Dried Distiller Grains???????

[NEBcattle]

I live in the sandhills of western Nebraska.  We generally supplement our cows with cake in the winter and keep them out on corn stocks all winter.  This is the first year I've used a dried distillers cake and my cattle look better than ever and have had very little hay.  I was woundering if anyone has been contracting dried distiller and if so how are you guys feeding it.  I found a plant out of Nebraska that will guarantee me 27% protein and after trucking cost its going to be about $100.00 cheaper a ton that the cake im feeding now. How are you guys storing it? How long are you storing it? Will it go through a caker ok?????????????????? 

 

[simtal]

Not familar with ddgs as cake but this may help:

http://beef.unl.edu/byproducts.shtml

 

[JWW]

that UNL beef website that simtal linked to his/her post will be your best resource, or contact Dr. Rick Rasby at the Univeristy of Nebraska- Animal Science Department

we feed it mixed in a TMR through the feed wagon


JWW

 

[cpubarn]

We havent had much hay here for two years.

Feed corn stalks and DDGs.  We only have a few cattle so we stick it in a 8 ton bulk bin, BUT, we ask for some that is "Cool", far side of pile, etc and we have had no trouble with making 1 big pellet.  I have herd it can happen...

 

[justintime]

I have fed it in the mash form at about 30-40% moisture. The reason I feed it in this form is because I can buy it considerably cheaper this way than if it has to be dried down more. It is delivered to the farm in large trucks that carry 25 ton per load. I just have it dumped on the ground and I feed it with a front end loader. Some is dumped into troughs and some is put in hay feeders, and some is dumped on the ground. I find that the cows will eat virtually every bit of this they can get. They almost stampede when they see the tractor coming.

For many years, we fed it as stillage, which is the liquid form of the product. It was stored in a 6000 gallon tank with a pump on it. It was pumped into troughs and fed year round. It cost me 1 cent per gallon delivered to my farm which was a 20 mile haul. The stillage allowed me to triple the cows I could run on my pastures, and we had over 300 cows on the same pastures that now carry 100 cows. It was great for AI breeding as the cows would come up to the yard every morning and night when I filled the troughs and I would just sort off the cows in heat when they were standing in the pen. I got the stillage from a distillery but it eventually closed. This facility is now an ethanol plant and their price structure is much higher, but I only feed it when we have poor quality feed or have had a hard winter.

Another benefit for feeding these products is it allows you to keep highly productive old cows in the herd for an extra two or three years.... or even more.