I get that in good weather cows eat grass 
but what else do you feed a beef cow? I keep reading about feed, and silage and hay... What are the main constituents of these and where do you get them from?
While I'm at it - have any of you experienced anything that has significantly affected the price of your cattle going to slaughter recently?
('Forage' is crops, usually leafy, fed to livestock. 'Cake' is concentrate - a mix of flakes and pellets, or just pellets. Usually has minerals and other dietary requirements added. Straights is a single grain or feedstuff, eg., barley, unadulterated.)
Hay is dried grass. Cut, dried in the sun, baled. Little square bales, big square bales or large round bales. Keeps for years as long as it's kept dry.
Silage is fermented forage, usually fermented grass but could be other crops ensiled. (Wholecrop maize or barely, for instance.) Cut, wilted for a short while but not as dry as hay. Wrapped in plastic, usually in big round bales but you can get big square bales. Once opened it must be used up within days. Larger operations have silage pits, where the cut grass is heaped up and covered in a plastic sheet. To make this you must be able to cut many fields all on the same day. When used, pit silage is sliced from the open face and the face re-covered.
Silage costs more to make and can 'run right through them', making a lot of wet slurry to dispose of. Many farmers mix it with chopped straw to make it go further and to dry up the slurry a bit.
Hay is more difficult to make, technically, although it can be done using simpler equipment.
Cattle cake is a mix of grains and other feedstuffs with minerals and vitamins added. The balance of grains depends on the target beasts - young stock, store beasts, milking dairy cows, finishing cattle. Beef suckler cows mostly don't get given cake.
Farmers with good land will make their own barley, maize, turnips, etc, all of which will reduce the cake bill.
Most adult cattle are housed over winter, certainly in the north. If loose housed then straw is needed for bedding. Most farms now have cubicles, where each cow has a 'bed', usually now with a mat or mattress for comfort. The dung and urine and, where used, soiled straw, have to be managed safely and legally. Large dairy farms mostly have slurry towers which can store 6 months' slurry. Farmyard manure is a great natural fertiliser, so farmers want to get it back on the land when it'll do most good.
TB is a big issue to dairy and beef farms. No coherent plan for its control is forthcoming. If you are in a TB area, the only way to keep your cattle safe from the disease is to house them full time. If you are from an area that has TB, you cannot sell your beasts into Scotland (or if you can then there are a lot of hoops to go through) except for immediate slaughter.
Cake and artificial fertiliser have gone up enormously recently. Breeds which do better on grass and don't need intensive finishing therefore are becoming more popular, plus Morrisons now pay +10p/kg deadweight for beasts fathered by pedigree Aberdeen Angus or pedigree Hereford bulls, and +20p/kg for beasts fathered by pedigree Beef or Whitebred Shorthorn bulls - so those breeds now fetch more at all points in their lifecycle.
Most farmers need their subsidies to survive, and increasingly the subsidies impose environmental scrictures. Supplements may be paid for using native breed cattle to graze moorland, which has increased the costs of breeding pedigree Galloway and other native breeds enormously.
Anaerobic digesters are starting to go up around the country now. It is hard to quite predict the effect of these. Basically they need cattle that are housed all year round, living on slats, so the slurry is collected easily and fed into the digester. The original theory was that the land would grow grass which would be fed to the cattle, who would make slurry and beef. The slurry would go through the digester, release energy and produce fertliser for the land. The fertiliser would be spread on the land and help more grass to grow. However, the systems now going up need the grass to go directly into the digester, the feed for the cattle is being brought in from elsewhere.
If this all sounds completely bonkers, it is.
We live in a world where, in a country ideally suited to rearing beef off grass, we house cattle on slats, feed them cake made from imported soya, to grow which rainforest has been cut down.
Topic: Cattle Feed? (Read 7587 times)
