With the exception of a few wild bovines, the cattle that we have owned in the past have loved cubes……..until now!
Despite my best efforts, I cannot get our current group of heifers trained on coming to the cubes. I started by dropping a few dumps of cubes on pasture with the cube truck. Some of the heifers would come to the piles, smell them, maybe sample one or two cubes and then walk away without showing any further interest. At first, I thought it would just take a few days for them to get excited by the cubes. Wrong. After several days of cubing with the cube truck they are still NOT interested.
So, I came up with a new idea. Perhaps they are spoiled and do not like eating cubes off of the ground. To test this theory, I put a couple bags of cubes in our concrete troughs. The heifers watched this with great interest; however, that interest did not result in an appetite, as they left the cubes to be rained on.
The cubes are from the same batch that our last group of feeders would follow the cube truck all over the pasture for.
Our heifers are in good condition, have a relatively docile (but not tame) disposition, and a healthy appetite (with the exception of cubes).
Most of the heifers are on pasture grass with a wheat based grain feed being limit fed. The remainder are on pasture grass without the wheat based grain feed. Both groups have ZERO appetite for the cubes.
This is a put together group of cattle, so they have come from many different previous feeding practices; yet, none of them seem to enjoy eating cubes.
Our preferred method for rounding up our cattle is to get them to follow the cube truck into the corrals; therefore, getting them cube trained is on the necessary list.
Notice anything I am doing wrong, or have any suggestions about how to turn these heifers into cube eaters?
