How about this: I was on a dairy feedlot a week ago, watching them make rations. The ingredients going in included:
- Alfalfa hay (a legume crop which improves the soil)
- Corn & triticale silage (chop up the ENTIRE field, stalk, cob, and all, then ferment it a bit to improve digestibility)
- Corn cannery waste (all the leftovers after they make canned corn for people)
- Waste onions (cattle love these, they'll root through the whole ration to find them)
- Apple waste (pulp left over after squeezing apple juice)
- Potato waste (leftovers from processing potatoes for, that's right, people)
- Pea meal (broken bits of dried peas left over from processing for humans)
- Hop pellets (after breweries have used them for beer)
- Canola meal (leftover from making canola oil)
- They may have been feeding brewery waste grain, but I don't remember for sure
The first two are the only ones specifically produced for cattle. One of them improves the soil in a crop rotation, and the other is a pretty damn efficient use of plant matter vs. anything humans consume. They constitute a pretty good chunk of the ration, to be sure, but I do think HN tends to assume cattle are just fed big buckets of corn seed & wheat.
btw, I was visiting the feedlot, but they weren't just blowing smoke for the city slicker... I had worked there a decade ago, making the rations, and I fed all the same stuff then.
edit: there are effective software tools for building rations based on your particular nutrition goals, so there are dozens of different rations being made any given day. If the cannery doesn't ship any corn waste for a while, you just adjust the other ingredients until you hit your same target nutrition without it. It's impressive stuff.
There's kind of a barrier to entry for the layman because feedlots are generally out of the way, and they're not usually in the business of giving tours--they're busy places with lots of heavy machinery running around. It's a fascinating business, but you have to be ready for 6.5 day work weeks :)
One way to learn a bit more is from the actual industry's magazines, like Feedstuffs, which focuses particularly on livestock feed. Here's an article picked from the top of their beef nutrition section: https://www.feedstuffs.com/nutrition-health/byproduct-feeds-...
- Alfalfa hay (a legume crop which improves the soil)
- Corn & triticale silage (chop up the ENTIRE field, stalk, cob, and all, then ferment it a bit to improve digestibility)
- Corn cannery waste (all the leftovers after they make canned corn for people)
- Waste onions (cattle love these, they'll root through the whole ration to find them)
- Apple waste (pulp left over after squeezing apple juice)
- Potato waste (leftovers from processing potatoes for, that's right, people)
- Pea meal (broken bits of dried peas left over from processing for humans)
- Hop pellets (after breweries have used them for beer)
- Canola meal (leftover from making canola oil)
- They may have been feeding brewery waste grain, but I don't remember for sure
The first two are the only ones specifically produced for cattle. One of them improves the soil in a crop rotation, and the other is a pretty damn efficient use of plant matter vs. anything humans consume. They constitute a pretty good chunk of the ration, to be sure, but I do think HN tends to assume cattle are just fed big buckets of corn seed & wheat.
btw, I was visiting the feedlot, but they weren't just blowing smoke for the city slicker... I had worked there a decade ago, making the rations, and I fed all the same stuff then.
edit: there are effective software tools for building rations based on your particular nutrition goals, so there are dozens of different rations being made any given day. If the cannery doesn't ship any corn waste for a while, you just adjust the other ingredients until you hit your same target nutrition without it. It's impressive stuff.