You can do a lot with feed supplements for your summer forage program; you can also tailor the supplements, depending on how you want your cattle to perform. University of Missouri Extension beef nutrition specialist Justin Sexten told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor it’s not always the case that supplements are used to maintain gains as forage quality declines in the heat of the summer; they can also be used to enhance gains, by producers who have chosen to manage risk by locking in a price for cattle at a target weight. “If they have forward contracted those cattle for sale in late July and August,” Sexten explained, “and contracted those cattle at 700 lbs. and locked in a price, what they have done is minimize their price risk, but then they have potentially shifted the price risk to a production risk.” They can’t control the price, he said, but by manipulating the feeding program, they can control the weight of the cattle as they come off grass.
As more volatility has entered the cattle market – with wide swings not just in cattle prices but in feed, energy and other inputs – Sexten said “more producers are looking at managing their price risk in some form or fashion.
By forward contracting or hedging those calves, they’ve shifted risk to something that they’re more effective at managing, like the weight gain in the cattle.” The producer can rotate through feedstuffs as the need for supplementation increases.
After the wet, cool spring this region experienced, grass was plentiful and high in quality; as the summer progresses the forage will mature and the stocking rate will increase, since the cattle are getting bigger and their feed needs rise. “Where protein content will be high enough in many cases,” Sexten said, “we would look to provide a supplement that is primarily fiber-based. Many of the byproduct feeds are well-suited to this – soyhulls, wheat midds, corn gluten feed, distiller’s grains.”
He said the producer could start with soyhulls, which are the lowest protein supplement, and eventually move up to distiller’s grain, which is the highest and has a higher level of fat for additional energy.
Supplements can also be used as a vehicle for delivery of performance-enhancing additives like ionophores. “If you supplement the same amount all the way through the summer grazing period,” Sexten said, “essentially the supplement goes down in terms of its percentage of body weight that you’re providing to the cattle.
So you can either look at supplementing greater amounts as forage quality declines and the cattle get bigger, or you can supplement the last half of the grazing period, towards the end of when you would market those cattle.”
Paul Beck, a professor and researcher at the University of Arkansas Livestock and Forestry Branch at Batesville, has been studying how to get optimum performance out of each byproduct. “They all do a good job increasing the energy density of a lot of our cattle and forage based diets,” he said. “They are a digestible fiber source, so they’re closer to the forage they’re consuming than a grain would be.”
That’s important, since excessive starch in the diet can impair the digestibility of forage. There are problems to avoid with some of the feedstuffs; corn gluten feed and distiller’s grain can be high in sulfur, which Beck said can lead to problems with copper absorption. It can also produce a thiamine deficiency in the rumen, which produces an impairment of motor skills called polioencephalomalacia.
Distiller’s grain and hominy feed are both about 10 percent fat; if the diet is too rich in fat, he said, that will disrupt fiber fermentation. Beck said it’s hard to predict what your supplementation feeds will be before the season. “With our introduced warm-season grasses – bermudagrass – we’ve had years where we get adequate performance from just grass alone, 1.8-2.0 lbs/day,” he said. But even in those circumstances, cattle can benefit from supplements.
“Some of the results from our Batesville research” he said, “has shown that even though we have cattle that are gaining 1.75-almost 2.00 lbs/day on grass alone, they still will respond to these supplements like distiller’s grains and cottonseed cake and these fiber-based supplements. And that gives us some advantages, knowing that at moderate rates of supplementation, 2-3 lbs/day, we can get adequate performance from those, and it’s a quality investment.”
How can you tell when a supplement is necessary? One warning sign is when cattle fecal pads start stacking up; Beck said that indicates higher fiber content in the diet and low digestibility. “If you have low forage availability and you see cattle grazing all throughout the day,” Beck said, “a lot of times when you start feeding that supplement at a high enough rate to meet their intake goals, you’ll see the cattle return to a more normal grazing pattern. When we look at performance, it’s hard to pick up changes in body weight over a real short period of time, so you’re going to have to use your animal husbandry skills and just observe the cattle to see how they’re performing.”
