Feeding Dairy Cattle 



who are making creditable advanced registry records. 

 Rolled oats is particularly valuable as a bulky feed to sup- 

 plement wheat bran in rations nowadays when we no longer 

 have distillers' dried grains to add the bulk that we want in 

 our best dairy feeds. Dairy farmers will do well to see to 

 it that they have a good acreage of their land devoted to the 

 raising of oats for their young stock and to put into the dair}- 

 ration. 



BY-PRODUCTS OP OATS 



Rolled oats is without question one of the best known 

 of our breakfast foods and is used universally by all classes 

 of people. This of course has given rise to a great industry 

 in the milling of oats and since only the groats are used for 

 this purpose there arises from the oat meal mill thousands of 

 tons of what is known as oat meal mill by-product. 



In the process of the manufacture of oat meal, to 

 describe it in a brief way, the oats are first dried or tempered, 

 so that the hull can be readily separated from the groat, 

 the oats are then milled to separate the hulls from the groat. 

 In the process of milling there necessarily is an amount of 

 middlings and what might be called oat bran separated from 

 the oat groat as well as the hull. Therefore, the oat meal 

 mill by-product is made up of oat hulls, oat middlings, oat 

 bran and oat dust. These are all mixed together and sold 

 as oat meal mill by-product. It takes 320 pounds of oats 

 to make 200 pounds of oat meal. Therefore, about one-third 

 of the oat is hull and there would be a yield of oat meal 

 mill by-product from any given mill of about one-third of the 

 total loats used in the manufacture of oat meal, thus it can be 

 readily seen that there is an enormous quantity of this 

 by-product manufactured every year. 



This material is reground and sold in the market as oat 

 feed. Most of it is sold as an ingredient of mixed feeds. 

 The amount of total digestible nutrients in one ton of oat 

 feed is about iioo lbs. In my opinion this is a very liberal 

 rating of digestibility. The amount of digestible protein is 

 not over 7 per cent. For comparison, wheat bran has 12 18 

 pounds of total digestible nutrients per ton and red clover 

 hay has 1018. Therefore, it will be seen that oat feed has a 

 value not much, if any, above that of roughage. 



In mixed feed manufacturing oat feed is used to give 

 bulkiness to a feed that would otherwise be too heavy. There 

 has been little demand for this feed as such and oat feed 

 is not generally on the market as a separate ingredient. 



Page One Hundred Twenty-six 



