Making a Cow Feed Ration

Cows can’t make their food by themselves, they need help! Making a feed ration for cows is an easy task but involves a lot of thinking and concentration. Since feed for your cattle is the second most important thing on your farm, while water is number one, it is good to know how to make a feed ration. This guide includes the materials that you need, how to get products, the mixing stage, and delivering to the bunk.

For this process, it is best to have good math skills and to be able to deal with big numbers. I will be using newer equipment, however, any kind of equipment will work as long as it is the same implement. The materials needed to complete this task includes a loader with a bucket, a tractor with a feeding wagon, hay, silage, corn, wet distillers grain, minerals and rumensin, a pen, and a notebook.

In order make a feed ration, you have to have the products that are needed in it. These products can also be bought from other producers. For hay, we cut grass and baled it up into round bales, and then shredded them into a grinder to make hay. Now for silage, we chopped corn with a forage harvester and fermented it into silage. With the rest of the corn that wasn’t chopped, we combined it with a combine to make the corn. These two products are the base of this ration. Wet distiller’s grain can be bought from a local elevator and the minerals and rumensin can be bought from a feed store. The minerals are what keeps the cows healthy and is what gives them energy.

Now that we have our products, we can start with the mixing process. It is best if you have all of your products in piles and in the same area. Now we hook up our feeding wagon to our tractor and turn the wagon on Once we turn the wagon on, we also have to turn the scale on, which is on the wagon, so that we can measure how much we put into the wagon. We are going to be doing a 16,000 pound load. To begin the ration, we are going to use our loader and put 1,600 pounds of minerals into the wagon. Now we need to get 5,000 pounds of corn. To avoid spillage and waste, we will take two trips instead of one big one. After putting the corn in, the scale should read 6,600 pounds. It doesn’t have to be exactly that number, but we want it to be close. Now we are going to put in 1,400 pounds of wet distiller’s grain. We have to be careful when we put this product into the wagon because too much can cause sickness to you cattle. If we are short 100 pounds, it is better than 100 pounds over. After this, the scale should read close to 8,000 pounds. Now we are going to put in 6,000 pounds of silage. We will be taking small bucket loads again so that we don’t have spillage. This is where we have to have good math skills because now the numbers are getting high and you have to do mental math while operating the loader. Once all the silage is put into the wagon, the scale should be around 14,000 pounds. To finish the ration off, we need to put in 2,000 pounds of hay. Be sure to close windows before dumping the hay in because the hay dust gets really bad. For a better mix, we would put half the silage amount in, then add the 2,000 pounds of hay, and then add the rest of the silage in. For beginners, just put all the silage in and then the hay. After all the products are put in, the scale should be about 16,000 pounds, and now you have a feed ration. In order to have a complete mix, we are going to wait for a couple minutes to allow for the wagon to mix the ration together.

After mixing the ration, we are now ready to deliver the feed to the bunk. It’s better to put the feed in bunks rather than the ground because then we won’t waste as much feed. When we arrive to the bunk, we are going to lower our spout and raise the gate. Your bunk length will determine your speed because the whole bunk should be equally dumped with feed. We want our spout to dumb the feed right in the middle of the bunk to keep space from the bunk so that we don’t hit it with our tire. When we reach the halfway mark of our bunk, the scale should be at around 8,000 pounds. This tells us that we are equally spreading the feed in the bunk. Once we get to the end of the bunk, we will close the gate, raise the spout, and shut of the feeding wagon.

With the pen and notepad, we will write down how much we fed and the date that we fed them on. This way we can keep track of what we feed our cows and so we can monitor their consumption. Once the cows get to the right weight, we will sell them to a packing plant where they will get butchered. Now next year when you feed your cows, you will have a feed ration to use. Good luck and enjoy feeding!