What Do Beef Cattle Need to Eat?
Did you know that what you feed your beef cattle directly affects the quality of the meat, the marbling of the fat, and the overall price at market? Having a solid plan for feeding beef cattle that considers nutritional needs, cost and availability of feed, as well as other aspects of feeding your livestock can improve the quality of the final product, therefore improving your farm profits. Cattle Feed Plans: What Do Beef Cattle Need to Eat? All types of cattle are born with a four-chamber stomach. At birth, calves live off the fat and protein that comes from their mother’s milk, and their stomach functions more similarly to a single-chamber stomach. As calves get older and begin to eat grass and forage, the other three stomach chambers grow to become one of the most efficient means of transforming plants into protein. Cattle are very efficient at extracting as much nutrients as they can from the food they eat. Ruminants have a special stomach chamber filled with microorganisms t...