Steve Sickle wins Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association’s (OSCIA) Don Hill Legacy Award

Steve Sickle received the Don Hill Legacy Award for his innovative mobile cow shade project from the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association (OSCIA) at its recent annual meeting in Kingston.

The $1,000 award recognizes producers who successfully use on-farm innovation and ingenuity to address and identify risks to soil, water, air, or biodiversity. Sickle’s mobile cow shade improved both conception rates and manure management on his beef and cash crop farm in Brant County.

Phil Oegema, OSCIA past-president, said Sickle “reimagined” a rusted-out grain bin into a mobile cow shade after attending Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show several years ago and seeing a ginseng shade. While such a structure would provide shade for his grazing cattle, Sickle thought moving it from pasture to pasture would be awkward.

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So “he cut the bin into sections and attached legs for support and had an excellent shade structure for his cattle (and) the structure is mobile with the Gator,” said Oegema. “The cows were rubbing on the cool steel poles because all the other wire was hot. So, Steve installed brushes, which the cows quickly wore out.”

Sickle said he’s rotationally grazed his beef cattle for five or six years, but much of his grazed land lacks shade. He noticed that during hot, sunny weather, his conception rates dropped to around 80 per cent. However, after installing the shade, his rates rose.

“I haven’t had conception rates of 100 per cent every year, but two years since I built it (I have), including this past year,” he explained. “It’s definitely part of it, and my manure management is better.”

The cow shade’s easy mobility allows him to position it wherever the paddocks could benefit from increased fertilizer, although he tends to avoid the hollows. He said strategic placement offsets forecasted wind events, limiting the odds of the shades ending up in the bush or blowing over.

After one powerful windstorm, Sickle had to pull a cow shade out of the bush and said it took some pushing, tugging and twisting to get them bent back in shape.

“If it were a ginseng shade, she’d be junk because it’d be up and over the bush,” he explained.