You’ve seen it before. The rains come late, the veld browns off, and by midwinter everybody is chasing the same bales at twice the price. A drought feeding plan built around the feed mixer is how you get ahead of that. Count what’s in the stack and the pit now, while there’s still something to count.
I’ve spent my whole career around feed mixers, and the dry years always sort farms into two groups. The guys who planned early come through with cattle still holding condition. The guys who waited end up buying whatever’s left on the truck. No prizes for guessing which group spends more.
Count What You’ve Got. Then Count It Again.
Every dry-season plan starts with a forage inventory, and almost every one I’ve seen is too optimistic. Don’t eyeball the stack. Measure it. Weigh a few bales that look typical, and pull a fresh dry matter sample from silage that’s been open a while. Then put everything into tonnes of dry matter so you’re comparing apples to apples.
Now the demand side. Head count by group, times dry matter intake per head per day, times the days until you can honestly expect new growth. Add a margin for shrink, because wind, spoilage and refusals don’t take a break in a drought year. The gap between those two numbers is your shortfall. Know it in tonnes before the hay market figures out you need to buy.
- Track stock by ingredient, not just “hay” and “silage”. The quality differences will bite you later.
- Redo the numbers every month. Dry seasons never end when they’re supposed to.
- Decide early who eats first. Usually that’s milking cows, in-calf heifers and finishing cattle.
Building a Drought Feeding Plan Around the Feed Mixer
Here’s where a mixer earns its keep. A hay ring can’t do much with straw, low-grade hay, crop residue, hulls or by-products. A mixer can. Chop it, blend it with denser feeds, and you’ve got a ration cattle will actually eat. The idea is to dilute the poor roughage so total intake stays where your nutritionist wants it.
But only if the mix is consistent. Put cheap, coarse roughage in the ration and cattle get a lot better at sorting. They nose out the concentrate and leave the stalks, and now the ration on paper has nothing to do with the ration in the rumen. Let the nutritionist build the formula. Your job is making sure that formula survives the trip to the bunk.
Change Slowly and Check the Mix Every Time
Want to lose intake fast? Swap the ration overnight. Rumen bugs need time to adjust. Step the change over a week or more, swapping out part of the old roughage at each step, and you’ll usually avoid a crash in milk or condition.
Every time an ingredient changes, check three things:
- Does the load order still make sense? Dry, coarse stuff generally goes in early so it gets processed. Liquids and fine minerals go in later.
- Watch the scale. Light, bulky roughage fills the tub long before it hits target weight, so you may need smaller batches.
- Grab samples at the start, middle and end of the bunk. If they look different, your mix isn’t uniform. Simple as that.
Stop the Sorting With Chop Length, Not Extra Minutes
Coarse drought roughage has to be cut short enough that cattle can’t push it aside, but not so short it stops working as fibre. On most mixers, knife condition, counter-knife or restrictor settings and mixing time all decide where you land on particle size.
Sharp, properly set knives do the work quicker. That saves fuel and keeps you from beating everything else in the tub to dust. Dull knives are what push guys to add minutes, and extra minutes mean extra wear and finer particles. Check the knives before the dry season peaks, not in the middle of it.
A particle separator box is the cheapest tool on any feeding operation. Shake out a sample of fresh ration and one of the refusals. Refusals mostly long stems? The roughage still isn’t processed enough, or it isn’t being blended in.
Watch the Bunk Like You Watch the Bank Account
In a drought, small losses stack up quick. Refusals, wind loss off open loading areas and spoilage on a half-used silage face all eat a forage budget that was tight to begin with. A few habits help:
- Feed to a target refusal and adjust every day, not every week.
- Keep the silage face clean and take enough off daily to limit spoilage.
- Get bought-in hay and straw under cover where you can. Dry seasons still end in storms.
- Log every load: ingredients, weights, mix time and who mixed it. When intake drops, the log tells you why.
Run the Money Alongside the Feed
In a drought, cash flow usually runs out before the feed does. Price substitutes per tonne of dry matter and per unit of energy or protein, not per bale or per load. That’s the only fair way to compare a cheap-looking option with a good one. Call suppliers early, because straw and by-product prices climb as the season dries out. And if you’re facing destocking, it’s a lot easier to make that call with a real shortfall number in front of you.
Will Your Mixer Handle Drought Roughage?
Not every mixer copes with a drought ration the same way. Straw and stalky hay are bulky and tough. They fill the tub before you hit weight, and they punish worn augers and blunt knives. If you’re a bigger feedlot or dairy feeding a lot of low-grade roughage, a heavier-built machine is worth it. Our LEO HD Series vertical mixers are one example: twin-auger, heavier floor and wall steel, stainless liners and a load-cell scale as standard. That build is meant to keep chewing through coarse material day after day, and the scale keeps batch weights honest when the ingredients change every week.
Whatever you run, size the batch to the ration’s bulk, not just its weight. A straw-based drought ration can fill the tub at a lot less tonnage than your normal silage ration. Cram extra weight in and you’ll slow the mix and invite sorting.
Write a Feeding Calendar, Not Just a Ration
A good drought plan says when each change happens. Write down the trigger points. Silage drops to a set number of days’ supply. Bought straw comes into the mix. Weaners get sold or moved. Dry cows go onto maintenance. Tie each one to a date or a stock level so you’re making calm decisions, not panicked ones. And share it with whoever’s doing the feeding. The guy on the mixer is usually the first one to notice when a ration isn’t behaving like the paperwork says.
Protect the Cattle That Matter Most
When feed is short, not every animal gets fed to full potential. That’s just reality. Rank your groups: close-up and early-lactation cows, replacement heifers, then growing and finishing stock. Dry cows can often manage on a lower-energy ration. With a mixer and a scale, separate mixes for each group are easy. Load the high-priority ration first, then build the cheaper roughage ration for the groups that can handle it.
Final Truth
A mixer won’t make it rain. Nobody’s selling you that. What it will do is take a pile of mismatched, lower-grade feed and turn it into a ration cattle eat the same way every single day. That’s what keeps condition on when forage is tight. Keep the knives sharp, change the ration slowly, and watch what comes back from the bunk. Not sure your mixer can handle a coarse drought ration? Ask your dealer or drop us a note. We’ll tell you straight.
Related reading: When TMR sorts in the bunk before noon · The load order crews keep when silage arrives · Walking a Free State herd through the mixer size calculator
