corn stalk bales

How do people out there feed cornstalk bales? Do you grind them or pour liquid protein on them or roll them out or what? I just got done pouring 2 5 gallon buckets of diluted mollasses on 110 round bales. I diluted the the molases with water. I was hoping to dump bales on ground and let cows eat and bed down with calves also. Am I an idiot or what? The feedmill guy claimed the molasses is 17% protein. Should I or can I grind them after doing the molasses deal? Has anyone tried manufacturing feed like this? I am covered with goop and feel like a train run over me. The bales are dry and seemed to soak up pretty good though?  Thats 2    5 gallon buckets per bale roughly 1000# each.

When hay got scarce around here last winter I fed about 60 rolls total. I just put them in the feeders like they were, & the cows seemed to eat it pretty well. These rolls were drought stricken & still had the nubbins on them , so that helped.

I just put them out whole and let the cows go to em. Since it's still cold here, once the cows have pretty much picked them over and eaten what they wanted, I scoop up what's left and use it for bedding in the barn. I know some people up this way that do the molasses treatment and their cows really clean it up.

The last 2 years I have separated a large lot into 2 pens in one the cows can get to a bale ring with a stalk bale in it, the other lot has a open faced shed that we store hay in. The front of the shed has a wooden manger that we built. I allow the cow to eat stalks all the time but limit them to 8 hours of hay expouser a day. They will eat a lot of the stalk bale and what they waste becomes bedding. The main thing is make sure that you have plenty of room to move the bale ring around so that the bedding base builds up. This has really help eliminate the problem we have had in the past with mud. The cows are always fat and it has really cut our hay wastage down because they don't stand at the hay and play the eat because the learn that they will get chased out of the hay area soon.

put them in the feeder just as hay. When its really cold we just dump some of them in there and they make them selves comfortable

AJ- double s Feeds in Danville, IL actually injects the bales w/ the molasses for you. www.dbl-s.com

Thanks

if you call them tell them Cathy said HI! They also have products w/ protien & fat.

Red

This would work with soybean stalks as well wouldn't it?

We've fed them in round bale feeders and have also unrolled them.  They eat what they want and keeps the calves out of the mud.

worthabit said:

This would work with soybean stalks as well wouldn't it?

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The soybean stalks didn't work near as well for me. Not a whole lot for them to actually eat and pretty woody too.

Soybean stalks seem to disentegrate pretty fast so they aren't much good as far as we are concerned.    We feed cornstalks by just putting them out or unrolling the bale.  We've never fed them as the main source of nutrients & kind of used them for bedding/feed.