What to feed 3 month old plus dairy-bred beef calves?

[Farmertom1988]

Beef ration calculator | AHDB

ahdb.org.uk

Would this help using own figures?

I've been looking at options for our B&W calves

Very useful suggestion thank you, I downloaded it a while back a use it quite a bit!

 

[Farmertom1988]

That should work well, we split the nuts between two feeds which suits our system. We buy our 18% nuts in bulk from Heygates for £280 per tonne but I bought a load of surplus 18% nuts from a neighbour who had a contract with a firm and they were only £230 per tonne in half tonne bags so it’s worth shopping around. 16% blend from Berrystock feeds is around £205 per tonne in bulk. We have got the older cattle sorted but do struggle with the younger stock, they’re work in progress!

£205 for blend sounds a reasonable price considering the price of spot markets now.

We will be cutting back to 3kg a head from today so will let you know how i get on.

We're the same and still experimenting in the 3 to 6 month range as to what is best, balancing between pushing them on but not too much that it becomes too expensive!

 

[Farmertom1988]

I would treat the barley with homendry or similar it will help a lot with the wet acidic silage as well as saving money . At 14%cp with the high protein silage shouldn’t need anything else. The alkalinity should keep them A bit firmer too, with straw this year that has to be a bonus

Yes we've tried this on our wheat this year and has worked very well, we used Harbro Maxxomon which i assume is much the same as Home n Dry?

I'm wondering on growing some barley in the future and using alkali treatment to make alkagrain, would it be possible to feed this ad-lib to beef calves in that 2 - 5 month age period?