diet of oxen

[bivol]

hi!

i asked about the oxen in the main forum in croatia, and there people said oxen would eat only good/top quality hay, with oats and fresh grass.
when i mentioned corn stalks and straw, even when not at work, they said i’d have to call the vet after feeding them the mentioned stuff.
they worked with simmental oxen, though. they’re big and consume as a team over 200 pounds of good quality hay each day, plus the oats.

so, i’m confused. i thought oxen in general could at least live on a diet of partial corn stalks and straw. at least that’s what i red in the article on the net years ago.
is this conception based on the fact that they worked with a big industrial beef breed?
you may say that farm work can be done with a lighter breed. that’s true. 2000 pounds per animal is enough, i think. as opposed to the s. weight of 2900 pounds at least.
are there oxen, reasonably big, who can live at least on a partial diet of cornstalks and/or straw, when not working?

[OldKat]

@bivol 8577 wrote:

hi!

i asked about the oxen in the main forum in croatia, and there people said oxen would eat only good/top quality hay, with oats and fresh grass.
when i mentioned corn stalks and straw, even when not at work, they said i’d have to call the vet after feeding them the mentioned stuff.
they worked with simmental oxen, though. they’re big and consume as a team over 200 pounds of good quality hay each day, plus the oats.

so, i’m confused. i thought oxen in general could at least live on a diet of partial corn stalks and straw. at least that’s what i red in the article on the net years ago.
is this conception based on the fact that they worked with a big industrial beef breed?
you may say that farm work can be done with a lighter breed. that’s true. 2000 pounds per animal is enough, i think. as opposed to the s. weight of 2900 pounds at least.
are there oxen, reasonably big, who can live at least on a partial diet of cornstalks and/or straw, when not working?

bivol,

I’m a horse guy … not an oxen guy, so I am no expert here. However, I do have cattle and last I checked oxen are just great big bovine type guys (or almost guys) so therefore the cattle experience should count for something.

One of the benefits of cattle, in general, … not just oxen, is that they can eat roughages that horses and other simple stomach animals would starve / colic on. In the US it is fairly common to put an electric fence around corn fields after harvest and turn cattle; cows, stockers, whatever in on it to clean it up. Granted, they may find some spilled grain, some ears that the combine knocked down, but didn’t pick up, some crabgrass or other post crop grass in addition to the stalks. Still, their primary diet is going to be the stalks or what is left of them. If you are bringing cut staks to the animal and that is ALL they are getting, then you might have to supplement that with a protein supplement of some kind, liquid feed or something similar.

Question: When you say corn are you referring to the crop the American Indians referred to as maize? I know at least in the past some Europeans called whatever the locally grown grain crop was as “corn”. If that is the case the answer might be different. Also, what quality straw are you talking about? If a grass or other plant material is extremely mature and fiborous, it might be so low in quality that bovine couldn’t utilize it, but it would have to be pretty poor quality before they couldn’t utilize at least part of it.

Here again, I’ve used poor quality hay and supplemented it with a liquid feed when I didn’t have anything else to feed. So I find it hard to believe that oxen couldn’t subsist on lower quality feedstuff when idle.

[bivol]

i refered to maize as corn. and i never seriously thought of feeding them straw in significant quantity. my primary concern was can they survive, and, hopefully, work, on lower quality feed, supplemented with some oats, than horses.

[danb]

There shouldn’t be anything in a corn field that would harm oxen. But I doubt that straw or corn stubble would be substantial enough on it’s own to feed a working ox. There isn’t enough energy or protein. I would supplement with hay and oats/grain.

[Tim Harrigan]

Oxen that are mature steers can overwinter just fine on corn stalks. Mature steers just have to meet their maintenance requirements and it does not take very much or very good forage to do that. Young and growing steers with not gain well on cornstalks without supplemental feed. Cows with calves will likely loose weight. Feeding oxen is not like feeding dairy cattle. With the amount of work most oxen do the greatest challenge is to keep them from getting fat. I remember seeing Simmental cattle in some of the milking herds in Europe. They are dual purpose cattle (in Europe they were anyway, Simmental in the US are beef animals) so maybe that is their feeding frame of reference.

I think your reference to 200 lbs of feed per day would be a green chopped forage rather than a dry hay or dry corn stalks. That amount of green chop would be equivalent to 40-50 lb dry hay.

[Nat(wasIxy)]

Just had to join this forum – it’s amazing! very few people in england are interested in oxen so it’s reallygreat to find so many people chatting so knowledgeably together!

I just had to join when I saw this thread – I have a simmentalX ox, he lived on wheat straw and a couplea kgs of pellets a day over winter and maintained condition perfectly – although he was only 12-17months old and not doing any work. feeding straw wont kill the ox; maybe if you fed only straw and worked it hard you would be effectively starving the beast to death. They say good barley straw is better than poor hay.

I even found that given the choice, Angus (the ox is question) would gobble up the wheat straw and THEN move to the hay, which was horse quality. Which is why i ended up giving him a small bale of straw a day as belly filler and the pellets to complete the diet.

His younger brown swiss companion did not do so well at all – he was still growing and in need of more food, but if i separated him from Angus, even with a low partition, he completely refused to eat at all 😮 and with angus, he ate too slow and angus got it all – i ended up having to tie them up in order to give the brown swiss extra. Luckily the spring grass has come through just in time and he has now piled on the weight and is looking much better. can’t beat grass!

[near horse]

For about 10 years I worked in beef cattle nutrition research at the University of Idaho and one of the primary projects was to find alternative and available cheaper feed sources (from our area) for cattle. Since we are in an area that produces lots of wheat and barley and removal of the straw often ended up as a “problem” (they usually burned it), we spent a lot of time looking at straw as a source of forage. Alone, barley and wheat straw only have about 3-4% protein – too low to be fed alone. In addition, the fiber (stuff that gets fermented) isn’t very digestible. That said, we looked at treating the straw with anhydrous ammonia (3% of the DM) to increase digestibility. NOTE – This might not sit well with some folks here but I’m just describing what we did – not necessarily advocating or opposing – just stating. By treating with ammonia, you increase the N value of the straw to about 9 -10% and the fiber digestibility is greatly increased. Some of the producers in the area treated 600# round bales and used them as winter feed for their dry cows. The problem they saw was the cows would fill up on the straw (they chose it over a free choice alfalfa round bale) and be full. Unfortunately, there’s still not enough energy available from treated straw alone, so the cows were losing condition. They ended up having tol imit feed the straw so the cows would eat some alfalfa and take in a sufficient amount of energy.

Also, some of the work we did utilized “fistulated cattle” where there is a plug that allows access to the rumen through the animals side. When they were eating plain straw, the rumen was not very full at all and the poop looked like something from a horse – smaller apple turds.

Back in the old days (stationary thresher days) I read that many guys would overwinter their horses on the straw stack left by the thresher. Not sure about their condition come spring.

One last thought – there is a different theory about who needs the higher quality feed – ruminants or equids. Some believe that horses can get by on poorer quality forage because they just extract/digest the readily available nutrients and then pass it out (poop)with little time committed to it. Whereas, a bovine commits a pretty good chunk of time (48 hrs or more) to digesting the same forage. If it is really poor, then their stuck w/ a gut full of stuff that’s of little nutritional value to them – even though they may be able to extract more than the horse. The example used is the series of animals migrating and grazing across the Serengeti (or other range in Africa). Zebras supposedly move through first and consume some of the older grasses which stimulates regrowth and are followed by wildebeest, antelope etc – the ruminants who then get the newer more nutritious stuff. Just a theory but interesting.

[Author]

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