Alternative Feed Options

By Brian Ashton, livestock consultant, Port Lincoln

This year all common feeds for sheep and cattle are very expensive because of the drought across much of Australia. At the same time farmers want to maintain their breeding stock. Farmers are considering all sorts of alternative feeds including straw, onions, grape marc, sawdust, potatoes, and so on.

The things to consider about alternative feeds are - will stock eat it, how much food value does it contain, has it any health problems and does it contain any chemical residues.

If the feed is a fresh material, such as onions, it will be mostly water. For example, hay is normally only 10pc water so 1 tonne of hay has 900kg of dry matter. On the other hand, onions are 90pc water so 1t of onions only has about 100kg of dry matter. Onions can also cause health problems, and even death, when fed to cattle. Another alternative feed is paper or sawdust. While these materials will fill animals up, if you can get them to eat it, they have no real feed value. Animals will use as much energy eating and digesting the feed as it gets from the feed.

Straw has about 6.5mj of energy/kg so it¹s quite valuable as part of a ration. It must be fed with grain because animals can¹t eat enough straw alone to maintain their weight. Another important issue is that occasionally feeds contained unacceptable levels of organochlorine residues, because of soil contamination, or other spray residues in the plant trash.

Root crops and any leaf crops contaminated with dust or soil should be treated with caution. Avoid any crop that may have been treated with endosulfan.

Feeding any food scraps containing meat or imported dairy product to pigs, poultry or other stock is illegal.