Oat hay and other spring cash crop thoughts. Do U feed oats

[Faster horses]

I planted some 4 way mix this past summer. Beardless barely, oats, beardless wheat and peas. It makes some real nice feed. My cows are really liking it.

I'll bet that is great feed. We bought some feed oats called 'naked oats' one time to feed our heifer calves (back before we started feeding them hay and only hay) and man, were they ever nice oats. Really heavy.

Not many people raise feed oats any more and the price seems to be pretty high when you go to buy them. Are they not raised because of price/yield or is there another reason?


As to the dust in hay, dust is dust and horses can't handle any type of dust.
Hay fed in a feeder is even worse because the horses stick their nose in the hay feeder and inhale any dust that's there.

 

[Ho55]

Most around here plant oats and other small grains. Mostly because corn doesn't grow here. 7200 ft. And freezes every month of the year. I mostly green chop my grain and put it in a silage pit. When going back to hay, the oats make a better cover crop because it doesn't seem to smother the young hay out. But when i rotate to just a grain crop for silage I like to mix oats barely and peas and plant it about 120lbs to the acre. It will work my chopper pretty hard.