Where/how do you feed your cattle or other stock?

[ChrisinMO]

One of the threads about hay down below got me to thinking about this subject. We've got sheep, dairy goats, cattle and oh yes my daughter's horse.

The sheep are strictly outside during the winter. Give them four months to put on a coat of wool and they laugh at cold weather. Ice storms are another matter, but fortunately we had none of that this winter. I like to feed them in various parts of the market gardens, especially those areas where we are going to be growing brassicas or vining crops, especially cucumbers. Also in areas for corn.

The goats winter part in and part out. They are hardier and have healthier kids when they spend most of their time outdoors (this is my experience). However, they don't really appreciate long periods of wet weather and chore time gets nasty with snowy weather, so at those times they move under a roof attached to our hayshed.

The cattle are fed under a lean-to attached to our hayshed. Feeding small squares is a snap. Round bales a little tougher. We use wood chips from the nearby town (free for the hauling) for bedding. This keeps them dry and short circuits all the problems with mud. This year we're trying an experiment with them. We're putting down whole, shelled corn just before adding bedding. In the spring, we'll put in some of our feeder size pigs to grow and finish by rooting up the bedding. One of my least favorite jobs of the entire year is cleaning out the bedding pack behind the cattle. Hard on the tractor and hard on me and it takes a long time. Perhaps the hogs will make it easier? Anyway, it is just a test.

The horse splits her time, inside on bad days, outside the rest of the time. She has a nice big field to run and seems to like that a lot.

Anyway, we get good use out of the manure these animals make (except the horse, which I haven't figured out yet). Taking care of most of them is easy and they seem to do well by it.

So, how do you feed your animals? And why have you chosen to do it that way?

Christopher

 

[ericlb]

horses are fed in homemade feeders, [ split 55gallon barrels with hay racks made out of rebar], they live inside/ outside free choise as each has its own shed, goats are fed by tossing hay into their pen they stay outside, small number of goats and fairly dry mild winters, cattle when we have some are fed round bales in cattle pen as needed , they stay inside/ outside free choise we usualy keep around a dozen at any one time , farming to suppliment food, not trying to make a living at it, learned that years ago, not enough land available in this valley to make a proper go of it and a lot of land around here wont support farming

 

[Dave from MN]

Cows are fed round bales in round bale feeders, they also have a small feeder bunk for when I have any small bales or am giving them some grain. Cornstalk round bales I just dump anywhere around the yard for them. Animals on grain are just given a round bale of cornstalks for bedding and roughage, and are fed feed in feeders made from plastic 55 gallon round barrles cut legthwise in half and are mounted on 4 or 8' 4x4 runners. Easy to move and they cant flip them over. I am going to build a feeder that will be 8'x12' with one side open so I can just drive in and drop 2 or 3 rounds for them and not have to deal with opning and closing a gate.

 

[kyhayman]

Cows and horses get inside stored round bales dropped into round bale feeders. Two groups of cows have feeding pads of geotextile covered with crushed stone. The horses and one group of cows (I board for these for other people) get the hay in the feeders but not the pads (yet). Takes time to get everything done that needs doing.

 

[Tom in TN]

Christopher,

I have small cow/calf operation in Middle Tennessee (43 head including a bull, 5 heifers, and a few calves). I feed only small squares to them. I take the bales to different parts of the farm each day and spread the bales on the ground. This has been such a harsh, long winter the grass hasn't even started to come back yet. I normally am scaling back on the hay that I feed by now, but I can't this year.

My horses have a feeder with hay rack on top that I use to feed them.

I'm only 65 years old right now, so I expect to keep making and feeding small squares for a few more years. Eventually, I think I'll either have to give up on the cows or go to round bales.

Tom in TN

 

[Hogleg]

For the first 1/2 of the winter, I was moving round bales into the dry lot one at a time. Pretty muddy but doable. I ran out of hay mid-winter so for the second load, as I unloaded them, I placed them in the dry lot so that I could selectively move fence and offer a new round when the prior one was used up. A much better idea and no need to fire up the tractor. I used electric for a while, but I have one darn calf that seems to know how to use her horns to move the wire. 4,000 volts in it but she still gets around the wire. So I used the cattle panels from my round pen and that kept them out of the new hay.

Horses get a round bale and I supplement with some alfalfa squares in their own dry lot, with access to their stalls.

What is the reason for using a feeding building? My cows (angus grass fed beef) get along fine in the dry lot with a run-in for shelter. They are almost never in the shelter, mostly laying in the hay around the feeder. 7 head.

 

[Nancy Howell]

4 horses, no barn/shed. Horses are given a small amount of grain in the corral. While they are munching on the grain, I drop the gate to the electric fence and James brings in one or two 4x4 rounds of coastal and puts them in the feeding rings using the Ford 2810 with F/E loader.

 

[showcrop]

Chris? do you have tines on your bucket for cleaning out the bedding pack? I found that it helped a whole lot.

 

[Chris in SK]

I bale a mix of small square and big round alfalfa and slough hay for our sheep. We use the small squares at lambing, and in the barn if the weather is really bad. The rounds we feed in adjustable type square ‘ring’ feeders, and we also leave some the pasture, and control access with electric fence to stop them getting too lazy, but we get a lot of wastage this way.
We feed a few oats or barley and a mineral supplement, but this year, a friend who is an organic grain farmer gave us about 350 bu of lentil screenings, which was mostly just wild oats that he'd cleaned out. I was a bit skeptical, but they fed well and were free. We kept the ram on better quality oats. The sheep have access to the barn, but they will stay out in -40 below weather which we can get for weeks on end sometimes. Wet weather seems harder on them than the cold.
Chris

 

[rrlund]

Everything is fed outside. If they get inside,they want to lay down and laying in front of a feedbunk gets cattle injured.

The cows get fed out in the field in round bale feeders. There gets to be quite a mound by this time of year and it keeps them out of the mud. The steers and heifers are all on concrete. Concrete fenceline feedbunks for silage and grain and round bale feeders for hay.

 

[James Howell]

<a href="http://s200.photobucket.com/albums/aa5/jameslloydhowell/Haymaking%202007/?action=view&current=IMG_1251.jpg" target="_blank">

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[usetob]

like this

 

[usetob]

opps let me try again

 

[Formerly PaMike]

I have steers outside all winter. I have a round bale feeder with a "basket" and a floor. Use a 656 with a loader on the front and a forklift on the back. Grab the bale with the forklift and head up the hill to the feeder. Tip the bale off the forks into the feeder. Then I use the loader bucket to scrape some manure or haul off the hay they didnt/wont eat. Then once the tractor is all covered in manure I park it in the barn so that manure can dry up, fall off and make a big mess...

 

[WA-Hal]

That looks like a good setup, unless you get a lot of snow. If that happened, I would worry about the snow sliding off the roof and landing in a huge pile just where I would want to drive to feed the cows.

When I was a kid, my Dad and I built a long, covered feed bunk that was attached on one end to our old hay barn. We only fed small square bales of conditioned mostly alfalfa hay, and the feed bunk made it possible to get hay waste down to almost nothing. It also was fairly easy to pull the bales down to the end of the bunk by hand and distribute hay the length of the bunk, and since it was covered, I didn't have to fight the snow. On the side of the bunk where the cows ate, we had a nice ramp with some slope to it, so the manure mostly just flowed off, giving the cattle good footing and a good place to eat. The shed roof over the bunk made the snow slide off on the other side from where the cows were. In those years, sometimes we would have snow piles 12 feet tall from where the snow had slid off the metal barn roof. I sure liked that feed bunk--it was lots better and easier to use than the way we fed before, and there was very little waste. One of my Dad's best ideas!

 

[Ron in Nebr]

We have a cow-calf operation in North Central Nebraska. Usually around 900-1000 head on the place at any given time including mother cows/heifers, take-in cattle, replacement heifers, weaned calves, bulls, and 8 head of horses.

We feed big round bales through a proccessor pulled behind a tractor. The proccessor grinds the bales up and strings it out in a windrow, and it can carry 5 bales at a time. We typically feed around 35 bales a day. The hay is strung out on the hay meadows in nice weather to distribute the manure for fertilizer, where it's scattered with a drag harrow in the spring. During bad weather the hay is strung out behind tree groves first planted by my great-granddad around the turn of the century(1900, not 2000) that have had more trees planted in them almost every spring since.

The only thing that comes inside the barn are cows that need calves pulled, and cold/wet newborn calves during bad weather until they get dried off.

We also feed our weaned calves in bunks with a mixer wagon that feeds a mix of ground hay, corn, and molasses. Used to have corn silage in that mix too but haven't planted corn the past two years.

Also, we feed cake to our cows in the winter before calving season starts.

 

[Anonymous-0]

Horses away from the house have a paddock and 3 sided shed with a water tank and have constant access to a round bale and a tank of water. Horses at the house get fed twice a day with about twice what they should get. Outside horses eat less and look better. I'll be figuring out how to give the ones at the house constant access also.
Pregnant mares get beatpulp, oats and/or barley with some extra minerals the last 2 months and 1st month (until they get on pasture) after birth. Really like the way they look with the free choice feed.


Dave