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Starting Cattle on Feed and Set-Up Rations

Here is a definition I found of starting cattle on feed. It is the transition between the receiving or growing diet, so whether you are backgrounding calves on pasture or on hay or actually they are in the feedlot receiving the majority of their diet as forage. It is a transition from a forage diet or primarily maybe a 50:50 forage grain diet, to a very high concentration diet, essentially an all grain diet. If you background animals on a roughage source, you would gradually adjust to a high grain diet. You have seen some of these if you look at forage. If your final diet was 90% concentrate, 10% roughage or forage, there would be a number of steps that you would go through to get these animals from 50:50 forage:concentrate to 10:90 and maybe over two to three day intervals you would adjust the diet. Over a period of two to three weeks, you would move the animals to the final diet.

With program feeding, remember we are restricting intake to achieve a certain level of gain. Actually, these animals are already on a high concentrate diet, so there is little or no set up required. Simply what you do is increase the quantity of the feed that is offered to gradually increase weight gain. The bottom line of why you need a smooth transition, you want to initially avoid excessive consumption of concentrates which can lead to acidosis which can lead to decreased feed intake or cattle that are off feed. Why would it matter if cattle go off feed for a day or two or they have poor consumption for a day or two? What do you lose when feed intake decreases? You lose weight gain. And maybe more importantly, you lose feed efficiency, pounds of feed per pound of gain. Remember with any animal, you always have a fixed cost associated with maintaining the animal. Maybe you start out at a 50:50 and you go to almost an all concentrate diet over a period of several weeks. Another approach would be ad-lib intake of some diet that is almost half forage, half concentrate followed by substitution during one of the feedings of the day of the final diet. Maybe if you feed three times a day, twice a day you would offer a 50:50 diet, the third feeding each day you would offer the all concentrate diet. Over a period of a week or two, that would become two feedings, then eventually your all concentration diet is all three feedings each day.

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