May 15, 2015
NORTHERN EDITION
© 2015
(800) 657-4665 www.TheLandOnline.com theland@TheLandOnline.com P.O. Box 3169, Mankato, MN 56002
...keeps the beef cattle fed By TIM KING The Land Correspondent STAPLES, Minn. — Steve “Gilby” Gilbertson fed his last apples to feeder calves in early April. “I ran out. I don’t have any more,” he said. Gilbertson operates a 200-acre beef ranch and apple orchard south of Staples. The orchard has some 2,000 trees and the apples that aren’t sold for wholesale purposes are cut up, sun-dried, and stored in large coolers to feed to feeder calves. “I wean them and keep them for another month and then I sell them as 550- to 600-pound feeders,” he said. “I don’t give them too much. Just enough to give them the extra sugar they need.” Gilbertsons’ black baldy and black Angus calves don’t get any grain. “We don’t have any grain on the farm,”
he said. “They get what we have — apples and hay.” The calves relish the apples and are healthy and grow rapidly so Gilbertson isn’t overly concerned that there isn’t much information available on the nutritional value of apples for them. “I called the University of Minnesota a couple of times but they didn’t have anybody that could help me with this,” he said. “What I found out is that an apple has about 100 calories per apple. Basically they are getting sugar. I saw some studies from a while back and they fed some heifers and apples came up fairly identical to corn. If you have extra apples you can replace corn.” Gilbertson’s conclusions mirror those of a study done with lactating dairy cows in India. In that study Indian researchers replaced a third of the corn ration with apple pomace. Pomace is what’s left after apple juice is
(with hay)
made. Overall production, as well as milk fat, was the same with cows on the apple-corn ration as it was on the straight corn ration. Another study, done at Michigan State University, fed pomace to beef cattle and analyzed its nutrient value. The study found that total digestible nutrients for apples was 69.7, for pomace it was 63.4, corn silage was 72.0, and corn was 90.0. Fat was somewhat higher in the corn and silage than in the apple products. The Michigan study speculated that too many apples could damage an animal’s rumen but the researchers appear not to have pursued that issue. When a visitor sees a dozen of Gilbertson’s bred cows come thundering up at high speed to get some fresh apple treats, it is apparent that they haven’t pursued the matter either. See APPLES, pg. 7B