Feeding winter beans as protein.

[Ted M]

Evening all. Currently have a shed full of 10-11 month old bulls fattening on a mix of barley and protein pellets, and fodder beet.
We are coming to the end of the pellets in the bin and a mate has some winter beans available.
Our roller mill has 3 rollers so should cope with beans okay.
Just wondering what experience others have of using beans and what rate of inclusion to go at if we go down that route?
Thanks

 

[nxy]

We have used beans as our protein source for years and they are pretty easy to use. In my experience and (depending on the mill) beans hammer better than roll. My current roller mill has only got 2 small rolls and they don't feed well so its a slow job, the previous one was the same make but had the third roll but it was just the same. Bigger rolls might work better but we bought a cheap hammer mill with 8mm screens and they rattle through that. Beans can vary in size and texture I would get a couple of buckets full of them and try them before commiting to buying in beans that your mill doesn't like.

We feed them at about 15 to 20% of the mix with barley, triticale, minerals and bicarb. You can put the cattle off if you include too much, they have a strong taste but I have always thought when feeding a lot of grain thats not always a bad thing, if the mix is too nice they can overdue it quite easily. When changing over from the pellets I would slowly introduce them rather than make a sudden change.

 

[yellowbelly]

^^^^^ What he said.

You might need to add some limestone flour to your mix - inclusion of beans alters the calcium/phosphorus balance.

There's plenty of threads on here somewhere that'll tell you chapter and verse.

 

[yellowbelly]

Feeding fields beans to finishing cattle

Currently finishing Lim x cattle on maize silage, grass silage, brewers grains and 5.5kg of barley/wheat mixture. Beans grow well here and interested in if they would have a place in our finisher ration. Thanks in advance

thefarmingforum.co.uk

 

[Ted M]

Many thanks for the replies. Pretty much what I was thinking but it's always nice to get other people's views.
Am hopefully going to pick a bag up today to try through the mill before we get too excited

 

[cousinjack]

We rolled lupins in our roller mill. Found it was much better to mix with barley before rolling as it helped feed the lupins in and kept the rolls dry..

growing beans this year, so the plan is the same regarding rolling…

 

[nxy]

We rolled lupins in our roller mill. Found it was much better to mix with barley before rolling as it helped feed the lupins in and kept the rolls dry..

growing beans this year, so the plan is the same regarding rolling…

We tried this with lupins and it worked well. The lupins were small and soft with an irregular shape compared with the beans that are hard and round.

When we tried it with beans it was a disaster. In fact it was almost impossible to roll the mixture. The beans will not go through the rolls unless the gap is too large so the barley goes through untouched. So you can roll the beans but not the barley or just block it up with beans that won't go through.

 

[J 1177]

We tried this with lupins and it worked well. The lupins were small and soft with an irregular shape compared with the beans that are hard and round.

When we tried it with beans it was a disaster. In fact it was almost impossible to roll the mixture. The beans will not go through the rolls unless the gap is too large so the barley goes through untouched. So you can roll the beans but not the barley or just block it up with beans that won't go through.

I found that so i put mix some previously rolled barley in, seems to mill the beans better then