Saskatchewan Agriculture has released a new publication that it hopes will save cattle producers money this winter.
The 76-page Beef Cow Nutrition and Winter Feeding Guidelines contain directions for developing 450 feed rations for 1,200 and 1,400 pound beef cows using 11 different forages, silages and straw.
The feeding guidelines cover the mid-, late- and lactation-stages of pregnancy.
“What I’ve done is produce a series of feeding guidelines built around the recommendations put out by the National Research Council,” said Bryan Doig, a Saskatchewan Agriculture livestock agrologist who compiled the manual with help from other provincial livestock agrologists.
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“It’s a guideline for producers to design efficient rations to reduce the amount of feed wastage, and to also meet the minimum nutritional requirements for the beef cattle.”
The recommended average rations were determined using the Cowbytes Ration Balancing software, which is available from Alberta Agriculture.
Doig said producers must first test their forage feeds for quality. Once those values are known, producers can use the guidelines to determine proper feed rations.
Forages make up the bulk of most winter rations, he said, whether it’s hay, silage or a combination of hay and straw.
“Having your forages analyzed for nutrients is important because it tells you what protein and what energy is in that forage,” he said.
“A lot of producers are not aware of what the nutrient content of the forages are. So generally, it’s overfeeding – you’re wasting feed to put body weight gain that the cows may not need. Or, in some cases, they may not be supplying the proper level of nutrients by not knowing what’s in the feed.”
Enviro-Test Laboratories, which has labs in all three prairie provinces, can analyze the nutritional content of forage materials, as can Norwest Labs in Alberta and Manitoba, BDS Laboratories in Saskatchewan and Central Testing laboratory in Winnipeg.
Saskatchewan Agriculture’s guide also provides advice on vitamin, water, salt and mineral requirements for cows, cold-weather feeding guidelines, maintaining cow condition and dividing the herd into different feed groups.
Doig said overfeeding is costly and wasteful to the producer, while malnourished animals may perform poorly in the breeding herd.
It only makes sense then, he added, for producers to know the nutritional content of their feed so that they can use it wisely.
