Episode 29: The Last of the Cowboy Scholars with Dr. Derek Bailey
On this episode of the Maine Farmcast, I’m pleased to have back Dr. Derek Bailey, Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University and current Director of Research and Outreach at Deep Well Ranch in Prescott, Arizona. Dr. Bailey served as my Post Doctoral Fellowship Advisor, and has been a long term mentor for me and countless others. He has led an exciting life growing up on a ranch in the Western United States, conducting research all over the world, flying bush planes, and scuba diving amongst countless other adventures. He recently received the Society for Range Management Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as, being a prestigious Fullbright Scholar where he studied monitoring livestock behavior near water as a potential indicator of disease, welfare, and grazing distribution on rangelands in both the USA and Australia. I invited Dr. Bailey to Maine to help with a low-stress handling and stockmanship workshop at the Bangor State Fair. While in Maine, we visited numerous farms, the Moosehead Lake Region, and Acadia. In this episode we discuss some of his research into genetics and behavior.
Episode Resources
- Learn more about Dr. Derek Bailey
- Learn more about the Deep Well Ranch
Automated Transcript
Colt Knight: 00:31
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state livestock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And today, I have the pleasure to introduce Dr. Derek Bailey, professor emeritus from New Mexico State University, cowboy, and my previous post doctoral advisor, Dr. Bailey, welcome to Maine.
Derek Bailey: 00:59
Thanks, Colt. It’s great to be here.
Colt Knight: 01:02
So Dr. Bailey is one of the last, academic cowboys that we still have kicking around. He has got a million amazing stories about growing up in the west, working cows, flying bush planes, scuba diving, traveling the world, working with grazing behavior and rangeland ecology, and, we are privileged to have him on the podcast today. But just to start off, could you tell us a little bit about your background?
Derek Bailey: 01:35
Sure. I grew up on a cattle ranch, small cattle ranch in South Central Colorado. And, then I got my bachelor’s degree at Colorado State University in Fort Collins in animal science, and then I got a master’s at Colorado State in animal breeding. And then I got my Ph.D. in rangeland management at Colorado State University. So 3 degrees from there.
Derek Bailey: 02:02
And then after that, I got a job as a range management consultant based out of Elko, Nevada and helped ranchers with their problems with the public lands, Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service all over the west. Did that for 5 years. It didn’t did a, was a scientist for USDA Agricultural Research Service in Winter, Oklahoma, and extension agent for a short time in Globe, Arizona. And then I worked for as a research scientist for Montana State University in Havre, Montana for 9 years, and then I spent 19 years at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and just retired in January of this year. And now I am also working part time as the director of research and outreach at, Deepwell Ranch, which is a private foundation and ranch in Prescott, Arizona.
Colt Knight: 02:57
So you just can’t get away from the cows even after you’ve retired at this point. Right?
Derek Bailey: 03:01
No. No. I love cows. I can’t just go cold turkey and leave them.
Colt Knight: 03:05
Yeah. And so Dr. Bailey is actually in Maine this week to help us with some low stress handling and stockmanship, but we just did 2 podcasts on low stress handling and stockmanship. So we would thought we would talk a little bit about, Dr. Bailey’s research. And so I’m gonna tell a story on Dr. Bailey. I was going to graduate school in Texas, and my master’s adviser, made us read all of Dr. Bailey’s papers about the animal behavior and grazing in the in the semi arid Southwest.
Colt Knight: 03:46
And then when I went on to do my Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, we were doing some grazing behavior research on those arid rangelands. And my adviser in Arizona said, oh, we need to call Derek Bailey and ask him some questions. And then I didn’t wanna sound like a fanboy, but I did call Dr. Bailey, and I told him what we were gonna do. And I said, you know, I’ve got this idea. I’m gonna build some GPS collars and put them on cows.
Colt Knight: 04:16
And I know you do quite a bit of work with GPS collars and cows and and gonna get your advice. And do you remember what you told me?
Derek Bailey: 04:25
Well, I told you that it’s tough to build GPS collars.
Colt Knight: 04:28
You told me that it wouldn’t work and that people have tried and not to fool with it, and that I should just borrow your collars. Yes.
Derek Bailey: 04:38
I did.
Colt Knight: 04:38
That’s what he told me. Well, I’m just a a stubborn hillbilly from West Virginia, so we borrowed his collars, but I also built my own. And that turned out quite well for me because all the equipment that we’re using to do this podcast was paid for by GPS collars that that we build and and manufacture and sell here at the University of Maine Grazing Behavior Lab.
Derek Bailey: 05:06
But Dr. Knight, you did take my advice. You built them strong because I told you there’s like commercial grade, military grade, then at a whole level other level, there is cow grade.
Colt Knight: 05:19
Yeah. Yeah. So we went through several iterations before we we nailed it down, but I always thought that was funny because I think you may have bought more GPS collars from me than almost anyone at this point. That’s probably true. But so one of the things that might be pretty relevant for our listeners here in New England is animal behavior and selecting the right animal for the right conditions.
Colt Knight: 05:50
Right? So in the beef cattle world, we don’t have one singular breed of animal that works in all 50 states. You know, and like pigs and chickens, those are all raised in climate controlled environments. So they have, you know, basic standard genetics. And that won’t work with cows.
Colt Knight: 06:10
Right? Because they’re all different forages, climates, terrains, and everything.
Derek Bailey: 06:17
Absolutely. There’s just there’s a lot of lot of differences that and, for example, for 19 years, I worked in New Mexico State, but I grew up in Colorado and worked at Montana, and I had never worked with Brahmans or Brahman cross cattle till I went to New Mexico in a very different cattle. It really did well, but we didn’t have cold winters. In fact, it got hot. Does that mean Brahmans have advantages, thin skin, even sweat some, long ears to radiate heat, loose skin to radiate heat, very different animals.
Colt Knight: 06:50
And they’ll take the bugs better in those southern environments.
Derek Bailey: 06:54
They take every yes. And they’re just they did great down there. But there was a study that was done by USDA and they moved cattle from Brahman cattle from Florida up to, Canada near Lethbridge, and they did poorly. And that’s just something you would expect. They just do poorly.
Derek Bailey: 07:11
Animals have certain there’s a lot both the genetical differences, you know, for different genotypes, that’s right. For cold temperatures like this, you want animals that have thicker hide, more hair, and not slick and thin hide it like Brahmans do to survive in more tropical or hot desert climates. But so, but I mean, there’s those there’s the genetic differences and those are the things probably, to do. But I think kind of an interesting thing is that also there’s a a learn thing. You wanna have animals that learn for the for their environment, learn where they are and what they do.
Derek Bailey: 07:52
We did an experiment once where we took Brangus cattle that, we had raised in New Mexico and got really dry, and we had to ship them. So we’d sent them from, Las Cruces, New Mexico, a place that gets 5 inches of in or 9 inches of annual rainfall to east of Dallas where they got, like, 41 inches of annual rainfall and kept them there for 3 years. And we bought cows from, that same area from east of Dallas, Texas and brought our cows back, and we’d kept a few. So we had animals that had been born and stayed in the desert, those that had went on vacation and went to Texas for 3 years, and those were originally from Texas. And and what we found is in their grazing behaviors that the animals that were born in, in the desert and stayed in desert, traveled further, did better grazing than those that even much better than those that were naive to the area, never from there, all Brahmin, all Brangus cattle, all similar genetics, but very different backgrounds and growing up, there was a real advantage for the hometown girls.
Derek Bailey: 08:59
And then even the cows that had left for 3 years, it took a long time for them to go and get grazing again. So the bottoms well, I know that’s don’t really care about desert cattle here in Maine, but the animals that you raise your own replacements, they have knowledge of your place. They have knowledge of your conditions. They know where the gates are. They know what forages to eat, what forages not to eat.
Derek Bailey: 09:20
And that’s really important. So raising I mean, there’s a we sometimes you get in a position where you have to buy replacement animals to return in your herd, but there’s a price you pay for that. There’s knowledge in your herd and both knowledge that they do and genetics where they do that really helps them for their area, for your place especially.
Colt Knight: 09:39
Yeah. Establishing and preserving those good quality genetics are paramount to any beef cattle operation. And it doesn’t matter. And and I would say that they’re they’re paramount for swine, poultry, and and anything. But just as an example, I mean, one of the reasons that record keeping is so important is we can identify our superior female animals.
Colt Knight: 10:04
We can keep replacement animals from our superior female animals. And if we do that over time, we are basically selecting for animals that are adapted to our environment and our production system. And if we keep good records, and we look at our outputs, we we’re also making steady improvements on our muscle quality, growth rate, reproductive capabilities. And then we don’t experience the severity of drought that you do in the southwest, but we do experience drought and other climate issues up here in in New England that that might cause us to destock from time to time or or sometimes what it is is it’s just too expensive to keep animals through the winter, and and we have to sell off a bunch. And so preserving those genetics can be really difficult.
Colt Knight: 11:00
Kind of an anecdote, when I was in graduate school in Texas, we visited, the Four Sixes Ranch, which is really well known for their quarter horses and it’s but it’s actually a working cow ranch. And during those severe droughts and fires in 2012, 2011, 2012, they actually sent all their cows to North Dakota because there was nothing for them to eat in West Texas. And then they had to bring them back at a later date. You know, people know that ranch now because of its TV Yellowstone connection, but, it’s an actual real working cow and horse ranch.
Derek Bailey: 11:44
Yeah. Just I mean, the genetics, that we important to have you do that, but there’s also a cultural things. They having the thing that animals learn what to eat and what not to eat, what are the best forages, what they tend to learn that from their dam, from their mother, and then plus all those other things. So it’s important for both things. If you get you get you get both nature and nurture if when you keep your own replacements and you pick the best of your herd.
Derek Bailey: 12:09
And I think that it’s it’s, it even adds more importance that the genetics are absolutely the case. And I I mean, I really love genetics and things, but, probably the the the culture of their animals is there. And I’m sure that happens. I’ve only worked with it in cattle, but I’m sure those sort of things happen with both pigs and with sheep and goats as well. It’s a there’s a thing to to that they learn that really is important about the conditions in your thing, and it’s the sort of thing that is passed from mother to dam and it’s it’s valuable.
Derek Bailey: 12:41
And I think that’s so you kinda get twice the sort of thing is to to save your own replacements if you can. But sometimes that’s difficult. You can’t do can’t do it. And so our recommendation is always if you can’t buy I mean, raise your own replacements, try to buy them from someone with the same sort of environment that you that you your animals are from. Same thing, neighbors or at least the same thing. Be careful. Bringing cattle from New Mexico up here to New England, not a good idea.
Colt Knight: 13:11
Yeah. I and there was actually some some cool experimental work done on that nurture versus nature with cattle. I think Larry Howery and, Cody Scott, they they actually swapped calves from cows raised in 2 different types of environments. And, you know, those calves kinda picked up a lot of those, behavioral characteristics from those cross foster dams.
Derek Bailey: 13:39
That’s right. So there wasn’t so there was no there was no genetic that that wasn’t genetically their habitat. Connection. But they still learn from that mom. And that’s and our our data our data supports that.
Derek Bailey: 13:50
And and that was really a great study that was done by Larry Howery and and, Scott. It was really a interesting thing to demonstrate. That’s I think I think that’s why I’m saying that the with that learning is is you just get in addition to, and it helps.
Colt Knight: 14:04
And they did that before we had these fancy GPS collars, and they, like, painted their cows with stripes and stuff so they could see them with binoculars, and they would just sit out and watch them all day long.
Derek Bailey: 14:15
That’s right. It yeah. It’s, but I can tell you as a graduate student, I did that as well. And some of the romance of watching chaos all day, it disappears as weather gets cold.
Colt Knight: 14:27
I tried doing that, and that’s why we ended up contacting you about GPS collars. I remember I was just gonna follow my cows around. I went and bought a bunch of camping gear, and I was camped out at 7,000 feet elevation in a Ponderosa Pine Forest in Arizona. And, those cows would just walk at a steady pace, and they’d kinda disappear over a rise. And by the time I got there, they were just gone, And I couldn’t find them the rest of the day.
Derek Bailey: 14:55
Yes. We did we did that in Montana and we followed cows on horseback, and that worked really well in the summer. But, the winters in Northern Montana, I couldn’t talk to any graduate students just watch them 24 hours a day in Montana. I don’t think you’d get it done here in the winter as well.
Colt Knight: 15:12
Here’s here’s another kind of funny story. When when I was a master’s student in Texas, we were gonna do some,
Colt Knight: 15:23
intake and behavior work with Spanish cross goats in South Texas. And we were gonna we were gonna follow these goats around, and we were gonna monitor what bushes and grasses they ate. We were gonna see how their behavior changed over time and whatnot. So we drove to Sonora, Texas with a load of goats. We drove out into the middle of, of the rangeland.
Colt Knight: 15:47
We opened the trailer door. The goats all ran out in the rangeland, disappeared in the bushes, and then we never saw them again. And so that study was just null and void from that point on.
Derek Bailey: 16:06
That’s a sad story.
Colt Knight: 16:10
But you’ve done some other really cool work with with behavior and genetics. One of the the the things that I always like to bring up in my classes and things is the work that you did with, cattle that prefer the lowlands versus the ones that that would graze up in the mountains.
Derek Bailey: 16:29
Yeah. So in in the west, there was a lot of concern with cattle grazing along streams or often called, you know, the riparian areas, areas influenced by, moisture from the stream itself and not spending the time on upland. And this these are out west. There’s really small areas, but highly important. Fisheries are there.
Derek Bailey: 16:50
And so there was a big concern. And so what the idea is is that wonder if we could find animals that more likely to graze up on the slopes and use the whole whole mountain, whole pasture, the far end of the pasture, those areas. Wonder if we could keep select those because as a as a kid, I grew up and we had mountainous terrain. Some I was never happy with the cows that stayed down by the creek and ate off there. And I was always impressed with the cows that we’ve had to look and look and climb up on the mountains and ride for days to find way up in the mountains.
Derek Bailey: 17:23
I thought, gosh. I love those cows. They often brought home big calves, and they use grass that nothing else used. And so we did a study with that, and we found that idea would be, could could you select for that? Is that a genetic trait?
Derek Bailey: 17:36
And the answer was yes, but it was it was difficult to do because it just sort of thing, it was type of studies, most genetic studies, you know, things like weights are easy to do. You can get the phenotype and describe what the trait is really easily. So you can put them across the scale, you can go look at them, get their color, you can get their height, you can measure their height directly. You can even get offspring and get carcass data and all that stuff is really straightforward, but behavior is much more difficult. It’s harder to find, and it’s hard to get a lot of data.
Derek Bailey: 18:09
But the cool thing is today with the in advancements in genomics, you can get to do that thing and look at new traits and, new things that can be specific and do that without all the expense that we did in traditional animal breeding studies where you would look at the, pedigree to determine whether the trait was passed on from one another. Now we can do it through doing DNA and that makes these traits, all kinds of new traits, much more feasible to look at and study.
Colt Knight: 18:40
And so what are some of the new tools that we have to to trace animal behavior? And and we’re not just looking at at, like, terrain usage and and traveling distances anymore. We can look at health and maybe even some reproductive performance using some of these new sensors.
Derek Bailey: 19:02
Right. It’s I mean, the probably some of the really some simplest things are is it even with tracking, you can get a lot of good ideas. Because if an animal is is moving and grazing, you can tell you can see that, if you can track them, and you can get that in real time, so you can see if there’s problems. If an animal isn’t moving, it might be sick, it might be dead, you can’t fight, you can see if they get out of your pasture, if your fence is down, somebody left the gate open, or god forbid somebody rustled them. I mean, all those things you can tell.
Derek Bailey: 19:33
And now the cool thing is is when I did my started my work with GPS tracking back in 1998, all the data was stored on a device and it was a great research tool, but you had to find the animals and take the collars off to get the data. But now there’s some techniques that allow it to be transmitted in real time. And that so you could that you can tell if they’re sick or not. If they do if they go to water, the water tank and don’t leave, it’s very likely that you have a water system failure that floats gone, lines plugged up or something. And that’s a very useful thing.
Derek Bailey: 20:08
We did a study to support that. Often in some of these new devices, there’s an accelerometer that’s attached to the device, or you can attach it to a device on an animal, often termed on animal sensor, if you ever see that, that’s one of the things. And really, an accelerometer is is the device that your cell phone, you can as you pick your cell phone up, it knows whether you’re there. Fitbits have everything. So we essentially been doing some studies with Fitbit for cows.
Derek Bailey: 20:37
And one of the things that we found is we were able to detect disease really well. We had went to a friend and colleague in Australia, Dr. Mark Trotter, and we started talking about it and I borrowed some of their data. They had accelerometers on cows that, got this disease called 3 day sickness or bovine ephemeral fever, really makes them sense. It’s a viral disease transmitted by mostly by mosquitoes, and it makes the animal really sick for 3 or 4 days. High fever, stiff, all sort of thing.
Derek Bailey: 21:10
But usually, if you don’t stress them, they’ll get over in 3 or 4 days, hence the name. But one of the things that we noticed is that the activity of the animals just as became sick, even before the herdsmen had spotted them in the pasture and brought them in for treatment, they quit grazing their activity, dropped really low in periods that they were normally busy. Because as we know, cows usually graze first thing in the morning, usually from like daylight to about 9 or 10 o’clock, often come to water and rest, especially if it’s hot, and then graze again in the evening. We found that they were just, instead of grazing and being active, they just tired and didn’t move and resting when it during normal grazing time. And, and that was a clear sign.
Derek Bailey: 21:52
And we went and repeated that with another study at a, cooperator in Queensland and found the same sort of thing. So we think there’s really great promise of using these new technologies to to disease. And that and the cool thing is even in even in New England, you know, everybody, you know, you can maybe have smaller pastures and you see your animals and that’s important, but often we have other jobs, other things going on. We’re busier than ever, and if this we could do some use technology to monitor the health, the water system,
Colt Knight: 22:26
and all that. A text message when you’re about to calve or something like that.
Colt Knight: 22:31
And how many would that be?
Derek Bailey: 22:32
It’d be awesome. So there’s lots of chances for disease. There’s there’s good chances that algorithms or algorithms are being developed to see if they’re calving or more importantly, dystocia, having problem calving. Those things are on horizon and are based on, you know, the advances in accelerometers or stuff from our cell phone and GPS tracking is also very important. And that was all done from the supply chain crisis of COVID, the COVID pandemic.
Derek Bailey: 23:02
One of the very few good things that ever came out of the pandemic was that they really was a big drive to start tracking containers and trucks. And so they developed small, lightweight, cheap GPS receivers to track things in real time. And agriculture, especially animal agriculture, gets to benefit from those today.
Colt Knight: 23:22
And and you can see why I invited Dr. Bailey to Maine. He’s got all this working cowboy experience with with animal behavior. He has studied it for the last 30 something years, gathered the data, ran the statistics, published all the papers, collaborated worldwide with folks. So it was great having him come to Maine. So at the Bangor State Fair this last weekend, Dr. Bailey gave a really interesting talk on stockmanship and low stress handling, and and we had a lot of our main youth beef producers in attendance.
Colt Knight: 24:00
And they got to learn about the concepts of stockmanship and low stress handling. And then, we did some some activities that I thought were really fun. We herded the kids around in the room. We made them put their hands in front of their face so that they see like a cow does with that that monocular side by side vision instead of human. And then they got to work their parents through the working facilities and the chutes.
Colt Knight: 24:29
They were having a good time catching heads and using stockmanship principles to move their parents around.
Derek Bailey: 24:37
No. That was fun. It was a good time. That worked out well.
Colt Knight: 24:40
Yeah. So you’ve been in Maine for about a week now. I wanna know what are the things that that you’ve enjoyed most about being here in Maine?
Derek Bailey: 24:52
Well, as you I’ve enjoyed, visiting with you again. It’s been been a while and meeting people and working working with all the young youth, all the young producers, seeing all the farms, seeing the terrain, seeing the differences in production systems here as compared to out west. And I think that that’s been a bias. It’s just beautiful area, nice green grass, nice people, and interesting to see such a, productive area, with such great forage quality and, green grass. We don’t always get that in in the deserts out west.
Colt Knight: 25:30
Yeah. There’s there’s there’s grass and water all over the place.
Derek Bailey: 25:36
Yeah. For a kid that grew up in the desert and worked in the desert, seeing this much green grass and water is fun. Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 25:42
Well, Dr. Bailey, it’s been great having you with us and appreciate you being
Derek Bailey: 25:46
on the podcast again. Thanks thanks, Colt. Thanks, Dr. Knight. I sure appreciate it. Yep.
Colt Knight: 25:53
Alright. In the future, pay attention to the University of Maine Cooperative Extension calendar. And when we have these really cool guest speakers coming in, you’ll have to join us in person. So stay tuned next week Farmcast. Howdy, folks.
Colt Knight: 26:21
Dr. Knight here. The Maine Farmcast wants to hear from you. Please send us your questions, comments, or suggested episodes to extension.farmcast@maine.edu. Again, that is extension.farmcast@maine.edu.
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