wintering calves on corn silage

We just finished cutting the corn, so my question is feeding calves. Having never fed corn silage before we are wondering if you should keep the show animals on their daily grain ration as well or to cut back, we don't want to blow any apart come spring. They will be getting around 500- 600 lbs every other day along with dry first cut hay. The calves are pb shorthorn and angus  both heifers and bulls will be in separate pens but getting the same ration. Hay is free choice.

Thanks in advance

Curtis

I would talk to your feed guy. I am n the same boat as you. This is my first year feeding silage.. I I am getting all my forage tested, then having my feed guy mix Me  up a ration  I have haylage as well as silage, with the hopes that I will not need to buy much protein  I will be cracking the corn and mixing it in a tmr. I have been feeding about 10lbs of green chop silage and 5 lbs of a 14% complete feed with bovetec. My calves r in the 500lb range and feed guy said that sounded about right and keep feeding the same way till we got the analysis  back. Also have free choice hay, but they r not eating much of it. Don't know if I helped any, but that is what I am doing.

I was helping a beef producer last year when it was so dry and he put up quite a bit of silage but it had very little corn it it.  I had done a search on the internet about feeding silage, etc.  Basically the silage will take up some of the slack in the amount of forage the animals will eat.  On a cow for example will consume somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 lbs of hay a day and we substituted and figured on giving them about 15 lbs of silage per day, the cows were on free choice hay to and their hay consumption did drop.

Your calves will be about the same way to feed them 1/3 to 1/2 of their forage needs in silage.  I would guess that with year being much better moisture wise that you have some corn in your silage, so depending on how much corn is in the silage, the grain ration could be adjusted some.

He also had some bulls on test, and again fed the silage at the rate of around 15 lbs a day with free choice hay and then top dressed the silage with about 9 lbs of distillers and corn mixed.  That was what our extension agent recommended.  A 5 gallon plastic bucket of silage will weigh about 15 lbs.

It can work for sure, but cattle that weigh over 700 lbs are way better @ utilizing silage than younger calves simply because their stomach are bigger the older they get. Smaller calves have a hard time getting enough nutrition out of silage because they can't hold enough silage in their smaller stomachs. Silage is a higher moisture product. Calves need a nutrient dense energy source. Green chopped will be slightly worse than silage that has cured, ie. more water in the green chop, but yes it can "work", just can't expect great gains and efficiencies.

We also have quite a bit of high moisture hay mostly red clover and alfalfa would it be better then the corn silage  to keep the gains up? or should we just stick to dry hay and a grain ration?

Really what you need to do is to test both the corn silage and your high moisture hay/clover so you know exactly what you have then balance your calf's needs from there and feed it accordingly to get the gains that you are aiming for.

In our experience, on a show calf it will blow up the front end. Not sure what type of animal you're feeding though.

Asking specifically about show cattle (shorthorns & angus).

Overall it's a great feed. Love to grow our non show heifers (dairy and beef) on it. Forget exactly what it is in corn silage but especially on a show calf it will just blow up that front end, and once it happens you can't really correct it. May be better to just bite the bullet and feed your regular ration.

Ok, so maybe not a good idea to feed to the heifers, but will it blow up the front end of a bull calf?  We have one that we would like to campaign next year as a yearling, and would love to be able to put him on the silage, if possible!

Ranke - what do you mean by "blowing up the front end?"

There should be no problems in feeding calves silage during the winter.  Last years silage was different because of the drought, but typically silage has been used in a number of areas or regions for feeding beef cattle for years.

One thing that is very important is to test your silage so that you know the % of Dry Matter and the protein.

Cattle will only consume so many lbs of feed daily from grass, hay, grain, silage, etc.  So with this in mind you mentioned that your calves are on free choice hay, so if they can basically somewhere around 2.75% of their body weight so a 500 LB calf will need about 15 lbs of dry matter daily.  So how much grain do you plan on them consuming?  On a DM (dry matter basis) 15 lbs of silage will be approximately 5 lbs of DM.  Smaller calves don't do as well on silage as larger animals.

There are no problems in feeding silage to calves, silage is just another forage that can be utilized for successfully growing animals.

Last few years we've put half of our dairy steers on silage and half on ration to see which works better, the CS fed animals always had an uglier brisket and there front always seemed very 'bloated'. We may have picked our control group poorly though. Just our experience. Again, the results may not be repeated elsewhere.. And yes, last year was abnormal for silage. I would suggest sampling your silage though.

RCC