What Do Grass-Finished Cattle Eat in the Winter?
Ahhh, grass-fed beef cattle.
You can see them, can’t you?
Frolicking in the fields? Prancing in the pastures? Gallivanting in the grass?
Am I killing the alliteration today or what?
For reals, though, those are definitely the images that most of us conjure up when we picture grass-fed cattle.
And to be honest? For a good portion of the year, they aren’t that far off from reality. Drive by most small Midwest farms in the summer and you can see it for yourself.
But then we have this whole “other” season. It’s called winter. And late fall. And early spring. And in Wisconsin, it can truly last from October - May, depending on the weather.
Guess what doesn’t grow well during those seasons? Grass. The same grass that we need for our grass-finished beef to eat.
So what’s a grass-fed beef farmer to do?
Make hay. Which is still grass. :) Hay is literally the same pasture grass that cattle eat all summer, but cut, dried, and baled so that it can be stored and eaten at a later date.
I could get into a whoooooole bunch of nitty-gritty details on how we calculate our hay needs and how we determine how much pasture to hay and how much to leave as grazing for our herd…but I won’t. It gets a little dry. (That’s a little hay humor for everyone.)
If you really want to know, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to nerd out and bore you to tears. :)
For everyone else, suffice to say that we spend a good portion of our summer evaluating our hay crop, making hay (which is actually pretty good fun!), and then buying in whatever hay our own land can’t support.
We then store our hay until our off-season, when we feed it to our boys the whole winter through.
The actual feeding has looked differently for us over the years.
When we first started raising cattle, we used small, square bales. You know the ones - they’re cute and you see them as decor on everyone’s porch in the fall.
Well, picture us, in our business casual workwear, climbing up into the barn loft every morning to toss down a few more bales for the boys before we’d haul off to work for the day. I’m sure we brought hay into the offices more than once. ;) (I’m equally as sure that our bosses were suuuuper impressed.)
These days, we use large, round bales and, depending on our cattle numbers, we give the guys a new big, round bale every other week or so, making it a pretty painless task.
So there you have it. Grass-fed beef really DO eat grass year-round - it just looks a little different.