What Do Cattle Eat?

Cattle, or cows, are large domesticated mammals raised on farms and feedlots for their meat and milk, along with byproducts such as leather. Cattle are ruminants, which means they have four-compartment stomachs and digest the food they eat through a process of rumination, or regurgitating, chewing again, and swallowing again. This helps the cattle to break down their food so that it is easy to digest. While ruminants evolved to eat a diet of roughage like grass, it isn't the only food commonly fed to cattle in modern agriculture.

  1. Grass

    • Grass is the ideal food for cattle because their stomachs are designed to easily digest it and other types of roughage through the rumination process. In the spring and summer, cattle graze in pastures, eating the green grass that grows in abundance around them during these seasons. Some types of grass that cattle are known to eat are bluegrass, timothy and brome. Cattle also eat the legumes, such as alfalfa and clover, that grow amongst the grasses in pastures.

    Hay

    • In winter, when fresh grass is less readily available, farmers tend to feed their cattle hay instead. Hay is made up of different types of grasses and legumes harvested by farmers earlier in the season, dried and baled for this purpose. Hay is often fed to cattle who don't have access to a pasture, such as dairy cattle that live in barns. Good hay is greenish-yellow in color and made up of a variety of grasses and legumes.

    Silage

    • Cattle are commonly fed silage on modern farms. Silage, like hay, is made of grass and legumes and is harvested and stored by farmers to be consumed by cattle at a later date when fresh food is unavailable. Unlike hay, however, silage is chopped up into fine bits while it is still wet and stored in heaps in silo,s where it ferments. The moist, fermented food product that comes out later is high in fiber, protein and calcium; it is therefore excellent for a cow's nutrition.

    Grain

    • Although their stomachs are not evolved to eat dry grain, commercial cattle are commonly switched from their usual diets of grass and legumes to a heavy diet of grains in the last few months prior to slaughter. This switch is made in an effort to rapidly increase the weight of the cattle before sale, as a grain diet provides nutrients to the cattle more quickly and therefore makes them grow more quickly. This practice is extremely common in modern agriculture.