If you plan to hit the road to vacation with family or friends this year, why not take in a few of our region’s agricultural shrines? We’ve put together a road trip that farmers and their families will find entertaining, educational and affordable. Take a day to visit one, or a couple of weeks to plow through them all.

National Agriculture Hall of Fame
Bonner Springs, Kan.
The U.S. Congress chartered this organization in 1960, and today it attracts about 45,000 people a year. The Board of Governors selects one outstanding agricultural leader for the Hall of Fame annually, with inductees ranging from Norman Borlaug to Willie Nelson. The Museum of Farming houses antique farm equipment, and Farm Town U.S.A. includes a railroad depot, farmhouse, schoolhouse, blacksmith shop, general store and poultry hatchery. Chickens come home to roost here at the National Poultry Museum. Kids can milk a fiberglass cow, gather eggs and plant sunflower seeds. The Hall of Fame hosts school, scouting and other youth groups, and offers educational seminars for teachers. Guided tours, hayrides, and miniature train excursions are available for group reservations.

Ask about group discounts and special events.
    Open:    Mid-April to mid-November, Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday 1-4 p.m.
    Cost:    $7 for adults down to $3 for children; those under 5 get in free; $6 for seniors

For more information: aghalloffame.com, (913) 721-1075

Kansas City Board of Trade
Kansas City, Mo.
From the KCBT visitor’s gallery, you’ll see traders in brightly colored jackets yelling and waving their arms as they buy and sell hard red winter wheat. It’s a great way to learn about futures contracts and options. Last year, the KCBT handled 6.5 million contracts, each representing 5,000 bushels. The exchange has 192 members, with the latest membership selling for $460,000. You’ll have to travel to places like Chicago, Minneapolis and New York to see corn, soybeans, cotton and other agricultural commodities traded, but Kansas City may represent your closest opportunity to see grain-trading action. KCBT offers tours to groups of 10 or more by appointment. Smaller groups are added to regularly scheduled tours.
    Open:    The visitor’s gallery operates during open outcry trading, which runs from 9:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. Monday through Friday; closed on certain holidays 
    Cost:    Free
For more information: kcbt.com, (800) 821-5228

Pioneer Village
Minden, Neb.
The village claims to house the largest collection of Americana anywhere, including antique planes, trains, automobiles and tractors. Allow plenty of time to saunter through 28 buildings including a Pony Express Station, frontier fort, general store, blacksmith shop, one-room schoolhouse, country church and sod home. Soak in agricultural history by viewing old mills, plows, cultivators, harvesters and threshers. Stay on site in a motel or campground, and dine in the restaurant. Up to 100,000 visitors stop each year—including many farmers. 
    Open:    Every day but Christmas; call for hours
    Cost:    $10.95 for adults, $6 for kids, under 5 free
For more information: pioneervillage.org, (308) 832-1181

Farm Progress Show
Boone, Iowa

Billed as the world’s fair of agriculture, an estimated 150,000 people attend this show each year—mostly farmers seeking out the newest products in their industry. About 500 exhibitors hawk their wares. The opportunity to view equipment in action sets this show apart—you’ll see corn harvested with shiny new combines. Tillage tools grow hotter each year, with more than 4,000 gathering each day to see the latest disks and rippers run across test plots. Precision equipment demonstrations also draw big crowds. Eight to 10 seed companies display their hybrids and varieties in test plots located next to their exhibits. Other vendors specialize in cattle, horses and rural life. You can also catch big-name entertainment and chow down at the food court. The show trades off each year between Boone, Iowa, and Decatur, Ill.
    Open:    Aug. 28–30, Tuesday and Wednesday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (Dates are for 2012.)
    Cost:    $12 per day for adults, $8 for students, under 12 free
For more information: farmprogress.com/farm-progress-show, (309) 586-5888

Living History Farm
Urbandale, Iowa

Since this nonprofit foundation launched in 1970, it’s attracted five million visitors, including more than a million students through school tours, day camps and outreach programs. A thousand volunteers keep history alive by dressing in period costume and showing off old-time skills such as tanning hides at the 1700 Ioway Indian Farm, raising pigs at the 1850 Pioneer Farm, blacksmithing at the 1875 Town of Walnut Hill, and driving Percherons on the 1900 Horse-Powered Farm. The newly renovated Flynn Mansion and Walnut Hill barn are on the National Register of Historic Places. Watch for special events at Easter and Halloween, and contact the farm for information on day camps and other programs offered throughout the year.
    Open:    May 1-Aug. 19—Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 5; Aug. 20-Oct. 14—Wednesday-Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 5
    Cost:    $12.50 for adults, $11.50 for seniors, $7 for
kids, 12 and under free, free to members

For more information: lhf.org, (515) 278-5286

Deere and Company
Moline, Ill.

Deere and Company hit a record $2.8 billion in income in 2011, with gains in all divisions, driven in large part by a healthy ag economy. If you drive green paint, you’ve contributed to this company’s success. The world headquarters in Moline houses corporate offices and 1,400 acres of woodlands and wildlife, but most farmers make a beeline for the display of vintage and current equipment. The recently renovated John Deere Pavilion offers hands-on exhibits, films and displays. Dedicated gearheads can also tour a harvester factory in East Moline, an engine factory in Waterloo, Iowa, and a tractor plant in Ottumwa, Iowa. At the historic site in Grand Detour, Ill., you can visit John Deere’s home and the blacksmith shop where he sparked his empire. You’ll find a gift shop at every venue.
    Open:    See John Deere’s website for info on each location
    Cost:    Free
For more information: www.deere.com/wps/dcom/en_US/corporate/our_company/fans_visitors/tours_attractions/index.page, (800) 765-9588

Monsanto Learning Center
Chesterfield and Creve Coeur, Mo., and other locations

Monsanto employs more than 21,000 employees at 404 facilities in 66 countries, and makes its world headquarters in St. Louis. Through a group tour, you can see first-hand how this Fortune 500 company develops seed, biotechnology and crop protection products. At Chesterfield, take a biotechnology tour of greenhouses and genetics research activities. At Creve Coeur, a plant breeding and agronomics tour focuses on seed research and treatments, along with weed management. A learning center in Monmouth, Ill., offers classroom training and tours of corn and soybean plots emphasizing yield, efficiency and profitability. 2011 topics included drought tolerant corn; improved oils in soybeans; weed, insect and disease management; best practices for population and row spacing; tillage management; and evaluating yield. A learning center in Scott, Miss., focuses on corn, soybeans and cotton, and a center in Gothenburg, Neb., demonstrates efficient water use.
    Open:    Contact Monsanto to arrange group tours
    Cost:    Free
For more information: monsanto.com. Chesterfield and Creve Coeur, (314) 694-7070; Monmouth, (309) 457-4019; Scott, (662) 742-4000; Gothenburg, (308) 537-4506.

Melvin Price Locks and Dam and National Great Rivers Museum
Alton, Ill.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers navigational locks and dams represent a critical asset to farmers and suppliers, offering an inexpensive way to transport grain. Some 75 million tons of cargo pass through the Melvin Price locks each year; corn is the number one commodity, followed by coal. Sixty percent of all cargo goes from here to the Port of New Orleans for export. An average of 25 to 30 boats travel through every day—if you’re lucky, you’ll witness a boat handling up to 15 barges at a time. The Corps created this museum just eight years ago, and it’s a hit—today, about 100,000 visitors stop by annually. The Meeting of the Rivers Foundation helps with exhibits, while the Corps provides ranger tour guides. The museum offers videos and exhibits on the culture, history and navigation of the Mississippi and its tributaries. You can also walk through a bird sanctuary, view eagles and take part in geocaching programs. 
    Open:    Daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed major holidays. Walk-in dam and lock tours are held daily at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. 
    Cost:    Free
For more information: mvs.usace.army.mil/rivers/education.html; for group tours, contact the Alton Convention and Visitors Bureau, (800) 258-6645

Anheuser-Busch Consumer Hospitality Tour
St. Louis, Mo.

No tour of Missouri agriculture would be complete without a stop at the Anheuser-Busch plant. Now based in Belgium, Anheuser-Busch is world’s largest brewer, generating $1 billion a year with a 25 percent global market share. Anheuser-Busch was founded in St. Louis in 1852, and the St. Louis plant is the company’s oldest and largest brewery. All this beer requires a lot of barley, rice and hops. While most of the raw commodities originate in other regions, the tour offers a great way to learn how ag products are processed from start to finish. Along the way you’ll meet a few of the famed Budweiser Clydesdales. A free beer awaits you at the tour’s conclusion. You can also tour Grant’s Farm south of St. Louis, the onetime home of President U.S. Grant and ancestral home of the Busch family. Today it’s home to 900 animals. In addition, consider visiting the new state-of-the-art Clydesdale breeding farm at Warm Springs Ranch, outside Boonville, Mo.
    Open:    St. Louis Brewery Hours run September to May, Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sunday, 11:30 a.m.-4 p.m. From June to August, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, 11:30 a.m.-5 p.m.
    Cost:    Free
For more information: budweisertours.com, (314) 577-2626; warmspringsranch.com; grantsfarm.com

Bradford Farm
University of Missouri, Columbia

Each year, school groups, organizations and individuals visit Bradford Farm to learn where their food comes from. This 880-acre demonstration farm focuses on corn, soybean and wheat production, breeding, protection and physiology. MU students tour the farm as part of ag and science classes—a corn genetics research group has developed a chromosome corn maze to study mutations, for example. Farmers won’t want to miss the July 12, 2012, annual Pest Management Field Day, when you can learn about pests in the morning, and more general topics at the Farmer Field Day in the afternoon. Watch the website for a field day on managing wildlife in late June, and the annual Tomato Festival in early September. Come anytime to learn about the ancestors of corn and soybeans at the Gene Zoo. You can also tour rose and biofuel gardens, stroll through Missouri’s largest display of weed management plots, and witness how a passive solar greenhouse extends the growing season. In the fall, kids can enjoy the corn maze and pick out a pumpkin to take home.
    Open:    Best time to visit: June through October. Tours are available by reservation to groups of 10 to 70.
    Cost:    Usually free, although a nominal fee is charged for some events
For more information: aes.missouri.edu/Bradford, (573) 884-7945

Burger’s Smokehouse
California, Mo.

E.M. Burger founded this business, and built his first ham smokehouse in 1952. By 1956, Burger’s Smokehouse became the first federally inspected country ham plant in the nation. Since then, generations of meat lovers across the nation have mail-ordered the famed ham, beef, poultry and wild game. Next time you’re in the Ozarks, stop by “the country ham capital of the world,” catch a short video on the processing plant, see exhibits explaining the curing process, and enjoy dioramas depicting the four seasons in the Ozarks. On your way out, try a sandwich in the deli and pick up a ham in the gift shop.
    Open:    Monday-Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
    Cost:    Free
For more information: smokehouse.com—click on The Smokehouse, (800) 345-5185

Other sites to consider are the Hermann Farm in Hermann, Mo., opening soon, featuring a historic German farm with original buildings, buggies and early farm equipment; hermannfarm.com, (573) 486-FARM. Also, the Maramec Agriculture Museum in St. James, Mo., (573) 265-7124; and the Southeast Missouri Agricultural Museum in Sikeston, (573) 471-3945.

Let’s go to the fair!

With about a million visitors each year, the Iowa State Fair may rank as the granddaddy of them all. Books, musicals and a movie (State Fair) all feature the Iowa fair, including the best-selling book, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. But all states in our region offer wonderful fairs featuring livestock shows and other ag-related contests, art shows, exhibitors and campgrounds. You can pass through the gates for about $10, but bring plenty of extra cash for midway rides, concerts, food vendors and other attractions.

Arkansas State Fair, Little Rock
2012 Dates: Oct. 12-21
For more information:
arkstatefair.com, (501) 372-8341

Illinois State Fair, Springfield
2012 Dates: Aug. 9-19
For more information:
agr.state.il.us, (217) 782-6661

Iowa State Fair, Des Moines
2012 Dates: Aug. 9-19 For more information:
iowastatefair.org, (800) 545-FAIR

Kansas State Fair, Hutchinson
2012 Dates: Sept. 7-16
For more information:
kansasstatefair.com, (800) 362-3247

Missouri State Fair, Sedalia
2012 Dates: Aug. 9-19
For more information:
mostatefair.com, (660) 530-5600

Nebraska State Fair, Grand Island
2012 Dates: Aug. 24-Sept. 3 For more information:
statefair.org, (308) 382-1620

Oklahoma State Fair, Oklahoma City
2012 Dates: Sept. 13-23
For more information:
okstatefair.com (405) 948-6828

Horses may need grain supplement, but feed carefully

Filling out my 1040 made me think that all the line-by-line addition and subtraction on the form is similar to figuring what to feed horses. Ultimately, the ability of a forage to provide nutrients dictates the amount and extent of concentrate you need to give a horse. So in IRS parlance you would “add line forage nutrients to line concentrate nutrients” to get horse requirements. In both cases, knowing what the answer is supposed to be is important.

Usually, forage is the major component of any given horse’s diet. Forages provide fiber, energy, protein, minerals and vitamins, which go a long way to cover the animal’s nutrient requirements. All sorts of good things come along with good forage. Forages are needed to maintain normal microbial function in the horse’s hindgut and to support good fermentation. The end products of such fermentation include volatile fatty acids (which are a principal source of energy for the horse), B vitamins, and, to a limited degree, some microbial protein. However when energy needs are high (say when a horse is rapidly growing, nursing or working hard), grain supplementation becomes important.

Grains have high digestible energy, modest fat, protein and low mineral content. In some horse diets, grains will be the major source of digestible energy. However, if grain is overfed, significant amounts of starch can enter the lower gut and affect fermentation. At that point, bad things can happen. You may see increased lactate production causing lower hindgut pH. When that happens, the proportions of volatile fatty acids will change. You may also see problems such as colic, laminitis, variable growth rate in young horses and hormonal changes.

Many horse owners have limited space. This, at times, results in stabled horses with no access to pasture. That’s a situation that pushes the practice of feeding dry hay twice a day—or providing ad lib hay along with a concentrate. Horses have a relatively high passage rate with a high rate of cecum-colon (“hindgut”) fermentation, so the rapid consumption of highly fermentable carbohydrates such as grain-rich rations is potentially more troublesome that it is for steers. I can feed more pounds of rolled corn to a 1,200-pound steer or 1,200-pound milk cow than I can to a 1,200-pound horse.

The horse has a digestive tract that is designed to ingest large amounts of feed continuously over time. Its stomach is just 10 percent of its digestive tract volume, which allows short retention time. Inside a horse, the digestive strategy is basically “get what is soluble and get rid of the rest.”

This has some advantages—it allows a horse to subsist on a lower quality diet than cattle. In a horse’s digestive tract there is partial chemical-enzymatic digestion and limited bacterial fermentation. That brings some disadvantages, especially in a nutrient-dense environment such as feeding grain supplements. It is easy to overfeed them.

The small intestine of the horse is about 30 percent of its digestive tract volume and is the primary site for digestion.
The fiber fraction of the diet cannot be digested by the horse’s digestive enzymes—it is fermented by bacteria in the hindgut, the largest part of the digestive tract.

In a mature, medium-sized horse, the hindgut might be 18 to 19 gallons of volume. The hindgut also maintains an environment that is suitable for bacterial fermentation of fiber to volatile fatty acids, a significant source of energy for the animal. The horse’s hindgut is similar in its physiological function to the rumen of a cow, but a faster rate of passage through the horse’s hindgut results in shorter time for the undigested feed to be fermented. It’s less efficient than a cow’s rumen. Horses can’t ferment plant fibers as efficiently as cattle because of the reduced numbers and activity of cellulolytic bacteria.

And that’s where it gets a little technical. When we consider forage compared to concentrate feed for horses, we have to consider hindgut health. Horses fed concentrate will have lower hindgut pH from four to six hours after feeding compared to horses just fed hay. But there are times such as gestation, lactation and hard physical work when a horse will require more nutrients than can be attained through forage.  

Grain type and processing method affect the amount of energy available to the horse. Dry processing methods such as crimping, rolling, or cracking increases surface area of the starch granules exposed to digestive enzymes. Wet methods such as steam flaking or steam rolling, extrusion or pelleting result in gelatinization of starch, which substantially increases digestibility.

I usually try to explain it with a grocery store example: Take a bag of popcorn off the shelf and throw it in a bucket of water, the kernels fall to the bottom. But if you pop it first and then put it in the water, it melts.

In horses, most dietary starch, especially from processed cereal grains, is hydrolyzed by the pancreatic and intestinal enzymes to glucose which gets absorbed in the small intestine (popped popcorn melting). The undigested starch fraction then enters the cecum-colon and the bacteria have a chance at it. The grain source will have an effect on digestibility. In the small intestine, raw oat starch is about 90 percent digestible. Corn starch is closer to 70 percent digestible. Dry grinding will improve starch digestibility, but a wet process will improve digestibility even more.

As more starch is fed, the small-intestine digestibility of starch declines. That means even more starch in the hindgut, which can lead to starch overload.
The negative effects of overfeeding concentrate include starch escaping the small intestine and enter the hindgut. Once the starch gets to the hindgut, bacteria that favor starch (Streptococcus and Lactobacillus) start to use it. The reason that Lactobacillus are called lactobacillus is because they are really good at making lactic acid. The resulting spike of lactic acid production will irritate the gut lining, cause a drop in pH and reduce numbers of fiber-degrading (good) bacteria.

These fiber-degrading bacteria are known to favor a pH close to neutral (7.0). It is worth noting that different cereal grains have been shown to vary in lactate production in the horse’s hindgut. Wheat more than corn; corn more than barley; barley more than oats. Additionally a pronounced and quick increase in the starch content of a horse diet can lead to acidosis, which will make the animal more prone to hoof lesions. Under extreme conditions the majority of fiber-digesting bacteria might die off, which has been shown to increase endotoxin and amine release. Symptoms may include: colic, laminitis, post-feeding acidemia, osteochondrosis, excessive gas and altered bowel motility.

At what point does increased grain feeding reduce fiber digestibility? Somewhere between 0.25 to 0.5 percent of body weight as starch.

Dr. Jim White is ruminant nutritionist for MFA Incorporated.