Cattle Diets and Nutrition

Sustain life? It doesn't need any to live. It only needs it to be happy and healthiest and not bored. I know a cow that has lived for years on a small piece of dirt. Dairy cows live on concrete tied up.

Depending on the breed, beef calves should weigh about 600-800 lbs by the age of 8 months.

Of course. Deep fry it

Newborns need colostrum as soon as possible. Older calves require milk replacer as well as a ration of hay and grain for them to eat, along with water to drink. They should be weaned off the replacer by 3 to 4 months of age.

They can if you like stuff it down there throat but they wont willingly, its like saying humans wont eat other humans.

Email me at aimeeamberc@hotmail.com for questions.

A young bottle-fed calf should be fed every three to four hours. When they get around a week old, it should be increased to 8 to 12 hours between feedings.

yes

Cattle can provide meat, milk, draft power, and fiber. They are also used as companions and riding animals with surprising frequency. Cattle can also be used as show animals, living lawnmowers, companions for horses, and as rodeo stock. Most are raised for profit and as a means to manage grasslands as bison once had, except that the bison population is too small to be able to be used on such native grasslands.

Raising cattle also enables a person with experience and knowledge of how cattle behave, how to feed them, breed them, etc. This experience and knowledge can be used to teach other people who want to get into the business of raising cattle, and to share methods that you have learned with other experienced cattle producers. Raising cattle enables a person to get involved in managing and learning how the natural cycles and nature works according to how the grass and seasonal cycles work, especially if you are one to be raising cattle on grass only. Raising cattle also gives you a much more in-depth sight of what it takes to care for such animals that other people, especially those who live in cities, could never understand or appreciate.

yes

None.

No.

There is nothing special about the way cows chew. The only thing that may seem special is that, when they eat, they first eat the grass or hay whole then, when full and resting, regurgitate it to chew it as cud.

No.

A typical range cow loses her productivity between the ages of 8 and 10 and must be replaced.

Because cattle can be grazed for 365 days a year, and most often feed doesn't have to be put up to sustain cattle through a cold winter or a season where there's little to no grazing.

No.

The best thing for your pasture is to first drastically reduce your stocking rate, or pull off your livestock off the pasture that has been overgrazed altogether. You should decrease your livestock numbers to what your pasture would normally be able to accept in a fair to good (NOT excellent) grazing season.

The next thing to do is to make one of two choices:

1) Till the overgrazed pasture and reseed and fertilize

2) Harrow, fertilizer and no-till seed the pasture and keep grazing at a minimum to allow the grasses to establish a deep root system and increase soil and above-ground biomass.

The latter one will take longer as you will be dealing with weeds and will have to consistently fertilize your pasture to keep the grasses growing. You also MUST be VERY strict on how you graze your pastures (and I mean not just the one that has been overgrazed, but ALL of them) from now on, knowing when to pull them and when to put them on so that you don't kill your grass.

The former choice takes more machinery because you will need to repeatedly disk and harrow the pasture until the soil is fine enough to seed the grass seed and pack it down. And yes, you need to pack the soil down enough that the grass seed can establish itself. You may also want to let the field go fallow for a year to let it rest, before you reseed it again. With this option, once the grass has been seeded you CANNOT graze that pasture AT ALL because you need to let the grass establish its root system before you put your livestock out on pasture. If you cannot afford to do this, you must limit the amount of grazing that is done on this new pasture. DO NOT LET THEM GRAZE IT DOWN. Only let the animals graze enough so that they are only taking one bite-level down, not so that they graze the grass down to the ground. Then take them off right away and let the pasture rest for at least 30 to 60 days. When the grasses first start to grow, you will get lots of weeds. There's no need to purchase herbicide because this problem is easily fixed by simply mowing the weeds down; this encourages the new grasses to grow, outgrowing the weeds that may try to regain themselves.

Once you have established your stand, you must graze responsibly. Know the Stocking Rate for your pastures and let your pastures rest for at least 30 days between each grazing period. Use a principle of "Take-Half-Leave-Half" or graze until there is at least 3 to 6 inches of stubble left before you switch pastures. You need to move your livestock quicker during the growing season than you do when the grasses have started to reach maturity and are going into dormancy. Grasses during the growing season require less time to rest than those pastures that are in the dormant stage. Your risk of overgrazing increases much more when you're grazing pastures during the hot summer months (when cool-season grasses are in dormancy) than during the spring to early summer time.

But the biggest mistake that any novice livestock producer make is to overstock their farms and pastures. DO NOT fall into this trap, as this is the quickest way to kill your grass and increase risk of a train wreck waiting for a place to happen.

No.

It'll take one cow nine days.

The reticulum and rumen (and likely omasum) of a calf are underdeveloped at birth and do not reach full maturity until the calf is around 3 months of age, after the calf has began to eat grasses and/or grains like its mother. Calves will start eating the same things as their mother when they're only a week or two old. So that's not to say that there's particular compartments that do not work at birth, since all compartments are functional, it's just that they're not nearly as functional as that of an adult bovine. A calf makes the action of chewing cud at a few weeks of age, but is not actually chewing cud, since the rumen is not functional enough to enable rumenation.

Young calves have a special tube-like structure called the oesophageal (or esophageal) groove which directs milk straight from the oesophagus to the abomasum. This is the final (fourth) stomach chamber of the calf. This means that milk bypasses the reticulum, rumen, and omasum (to a lesser extent). The oesphageal tube begins to disappear when the reticulo-rumen nearly reaches maturation, and when the calf becomes less dependent on milk and more on forages. The groove pretty much disappears by the time the calf reaches a point where it is no longer considered a calf, which would be at yearling stage.

Wherever grass grows, whether it be on lawns or in fields, anywhere that grass grows often cattle will find them and eat the grass in those areas.

Silage.

As a foodstuff, it is called "tripe."

They certainly can, but you absolutely cannot nor should not feed them whole, as they will choke on them. Cattle do not have the flexible lips nor the upper teeth that horses have that enable them to eat an apple whole, nor do they chew up an apple like a horse or human does: rather they prefer to swallow it whole. Thus apples, for cattle, must be chopped up in small pieces or ground up to a pulp in order for them to be able to safely eat it.

Usually after a few days after birth.