I have always fed cracked shelled corn to my beef cattle. This year I am going to pick cob corn and grind the cobs also. My question is, I usually went thru around 200 bushels of shelled corn in a year, will I need around 200 bushels of cob corn? I know a bushel of shelled corn is 1.25 cubic feet and cob corn is 2.5 cubic feet, but are they about equal after it is ground? Thanks for any help.
I feed ground ear corn to my cattle and mix the supplement by weight to the ground feed. I make no allowence for the cob. It may take a little more corn to finish out your feeders.
We have a closed cow/calf herd (about 40 head, give or take) from which we feed the calves to finish. We use buckets to carry the feed to bunks, so my measurements will be in gallons. After the calves are weaned, we start them on approximately 1 gallon per head of ground ear corn fed twice daily. After a few months, we add a couple of five-gallon buckets of shell corn every month until they are up to 3 to 3.5 gallons per head of feed twice daily, at a final mix of 50/50 ground ear corn to shell corn. We add some more ground ear corn at some point in the cycle to make sure we feed at least 50% ground ear corn. We find it easier for our operation to grind the two feeds separately, and mix the ratio at each feeding. You might find it easier to grind each load at the ratio you want. We also feed them free choice hay, water, and salt. No hormones, and no daily antibiotic regimen. They only get antibiotics if they get sick, and then only on a calf-by-calf basis, as needed. We have experimented with feeding more shell corn, and feeding it earlier, to our detriment. We found that one or two knucklehead calves would ignore the hay and suck down too much corn, getting foundered. We have found that it is important for us to give the calves plenty of time to adjust to eating corn. We have also found that it is equally important to keep the 50% ground ear corn ratio to ensure plenty of roughage (cobs, shucks, stalks, etc.) in the corn to prevent foundering. Our beef usually dresses out at top choice or higher, and at a higher-than-industry average carcass weight. Our herd is a mutt mix of Hereford, Angus, and Charolais, with alternating Angus and Hereford bulls. This was probably too much information, but maybe you can pick out something useful.
Thanks for the replys. I am trying to get away from shelled corn as I have no dryer or storage other than gravity wagons. The local elevators don't want to deal with the little guy anymore either, that I why I decided to go with cob corn. I never thought about the cob and husks adding roughage. Would that be enough to affect the amount of hay that you feed?
Good question. I doubt that it would affect it much, but we have not studied hay usage. It varies greatly, as well, depending on weather and calf size. We mix hay with pasture in the spring and summer, then feed just hay when the pasture plays out in the fall. We finish in May, give or take. Also, we have our own hay, and do not need to buy any. Some of the big feedlots grind all their roughage into the feed, depending on whether they feed ensilage or a corn/roughage mix. I have seen hay, cobs, cardboard, and truckloads of day-old bread get dumped into those big tub grinders. I do not know how their roughage/corn ratio compares to that of ground ear corn. You might think about buying a small bin to hold your shell corn. Most of the bigger farmers don't want to mess with anything below 5,000 bushels. The really small bins, 1,000 bushels or less, can be moved whole if you have access to a boom truck and a car trailer. Another storage alternative is to build a granary, depending on your volume needs.
The smaller grain bins around here still bring a fancy price. I have thought about building a corn crib with the cribs on the sides and grain bins above for oats. I guess it wouldn't be that hard to make another bin for shelled corn. This is a small 4-6 head at a time operation so it will take time but it is coming together. Thanks for your help.
