Three students from Coláiste Dun Iascaigh, Cahir took part in the 51^st BT Young Scientist and Technologist of the Year Exhibition in RDS, Dublin on the 7^th -10^th of January 2015. Shauna Burke, Brian O’ Connor and Gerard Walshe presented a project called “Seed to Feed in 7 days” which aimed to find a cheaper, more nutritious alternative to conventional feed for farm animals. As young people interested in agriculture, they wanted to find ways to make farming a more viable career in the future. They were widely praised by the judges and public for their project and were awarded a “Highly Commended” rosette for their work. Mentor and Science teacher Stephanie Hassett explained how many hard hours were spent not only going through the experiments and processes but also preparing reports, charts and display material. School Principal Mary Finnegan-Burke said that the Coláiste was very proud of the students, their teacher and their remarkable achievement. This is the second year in a row that the Coláiste has reached the Young Scientist finals.

One of the students, Brian O’Connor explained the process: The project involved comparing two different systems of feeding cattle, and then comparing them under the following headings: 1. Weight gain. 2. Health Benefits and 3. Costs.

Twenty cattle were used for the trial, with ten in each group. One group of ten were fed 2kg of conventional feed per day, while the other group were fed on a 2:1 mixture of barley and beans. The cattle were then weighed weekly for four weeks, and the costs of both systems of feeding recorded.

To start the project, we had to build the sprouting system, which cost just under €5000. To buy a system of the size that we built would cost approximately €13,000.

To start the sprouting process, the grains are soaked overnight, which gets the seeds ready for a new life and any chaff left in the grain floats to the top, which can then be screened off. The grains are then spread onto the trays, and left in the room for seven days to sprout. The room temperature is kept at 22 degrees Celsius, and they are sprayed with water every 2 hours, and this water is also heated to 22 degrees. Fluorescent lights provide the light for the sprouts to grow. After seven days the sprouts are harvested and fed to the cattle.

Sprouted grains replicate the fresh spring grass which is regarded as the best livestock feed. When the grains are sprouted, they go from being 30% digestible as grains to 80% digestible fully sprouted. This means that the cattle can get a lot more nutrition from the grains, and are more content on less.

Our findings were as follows: cattle fed on sprouts had a better coat condition and were more content then cattle fed on conventional feed. We found that both systems of feeding were equally as efficient as regards weight gain, however the trial is ongoing and going by the promising results in the last week of the trial, we expect that the cattle fed on sprouts would outperform the cattle fed on conventional feed by approximately 5kg each per week.

Our findings as regards costs were very promising. Feeding the cattle on the sprouted grains was 25% cheaper than feeding the cattle on conventional feed; however an even bigger advantage of the spouting system is that cattle fed on sprouts ate 50% less hay because the cattle have access to green material in the sprouts.

The next step for our project is to refine the sprouting system, try sprouting different grains, and also to try feeding the sprouted grains to dairy cattle, to see if it would improve milk quality, and also to feed them to poultry to reduce mortality and costs.