Animal Nutrition at the Cal Poly Arena

This year, the Cal Poly Rodeo Program has taken extra steps to ensure the care of its livestock and has implemented some changes to help the programs bottom line. The Cal Poly Rodeo program has teamed up with the Cal Poly Dairy unit to revamp our feed process.

With the completion of the Rodeo Booster project, The Ray and Ginger Bunnell Barn, we now have a great covered feedlot for our critters. This summer we implemented a bunk feeding style setup and capitalized on the resources of our neighbors directly here on campus. We are feeding haylage put up on campus, mixed with our rodeo grain mix designed by Cal Poly animal nutrients, and fed with bunk feeding equipment owned and operated by the Cal Poly Dairy.

This actually adds more nutrients and vitamins to the livestock’s feed. Each livestock pen gets fed a tailored amount of the mixture based on what each pen needs nutritional wise. There are four different pens; the breakaway calves, calf roping calves, team roping steers, and bull dogging or steer wrestling steers. Each pen gets fed 3% of its total body weight, this ensures that each pen is getting fed what is needed to receive the proper amount on nutrients. The rodeo program and the dairy share an online app that allows changes to the feed requirements to be made. This can either mean the calves and steers switched pens, the feed needs to be increased or decreased, or the livestock is being used somewhere else, so a specific pen is empty. The app shows how much to feed each pen and highlights any changes that were made. The dairy’s mixer mixes the grain and haylage before feeding, and then records the amount of feed that each pen receives. The app records this data to be reviewed later by both the dairy and rodeo programs. The ability for many different aspects of Cal Poly to benefit from this program is but one of many examples of the Cal Poly connections.