Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How late into Spring are cattle fed hay?

No school that I attended or my kids attended had courses in animal husbandry. I had a cousin that learned it through OJT from my uncle since they always raised some cattle.

Dairy cattle in dry lots……

Feedlot cattle…..

A lot of the equine deal..

Eat hay….every day.

This is satire.

Right?

Our cows are on a sort of fresh field of cornstalks. No hay for awhile now.

Depends on lots of things. Here in Texas where we see lots of droughts, cattle get fed hay whenever there is no grass. That can be any time of year. The real underlying factor to all of it is how the place is stocked. Most people here in TX have cattle for tax purposes on their land and have little knowledge of range management. As a result, many places are overstocked and need to feed a lot more often than someone who has light to moderate grazing pressure on their property. I’ve got a friend with 500 acres in the Texas hill country. He’s got 6 mama cows. Guess how often he has to feed. I’ll give you a hint. Never. And then there are people like my in-laws who watched Lonesome Dove a few too many times. Their place is covered in brush, erosion everywhere you look, and skinny cows that make them a lot less money (read that as costing more money than what they take in) than the big money making operation they had in their pie in the sky dreams. If I try to have this conversation with them it falls on deaf ears.
When you see the wannabes, their fences are junk and so it their land. Pretty silly, really.

Texas and Oklahoma may have feed hay and cake after cattle have eaten all new green grow, if we don’t get some rain it’s going to be bad, my winter wheat is already brown, you can’t find any hay in the west, prices are good on cattle, there will be a run on sale barns, I’m seeing farmers that raise wheat to sale cuttings it right now for hay.

Don't understand the smart asses.

It was a legitimate, thought out question.
The answer isn't so easy, as others have alluded to.
Some diary herds live on hay, with no pasture available.

Some-dam‐where Texas, near El Paso, off I-10,
I used to go past an enormous diary.
Black and White Bitches by the hundreds south of the highway.
A rail siding with hay loaded cars. Hat was the only grass those girls had.



Often wished I could have checked that place out.
The numbers, of everything, would have been mind blowing.

*here*we often feed the cows right up till early June....

IB, I don't think it was.

Hey Jeff,

Can you quick write up a bash script to check and see if a certain service is running on a linux server, and if it it isn't, turn it on? I'll give you a list of IP addresses to check, in the form of a line feed delimited text file. Record the results to a log file, and there should be no user interaction other than invoking the command with the name of the text file as the argument. Thanks!!!

I know you can do this, because if everyone should know when hay is stopped being fed, it's even more imperative that people should know how to produce that script.After all, as of 2021 1.3% of population worked in Ag, but even more - 1.8% worked in information.

FWIW, I just purchased my last hay a week ago. Too much rain and snow to regularly get the critters out to graze/browse. Last year, they'd have been out full time starting in January, no s--t.

Scott

I'm still feeding hay. Pastures here are green and growing, and I drilled wheat into mine last fall, so they have that to eat on. But, I like to keep hay out this time of the year, because the cows that extra feed until the grass is really going good. I have fed hay since late last September because of the drought last summer and fall. The cows are craving that green stuff, and will keep it mowed down and not let it grow if I don't keep a little hay set out. However, I'll be out of hay in a few weeks, so I hope this nice warm weather continues, and grass keeps growing.

then.........summer pastures on US Forest property ?

Here......cows need to be outta the way to grow hay

It is a much varied answer in many places, I imagine. Around here it varies on how much pasture is available to the beeves. Only the organic dairy herds spend much time on grass. The rest of the dairy cows may get to see some pasture when they are dry , if any is available. Much of the land that is not too steep is reclaimed for arable soil. That being said, most of the critters , beef and dairy around here are on hay most of the year. It is not uncommon to get 4 cuttings around here, very fertile soil and plenty of moisture.

When I had cattle, I fed until the cows stopped eating the hay. When they get enough grass to eat, they will abandon the hay. So it depends on the weather.

Same here. March 15 is about as long as we go. One good year they got on the Persian clover and volunteer ryegrass which was growing rampant and quit the hay about the middle of February.

Mine in Alabama have just about stopped eating hay in the last 2 weeks. I leave a little out but they are eating mostly annual ryegrass I drilled into some of my pasture last fall

That place was there for many years. I don’t know if it’s still there as I haven’t been that far west in Texas in 12-15 years. Hell I was always amazed that there were dairies out there.

Yep.




Snow burned off and some of the cows are wandering around away from the feed grounds.


Had a couple get out yesterday and a neighbor called.

Washed out creek crossing on a little (currently)swamp pasture. I knew the fence was gone in that spot but figured the chitheads would leave it alone for another day.... Nope.....lol



We plan on feeding until early-mid May.

Yeah, had to call the neighbor yesterday to ask if he was short 40 pairs or so, since they were on the road, making good time, heading south....

He hoped to keep them on the dry pasture a little while waiting for the next one to dry a bit more, but those mommas decided it was time to check out greener pastures themselves.

Cows will drive you mad.

Nov