Winter Versus Summer Feeding of Corn to Two-year-old Steers, Finished on Grass

Abstract

During the past fifty years it has been the usual practice in the fattening of two-year-old steers in the Blue Grass Region of Kentucky to feed them grain during the winter and finish them on grass the following summer without grain. It was to determine whether it is not more profitable to carry cattle largely on roughage during the winter and then finish them with grain on grass that the Kentucky Experiment Station ran a three-year test, along this line, beginning the fall of 1926 and ending the summer of 1929. In other words, it was the purpose of the experiment to find out whether winter or summer is the better time to feed grain to two-year-old steers being finished for the market. Twenty native steers of good quality purchased locally were divided into two lots of ten each of equal quality and weight. At the beginning and end of the experiment, the steers were weighed on three successive days and the average of the three weights was taken for the beginning and ending weights.