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The Options of Green Fodder for Your Cattle
Fodder is some food given to feed domesticated livestock like cattle, horses, chickens, pigs, rabbits, and sheep. Green fodder is feed made from green crops like cereal crops, grass crops, legume crops, and tree crops. Green fodder supplies the nutrients for dairy animals since it can increase milk production.
The Advantages of Green Fodders
There are many advantages of using green fodder both for the animals and for the farmers:
- It is economical.
- Most green fodder is palatable and digestible. Using the mixed feeding system, the microorganism in the green fodder helps the digestibility.
- It helps to maintain good health and improve the breeding efficiency of animals.
- Growing greens for your animals in your land is very important. It saves more money and provides good quality food for your animals. Green fodder is as essential as concentrated feed. Any kind of feed is a great investment.
- Reducing the expense for concentrate feed and increasing the total amounts of profits on the farm.
These all advantages can be gained at their maximum when you have your land to grow them.
Varieties of Green Fodder
There are many different varieties of fodder suitable for cattle. If you want to grow the green fodder on your land, these are the choices you can pick to plant:
Grass fodder is specially cultivated for animal feed. Whether cultivated or not, pastures and natural grasslands are included as grass fodder. Other types of grass fodder are blue buffalo grass, guinea grass, hybrid Napier grass, and para grass.
- Legume Fodder
This is the important part of midwestern grazing land. It can be fed directly or preserved as fermented or dried to keep it for another feeding time. Examples of legume fodder are cowpea, Desmanthus, Lucerne or alfalfa, stylo plant from Brazil. Lucerne or alfalfa is known as the queen of forages. It contains 15-20% crude protein. Alfalfa helps to give soil more nitrogen and improve fertility.
- Cereal Fodders
Cereals are grasses cultivated for many edible parts of the plants. This kind of fodder includes Co-4 grass, maize fodder, sorghum fodder. Sorghum is one of the best. Sorghum can yield both green fodder and grain. It is also drought tolerant.
- Tree Fodder
Tree fodder is good for ruminants and is significant in some farming systems. This includes gliricidia, sesbania, subabul. Gliricidia is tolerable for any climatic conditions. It goes with any soil type like sandy, clay, and rocky soil. Though this plant is also an ornamental tree, it needs a good drainage system. The manure is also good for improving nitrogen in the soil.
Notes for the large animals like cattle, there are five poisonous trees: black walnut, oak, box elder, red maple, and chokecherry. You need to pay more attention to your cattle when they graze around these mentioned trees or don’t plan to plant them if you have livestock to feed.
Green Fodder Preservation
Green fodder can be given directly to the animals, especially when you have your pasture or grassland. Those mentioned types of green fodder are choices to plant if you plan to grow them by yourself. Yet, if you don’t have the available land to plant, you can keep them preserved for longer consumption.
Preservation for green fodder is important to gain more profit in ruminant livestock development. By preserving, you still have the supplies of quality feed when scarcity periods like drought, winter season, or other unpredictable things happen.
To preserve them, you need the best wrapping technology. Silopak has been present as an experienced wrapping manufacturer since 2011. We have become partners for many countries in Europe and USA. Our products are made from quality resins and have been tested against any weather conditions. Our products can last for more than 18 months.
We have silage film, bale net wrap, and round bale film. They are high UV resistance, suitable for any wrappers, made from high-quality material, and various sizes that will adjust to your farm needs. To preserve your green fodder using Silopak is to maintain the nutrition and finally to gain high yields from your cattle.