Iowa farmer Jim Yenter served his country for a decade. And now the U. Adding seaweed to animal feed to reduce methane gas released into the atmosphere by ruminants' is a relatively new idea.
Oklahoma State University Estimating forage usage by cows is an important part of the task of calculating winter feed needs. View the discussion thread. Latest News Education. Industry Press Release. Ag Policy. AgDay TV. The primary factors are cow weight, forage quality, and stage of production gestating or lactating. When feeding the same forage, cows that weigh 1, pounds will consume more on a daily basis compared to lighter weight cows that weigh 1, pounds.
In addition, cows that are lactating will consume more feed than cows that are not lactating. Forage quality impacts dry matter intake of cows. As the forage quality increases, indicated as an increase in TDN content of the forage, the amount of the forage that the cow can consume also increases.
As forage quality increases, there is more leaf as compared to stem. This can be pasture grasses and plants or hay. Hay is dried grasses and legumes. The rumen requires forage in order to process food. Options include, pasture, hay from either grasses or legumes and silage.
In addition, some cattle operations will finish the cows on additional grain concentrate. Silage is often used in large cattle operations. Silage is an excellent source of high protein forage for the cows during times of poor grazing conditions. However, silage is usually stored in an airtight silo building to protect the food from spoiling. Silage is commonly made from a mixture of corn plants and grass hay or legume hay. It is put up while the moisture content is still relatively high, kept at a warm temperature, and fed as a fermented feed stuff.
The problem for the small cattle herd is keeping the silage stored safely. Some forage crops have a hard time drying enough to be kept as hay. Silage is the answer to this problem as it can be stored at 30 percent moisture content. The length of time you can store silage is much longer than other feed stuff for cattle. Properly stored silage can be kept for around 4 or 5 years. Because it is stored in a compressed form, it takes less space than storage of hay.
The nutrition value of silage increases as it ferments. The disadvantages to silage for the small scale beef production herd are mostly cost related. While you can make silage and store it in heavy plastic bags, it is labor intensive. The bags must be stored under cover. Harvesting and storing the forage in the silo requires heavy equipment and a silo. Science tells us that a lb. But when farmers project the feed inventory they need for the winter, they may actually estimate their cows feeding needs at lbs.
Where does the missing feed go? Farmers are really tracking hay disappearance , rather than hay consumed by cows. Disappearance includes parts of bales spoiled during storage, dropped on the way to the feeder, and wasted or refused during the feeding process.
Is there opportunity for improvement? The answer is "yes". With feed harvested and stored many months ago, the main factor we can influence now is feeding efficiency.
Cows are notorious wasters of feed. Given the opportunity, they will pull bales apart and tramp them down, select out only the choicest morsels to consume, use the rest as a comfy bedded area to lounge on, and then happily convert this high priced bedding into a manure pack when they get up.
0コメント