complementing this,” he says. Whitney has also started re-
searching the possibility of juniper in cattle feed. “We’ve been putting ground juniper in supplements for cattle, and I fi rst wanted to see if
they would eat it. When we cre- ated a supplement containing 70 percent juniper, cattle ate every bit of it. We plan to do a trial using up to 40 percent juniper, a little bit of urea and mix in some cottonseed meal and distillers grains and cre- ate a supplement containing 20 to 25 percent crude protein,” he says. The juniper is the least expensive component. “There haven’t been enough toxi-
cology studies done yet,” Whitney says of the ground juniper feed, “but we haven’t found any toxic effects — even though fresh juniper leaves may contain 5 or 6 percent ter- penoid oil, which gives them the Christmas tree smell, and about 6 to 7 percent condensed tannins. At high enough con- centrations the oils and the tannins can reduce microbi- al function in the rumen, so it could potentially become toxic. But the animals, when given a choice of feeds, will reduce intake themselves, and this helps eliminates the toxic- ity,” he says.
Use the whole tree Whitney has moved to an-
other trial in which he har- vests whole trees. “We are try- ing to expand the work that we did with redberry and blue- berry juniper,” says Whitney. “Compared with redberry
Whole trees are cut, chipped and then hammermilled through a 4.75 millimeter screen to be used in feed.
juniper, I thought eastern red cedar would have much higher lignin and be less digestible because it’s such a big tree. However, it was 29 percent digestible and mature redberry trees were 30 percent digest- ible. When you look at cotton- seed hulls a few reports show up to 30 percent digested, but