Skip to main content

Molasses for cattle supplement feed

Living in a sugar refining state like Queensland gives us easy access to a by-product called molasses, which we feed to our cattle.  If you don't live near a sugar refinery, its probably not worth trying to source it.  However, if you can get some molasses cheaply, it is a great supplement feed as, according to our text book "Dairy Cattle Science", it contains:
  • calcium
  • cobalt
  • copper
  • iodine
  • magnesium
  • potassium
  • iron
  • biotin + various other B vitamins
  • other trace minerals
These are all the good things in sugar cane that are removed to make pure sucrose sugar for us humans to eat, see why we shouldn't eat refined sugar?!  In Natural Cattle Care, Pat Coleby mentions briefly that consuming excess sugar in the form of molasses can make cattle more attractive to insects, so we don't feed molasses during summer when buffalo flies and ticks are a problem.  However it does provide valuable energy in winter when our grass dies off.

We have been buying molasses in 20 L drums and feeding a slurp to each of the cattle with their grain in the evening, but ever since my husband realised that it would be WAY cheaper to buy a 200 L drum he's been planning to make a tank stand.  And here is the final product, full of molasses and in service.



The main challenge was rolling the full drum off the back of the ute and onto the stand AND getting the tap at the bottom.  I can tell you that old tyres, a car jack and a determined husband were integral to the process....


Do you feed molasses to animals?  Do you include it in your own diet?

Comments

  1. We feed our dairy cow a little grain to help with her body condition since our pasture is a work in progress. I know they add molasses to the stock mix, but who knows what else? Are you mixing your own grain and if so, what do you add to the mix? Thanks for the post- I never knew the "why" behind the molasses!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Garden Update - July 2013

This month I'm joining the Garden Share Collective , which was started last month by Lizzie from Strayed from the Table , to allow vege gardeners to share their successes and failures and generally encourage everyone to grow more of their own food organically.  This first month, I'll give a detailed update on everything that's growing in my garden, for anyone who hasn't been following for long.  I'll do my normal farm update on Tuesday as well. If you've just joined me, welcome to my vege garden.  I recently wrote about gardening in our sub-tropical climate , so if you're wondering about the huge shade structure, that's for protecting the garden during our hot, humid summers.  At the moment though, the garden is full of brassicas, which grow best here in winter, and are suitably frost-proof.  The garden is about 12 m long by 5 m wide, and surrounded in chicken mesh to keep out the chickens and the bandicoots.  The garden has spilled out around the edg