During winter time, normally you either feed your cattle with stored forages or grazing dormant forages. Here are some tips on winter forage:

1) Evaluating forage inventory

• The first thing to look out for during winter is your forage inventory.

• How much feed do you have available?

• Will it be enough to fulfill winter cattle requirements?

• Work with your nutritionist to help figure out if you need additional forages to last the winter.

2) Evaluate forage quality

• It is crucial to evaluate forage quality.

• Knowing the forage quality will allow you to match pounds and quality inventory to cattle requirements.

• Avoid eyeballing forage quality as it is not accurate. This may have risk of not meeting cattle requirements.

3) Filling in the forage gap

• Create a diet plan to match forage quality and quantity.

• If there is a gap, protein will often be the first limiting nutrient.

• Having quality cattle supplement will help filling nutrient gap as well as optimizing digestibility and intake of low quality winter forage.