Don’t Process Oats

• The thousand grain weight for oats is around 50 g.
• So 1 kg of oats will contain 20,000 individual grains.
• 1% of these is 200 grains.
• Assuming a dry matter in the dung of around 20% this would mean 12 whole grains per 1 kg of dung.  If the dung is much drier at say 50% DM then the number of whole grains would increase to 30 per kg.
• So feeding 3 kg of whole oats per day and with a 50% DM dung 1% would result in nearly 100 whole grains per kg of dung.
• With oats costing £110 per tonne a 1% loss is equivalent to £1.10 per tonne.

Putting a cost for processing oats at £5 per tonne the break even point would be a loss of undigested grain of 4.5%.  This is equivalent to 900 whole grains per kg of oats fed, equivalent to 125 whole grains per kg of dung at 50% DM!

Basil Lowman, SAC Consulting Beef Specialist