Bale Grazing Corn Stalks with Beef Cows ?

[Stocker Steve]

Since we are going into a drought, I had some corn stocks baled to conserve on hay. Considering a DDG with ionosphore supplement every 3 days. Any other tips on bale grazing them with or with out some hay in the mix? How well should you make them clean up the bales?

 

[Lucky_P]

Unless you've got a grinder, I figure they'll eat the leaves, shucks, and cobs, and leave most of the stalks. Though, I'll bet mine would eventually clean 'em up; with our limit-feeding system - 1.5 hrs at the hay feeders/day - they have eaten everything else in the sacrifice paddocks to the dirt - including 2" diameter pigweed stems. Boredom, I guess, makes 'em eat stuff they normally would ignore or just trample in.

 

[Stocker Steve]

We baled up the rest of the stalks we could not reach with an electric fence just before the snow storm today. Ended up with 101 5x6 net wrapped bales.

If the cows leave behind most of the stalks - - I assume you end up spreading them back onto a field in the spring ?

 

[Stocker Steve]

Baled up 2 tons per acre, so you could overwinter a moderate sized cow for every 2 acres of corn stubble. The dirt surfers are missing out on some year round work :cboy:

 

[Stocker Steve]

Re did some feed required calculations for wintering on corn stalks. With the amount of sod being plowed down here - - there are plenty of stalks to winter a much bigger herd than I have now. The limiting forage issue then becomes summer pasture. I assume this is true through much of the corn belt.

Have you seen any creative approaches to limited summer pasture? I know one MN producer who trucks his cows to SD every summer but I am not excited about that.

 

[buckeye]

just finished thursday and was able to chase together 43 bales of stalks but hoping to keep them out on wheat stubble/clover/weed field till the snow gets too deep

 

[alicerobert]

Nice ... thanks for the information... :santa: :cboy: :hide: :deadhorse: :bday:

 

[Stocker Steve]

Unless you've got a grinder, I figure they'll eat the leaves, shucks, and cobs, and leave most of the stalks. Though, I'll bet mine would eventually clean 'em up; with our limit-feeding system - 1.5 hrs at the hay feeders/day.

Stockers like free choice corn stover. They will happily eat about one bale of stover with 2 to 3 bales of alfalfa hay. Go figure. I don't use bale rings with the stover so they can sort it some. Trying a 50/50 mix now.
Bulls love stover. They blast the bales and make dust fly.
(Spoiled?) cows hate stover. They prefer to challenge the electric bale grazing fence. So now trying limit feeding behind 4 strands of barb wire. About 5% of the cows are losing quite a bit of condition on this approach but the rest look good. Hard cull'in is a continuous process...