An animal sciences professor in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences has been awarded nearly $600,000 in grant funding to train students for graduate school or future employment in the area of ruminant nutrition.
Uchenna Anele, Ph.D., associate professor of ruminant nutrition in the Department of Animal Sciences, will use the award to develop an Innovative Ruminant Nutrition Laboratory as part of an integrated teaching and research project.
“The project has provided me with an excellent opportunity to mentor more undergraduate students,” said Anele.
“Ruminants” are livestock such as sheep, cattle and goats which have a unique digestive system that allows them to aquire nutrition from plant-based food by fermenting it in a specialized stomach prior to digestion. This allows the animal to regurgitate food – known as its cud – and chew it again to break it down further.
The students will study primarily beef and dairy cows, with some limited work on sheep and goats, Anele said.
“The ruminant lab launched in fall 2022 to create a route for students to develop three specific skills: product development, feed evaluation and data management,” he said. “These skills are required for graduate school or employment in the livestock feed industry.”
Four N.C. A&T faculty members and five industry and USDA-ARS collaborators, including Berry College, Dairy Records Management Systems, Casper’s Calf Ranch and AB Vista, will work together for the duration of the project to provide undergraduate students with hands-on experiences doing original research.
“We aim to seamlessly integrate the instruction and research components to make the learning process as authentic as possible for the student,” said Anele.
Each year of the grant, 30 undergraduate students will be recruited into the ruminant lab track to perform independent small-team research studies on two other federally funded projects: one assessing ways to enhance farm profitability by integrating cattle farming, mushroom production and corn stover, and another studying gut health and feed efficiency.
Experiential learning activities, such as summer internships, field trips, opportunities to serve as research mentors, team-building exercises and workshops designed to enhance knowledge, leadership and communication skills, will also be a part of the project, Anele said.
