Finishing Cattle Going Off Feed on High-Grain Rations: Where an Enzyme and Live-Microbe Blend Fits, and How to Test It in Your Own Pens

The pattern is easy to recognise late in the finishing period. The concentrate has been raised to the planned level, and the cattle respond by eating less of it: feed is left in the trough, the dung turns loose and carries whole maize kernels, and the animals lie down less and spend the day rubbing along the rails and butting each other. Whole kernels and bits of silage in the dung are feed that was paid for and passed straight through. A restless pen costs twice, because the energy spent walking and fighting does not go into gain. An owner who answers this by adding still more grain is repeating that mistake.

Buyers hesitate over finishing additives for good reasons, and the hesitation usually comes down to three fears.

Products that promise visible growth in a fortnight, where the weight is water and soft cover that falls away when feeding stops. • Prohibited growth drugs, where a single positive test can mean the whole pen is condemned. • Harsh stimulants that force appetite for a short time and leave the rumen damaged, with acidosis, bloat and scours following later.

The answer to those fears is not in the advertising but in the formula: ask what the additive is made of and how each ingredient is supposed to work. A buyer's first request should be the ingredient declaration, before the price. An enzyme and live-microbe blend is the kind of product you can question that way, because every ingredient has a named job in digestion. The declaration, the supporting paperwork and your own country's feed-additive rules still need checking for the exact product you buy.

Start with grown cattle, not calves. The blend earns its cost once the animal has finished building frame; in the younger animal the work is still skeleton, and a finishing aid adds little. The yard in the trial below starts it when cattle reach finishing weight and feeds it right through to sale.

Run two inclusion levels. A lower level through the main finishing period keeps the cost down, and the level is raised for the last 60 days to push weight and shape before sale. The inclusion is counted against the concentrate, not the whole ration, and we set both levels with you by email from your ration and herd.

Premix in steps. This is the step new users skip. Blend the additive into a small amount of concentrate first, enlarge that premix stage by stage, and only then mix it through the full batch. A badly mixed batch means some cattle get too much and some get none.

Keep the ration honest. The blend supports the high-concentrate stage, but it does not allow unlimited maize: the base ration still has to be balanced and the roughage still has to be fed. The additive helps; it is not a free pass.

The figures below come from a single finishing farm, one pen each way, with no repeat run. Treat them as a result to verify in your own pens, not as a guarantee.

The farm took sixteen head from the same intake batch at the same weight, fed 8 the blend at a cautious starting level and left 8 on the usual ration. By the third day the test trough was emptying faster, with almost nothing left after the evening feed where a layer used to remain. On the fifth day the owner weighed the feed: the test cattle were eating more concentrate per head per day, a rise of about 8%. On day 9 the dung had changed to fine, formed and even in colour, with hardly a whole kernel in it. In about the second week the test cattle were lying down more, and the afternoon rail-butting and circling in a hot, west-facing barn had almost stopped. Over a 101-day finishing cycle the farm recorded daily gain about 10% higher in the test group than in the control group.

Eight animals in one pen is a small sample, the intake figure is a single weighing, and no carcass data was kept. That is exactly why the same farm's advice to other finishers is to start small: one batch, cattle from the same intake at the same weight, a treated group and an untreated group, and 30 days will show whether the blend is doing anything on your ration.

So that we can match the enzyme grade and set the two inclusion levels, send us the following.

1. Herd size, breed type and how many head you can put in a test pen and a control pen. • 2. Start weight and the planned days to sale. • 3. The concentrate share of the ration, the main grain, and the roughage you feed. • 4. How you mix: mixer wagon, on-farm mill or bought-in concentrate. • 5. What you see now: leftover feed, kernels in the dung, restless pens, animals going off feed. • 6. Your country, so the feed-additive rules for the product can be checked before anything ships.