Winter feeding costs are the largest single expense eating away at a cow-calf producer’s meager profit margin, says John Popp, a beef production specialist with Manitoba Agriculture.
Feeding straw is one way to chisel down the cost, he told a recent beef meeting that the department organized in Neepawa.
“If your cows are calving in May and you’ve got good quality hay kicking around the yard, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have at least a third of your wintering diet consisting of straw.”
Many cattle producers don’t bother to figure out how much it costs to winter their cows and are content to just put hay in front of them and forget about it.
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Popp said the cost of feeding his own herd is about 78 cents per head per day for the 200 days of the year that they are off pasture.
Straw quality is variable, whether it be oats, barley, wheat, rye or legume, which makes it important to test alternative feed stuffs.
Popp said year-old straw may be more palatable because fibre has had time to break down. Ammoniating straw is probably not worth the added expense.
As a rule of thumb, a 1,400 pound cow can eat up to 17.5 lb. of straw a day on a dry weight basis, or almost 20 lb. on an as-fed basis, provided it has access to all the water it needs.
When combined with screening pellets or sprouted grain, he said it may make more economic sense to sell some hay and feed cheaper straw.
However, lower quality feed takes longer for cows to digest, and some animal types fare better on it than others.
“If you breed pencil-gutted cows – those that are very high in the flank and a little bit narrower, tighter hided cows – they tend to do better on higher energy or higher grain diets,” he said.
“But those cows with great big rumens on them, they tend to do a little bit better on a straw-based diet.”
Cows that have always been pampered can’t be switched to a straw-based diet overnight, he said, adding it might result in a rude awakening for both the animals and their owner.
Alternatives are worth checking out, he said, but producers should first make sure the cows are willing to eat them.
For example, a producer who can buy dried distillers grain at $140 per ton might find it makes more sense to feed his cows eight lb. of the ethanol byproduct per day combined with straw at 11/4 cents per lb. and sell some of his own hay for 3.5 cents a lb.
Other combinations worth looking at include straw with pellets or cubes, canola, soybean and beef protein supplements.
Apart from palatability issues, Popp said straw is not without its problems. Excessive levels of potassium in straw may lead to a magnesium deficiency known as winter tetany, a condition in which cows fall down and can’t get up or flounder around trembling.
“But what I tell guys is that if you’re feeding two-thirds good quality hay and one-third straw on second trimester cows, you’re not going to get into any trouble.”
Bale grazing and using a bale processor are both good options, he said, as long as the cows are in good shape coming into the winter.
However, thin cows need good quality feed, and lots of it.
“Maybe they’ve got Johne’s disease, or maybe you just want to put a bullet in them,” he said.
“Those kinds of cows, you definitely can’t feed straw.”
Protein levels in straw can vary from 3.9 to 6.4 percent, and total digestible nutrients (TDN), which measures energy content, can be 40 to 46 percent. Energy requirements for second trimester cows are 48 to 51 percent TDN.
“So if you’ve got hay kicking around your place that is 55 or 57 TDN, then you’re overfeeding your cows in terms of what they need nutritionally,” Popp said. “Granted, you’ll put some weight on them, but that’s costing you money.”
Impacted rumen problems generally occur when the temperature quickly dips to -30 C and cows on free-choice straw react by stuffing themselves with excessive amounts that overwhelm their digestive system.
“It’s very simple to guard against impaction: feed adequate levels of energy and protein and limit the quantity of straw that the cows can get to.”
This can be done by using an electric wire to control consumption or by providing equal measures of hay and straw, he added.
