Your cattle's favorite food??

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oakbar

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North Central Iowa
Red's post about your favorite comfort food got me thinking about my daughter's Sonny heifer.    "Sugar" holds her tongue out to catch the rain water coming off the roof of our barn and has always been a sucker for Chocolate covered donuts.  She has even been known to eat the crust from our pizza and loves to drink Gatorade if you pour it out for her.  As you can tell she's extremely spoiled(although she did have a really good Tonic calf this spring) but I'm sure some of you have cattle with weird eating/drinking habits. 

My daughter and Sugar take thier naps together at shows sometimes.  Apparently, she makes a soft mattress---the heifer, not the kid!!
 

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red

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LaRue, Ohio
mine love apples, carrots, tomatoes & pumkins. I have a few that will eat melons & squash too. They love it when I find what I call molasses candy. you know it's a hard clump of molasses that's in the sweet feed. They just about go balistic over it!
I also give them lettuce & stuff from the garden that's gotten too old. They don't like green peppers though!

Red

ps- the heifer & daughter look great together!  (thumbsup)
 

simtal

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Champaign, IL
sweet corn shucks and the cobs after they've been cooked with salt and butter.  our girls  eat 'em up.
 

SWMO

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Carthage MO
Love the color coordination on the young lady and the heifer  <party>

My daughter has been feeding her Sr Yearling all the four leaf clovers that she can find this year.  Do you think that will help with the high expectations that she has? ;D

She has found alot of them this spring.
 

Simmymom1

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Texas
 :D     You are going to laugh but my daughter's show steer goes nuts when you sprinkle white cake mix in his feed.  Back when he has Mycoplasma and we were trying to get him to start eating again, this guy I know suggested white cake mix.  When he "gets off" his feed sometimes I put some in there and it cures the problem!!  I guess you could say he has a sweet tooth just like me!!
 

inthebarnagain

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Indiana
About a dozen of our cows will run you over if they see you have a loaf of bread.  I will save the heels for them.  They also love peppermint candy.  One is a powdered donut junky.  Not spoiled at all! ::)
 

oakbar

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SWMO--the color coordination between the tag in the calf's ear and my daughter's vest,etc. is purely coincidental.  

Green is one of her favorite colors--but the tag is the 4-H ID tag put in at weigh in.  As a grumpy old greybeard I pretty much frown on girlie stuff on calves---but that doesn't stop my girls from overruling me.    This year we have bright pink tags in all our 08 heifer calves and my girls just think they're grand---it does help to identify them to people who aren't famiiar with the calves, though.  Don't tell 'em I said that, though!!
 

linnettejane

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eastern ky
we have a huge apple tree in the backyard that overflows with apples every year....we are able to give our cows a 5 gallon bucket of apples everyday.....they love them as much as our horses do!!!  i always worry about them getting choked on one though....
 

red

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one other thing I do is walk the corn fields after harvest & pickup the ears on the ground. Boy, they love those. Plus it helps the next year on volunteer corn.

Red
 

garybob

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linnettejane said:
we have a huge apple tree in the backyard that overflows with apples every year....we are able to give our cows a 5 gallon bucket of apples everyday.....they love them as much as our horses do!!!  i always worry about them getting choked on one though....
Won't happen. The most you gotta worry about is loose tails and volunteer apple trees in your pastures. I remember, Papaw rented a place for his cattle during the Eighties. It had about 15 trees left on it, that were the remants of a 100-tree Orchard. I rememnber this Polled Hereford bull. He'd butt the trees for everybody else to feast.

GB
 

SWMO

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I have seen a cow choke and die eating a hedge apple.  Course those are much bigger than an apple.  Don't know why a cow would want to eat a hedge apple but we have some every year that do.
 

knabe

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Hollister, CA
hedge apple or osage orange, makes great fence posts, and turned wet, makes great wood on lathes.  indians used to use the suckers from it to make bows out of, as it had a great spring to it.  i planted some for lumber for my dad, along with black locust, also a nitrogen fixer.  both have tremendous thorns.  also, supposedly, you can use the apples to ward of insects around the house.  when i have some "apples", i will juice some, and spread it around the base of a pine tree to see if it keeps the ants away.  perhaps mix it with boron ant powder so it won't blow away, for a double whammy.
 

loveRedcows

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Nov 23, 2007
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New Yucca pods in the spring.  It always amazes me how they can so delicately pluck the pod right off those spiney stems.
 

minimoo38

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Courtney Hughes- Bagley, Iowa
red said:
one other thing I do is walk the corn fields after harvest & pickup the ears on the ground. Boy, they love those. Plus it helps the next year on volunteer corn.

Red

oh yes. i do that too. Kahlua, my avatar, loves it when i find her the ears of corn from the stalk bales. she steals them right out of my hand not 3 seconds after i pick them up!!!!
 
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