Angus Cattle Nutrition Tips for Winter Grazing

To continue to graze your Angus cattle in the winter, you must address their nutritional needs in an effective, efficient manner. You need to ensure that they will receive sufficient protein, energy and other requirements from your winter pastures. The length of the winter grazing season that you can handle properly depends upon the grass quality of the winter pastures and the cattle’s nutritional needs during this season.

Ready Your Winter Pastures

The first thing you must do for winter grazing to be successful is to prepare your pastures in the correct manner. These pastures need tall grass in them to ensure that the grass tips poke up above the snow. Also, when the grass is this length the solar energy can warm the area just enough that the snow stays loose.

Influences on the Winter Nutritional Requirements for Angus Cattle

The following things have a strong influence on the nutritional needs of Angus cattle during the winter:

• Growth stage and age of the cattle since young cattle require additional calories, protein, energy and more to grow strong and realise a proper weight gain than older cattle do since they have reached their maximum growth potential.

• Gender does influence the nutritional needs of the herd due to the fact that you may have more cows and heifers than bulls.

• Pregnancy stage of the cows or heifers might be another influencing factor since the nutritional requirements for them increases significantly in the last three months of pregnancy.

• Lactation stage of the cows can raise their need for nutrition when they are still nursing calves.

Schedule Calving During the Growing Season

Calving time at your farm or ranch has the highest influence on your winter grazing success. For this reason, you need to keep calving from placing a strain on your winter grazing by scheduling it during the growing season instead of practicing the ‘spring calving’ that traditional cattle ranchers practice when their cattle are not primarily grass-fed. This reduces the nutritional need of the herd during the winter since there will not be pregnant cows and heifers during this time of year.

Other Angus Cattle Nutrition Tips for Winter Grazing

• Group cattle according to age for winter grazing

• Remove underweight animals from the rest of herd to supplement their diets

• Wean calves at nine or 10 months instead of six months

• Provide forage samples to a livestock nutritionist to ensure that you have quality winter pastures

To start a new herd or add to a present herd, rely on Southfork Angus for quality seed stock. We breed our Angus to be highly adaptable to a wide assortment of environments.

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