Farm Talk Tuesday: "Do cows really have four stomachs?"

Kinda.

Cows are ruminants and they technically have one stomach with four compartments: the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. These compartments all play an important role in digestion.

You may have seen us mention that cows can eat a wide variety of byproducts and "garbage" that we don't really have other uses for. Some examples that are common in our area are dried distillers grains, cottonseed, corn gluten, soyhulls, etc. Farmers use different byproducts depending on what is readily available in their area. For example, down south, they may use citrus pulp in their feed rations!

It's pretty amazing that cows can eat this "junk" and upcycle it into high quality protein (beef!). It's also important to note that our cattle actually enjoy eating the byproducts in our rations. It might sound simple, but cow tummies can be a bit finicky and we do a lot of work to make sure they are getting exactly what they need to make high quality beef, while simultaneously maintaining good gut health.

We do nutritional analyses on our feed ingredients and hay (and provide this information to anyone who purchases our hay so they can use it as well!). Then we use the data from each ingredient to formulate our rations. I attached a photo of some data on a batch of our hay here so you can see just how much information we have at our fingertips when making feeding decisions.

Fun fact: Cows store non-digestible, big pieces of food in their rumen then they regurgitate it, chew it for a second time, and swallow it again. We call this "chewing their cud" and it's one of their favorite pastimes. We actually use this chewing activity as a measure of cow comfort, as cows tend to chew their cud when they are relaxed and comfortable.