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Sulfur requirements in meat goats |
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Sulfur requirements in meat goats |
by Pat Coleby
Some years ago, when I was farming in Gippsland, I was rung by one of the vets that used to do my CAE testing for me. He wanted me to find out all I could about Selenium.
He had been categorically told by the Dept of Agriculture at the time that there were no selenium
deficiencies in that part of Victoria, yet he was seeing them all the time in his practice and several of his vet friends had the same problem. The department was actually right - there were no inherent shortages there - only those mapped many years previously round Hamilton in the Western district of Victoria and round Christchurch in New Zealand.
I sent to USA for a book advertised in Acres USA,
by Dr Richard A. Passwaters called "Selenium as Food and Medicine". I know now I should have gotten it even earlier.
There is a huge amount of f very interesting information the book and Dr Passwaters refers to animal models as well. He says
that refining (and presumably processing) of grains destroys between 50 to 75 percent of the selenium, boiling can account for
45 percent.
The basic fact that came out in the book is that unless the amino acids of sulfur
are present in the gut in adequate amounts selenium cannot be assimilated. Similarly if that mineral is low in the soil the same thing happens and its not in the plants either. I had to go further back still to get more information on
sulfur, to a hand book produced in 1928 by CSIR (no '0' then).
In it the researchers talked particularly of the importance of cystine which would be missing if the
sulfur was too low and this led to poor growth. Later on (around the 70s) in Rural Research Bulletin No 22 (also
CSIRO) it was stated that if
sulfur was missing in the diet the animals digestions would suffer, and the article set the safe limit for
sulfur at 2% of all the food eaten by a beast in one day.
This actually allows a fairly high margin before we reach the levels described by Kent Mills in a recent issue of TGR They did not mention and possibly did not know that a lack of
sulfur leads to lice and other exterior parasite infestations. It was the first reason I was ever given for making sure the mineral was in every animals diet, either through feed (or licks) or in good levels in the soil.
However there is a far more serious cause for the shortage of sulfur and therefore indirectly selenium. When I worked with Neal Kinsey in WA in 1998 he told me that
sulfur was the fastest growing deficiency in the world today and he - like me put it down to high analysis fertilizers
I realized by the end of the sixties that the mineral was being inhibited somehow and I did not find out for quite a while that
artificials like 'super', in spite of being made with sulfuric acid, actually inhibit
sulfur - along with a large number of other minerals. When the vet who asked me to find out about this had the farms where selenium was so short
analyzed, he discovered that the sulfur in the soil was incredibly low.
The amount of sulfur suggested in the dry mix lick I advocate seems to be exactly right - selenium deficiencies do not arise once we had stock on the right amounts on
sulfur - I lost nearly a years production before I found out. Sulfur is replaced in the soil by topdressing with Gypsum (calcium
sulphate) or straight elemental
sulfur AFTER an analysis.
DM 0 and MSM are supposed to take the place of sulfur - a more modem processed form of the mineral; it was NOT a success in the horse world and all stock seem to do better on the basic mineral rather than a processed variety.
Passwaters also emphasizes that sea sources of selenium were preferable to using sodium
selenite, which can be very toxic; he says that I gram of natural selenium as found in seaweed or similar is equal in strength to 4 grams of sodium selenite and obviously a preferable source. That is one of the many reasons for the presence of seaweed meal in the lick, but it can be put out for goats ad lib as well.