Eliminating costs is always better than reducing costs

[Big Swede]

Absolutely they will eat the stalks in the field. And it doesn't cost anything to harvest them either. Be careful if there is a lot of ears in the field though. They will eat till they nearly pop and if they get too much corn it will kill them. Back in the day before corn borer resistant corn (Bt) my brother took in cattle on a field that had a least 20 bu per acre on the ground and he warned the owners but they turned in anyway. Within a few days there were 25 dead cows and that many more that were foundered enough that they never were the same. These days the corn varieties and genetically modified genes don't usually allow there to be that much field loss.

In good yielding corn, 1 acre will support a cow for a month or even a month and a half. Towards the end of the period most of the goody is gone so some protein supplement will extend the time you can graze. If there isn't too much snow we can graze stalks into February here. If I had more acres I would graze all winter if possible.

[Brad S]

I've wintered alot of cows on cornstalks and Sweed's admonition about burning up cows on down corn is spades. This is one reason to limit or rotate your stalk grazing, another: cows will graze through snow to ungrazed stalks, but if the stalks have been picked over they'll bawl behind the windbreak. My thoughts, make cows clean up ears, husks, and leaves (and crabgrass if you're lucky), but you'll spend too much on supplement forcing them to eat much stalk (without backing up).


For what its worth, I was roughing cows before I ever heard of Kit Pharo and proven "if you cheat your cow, you'll end up cheating your kids" Another thought, any good management decision must include opportunity cost; the progeny from high output management herds are about 150 days away from high end harvest (there's alot of savings there too). The only way I can justify yearlings on grass is to cheat the cowman (I'm certainly ok with doing this), and I love grassing yearlings.