09/22/08 Cummings Center open house

If you want to see how the University of Idaho's new Nancy Cummings Center is developing you can do it Thursday at a field day and open house. Superintendent John Hall says beginning at 930 am you can learn about plans for new facilities and ongoing projects like looking at different estrus synchronization systems that might help commercial beef producers. HALL "Another area that we've just started in is using sex semen to try to shift gender ratios in cows. We think there are some opportunities to be able to breed cows and end up with calves of a particular sex that you want knowing that steers are more valuable than heifers if we're selling them for feeder cattle. The third thing that we've been working on is selecting cattle or divergent selection for relative feed intake and relative feed intake is a measure of feed efficiency." And the fourth major research project involves a test plot this summer. HALL "Looking at some summer annuals that might be an opportunity to be used for swath grazing or late fall grazing, stockpiling and grazing to extend the grazing season." Its free, the Cummings Center is eight miles north of Salmon and registration Thursday begins at 9am. Today's Idaho Ag News Bill Scott