What is supplementary feeding and why do we do it?

Hello everyone,

As Christmas rapidly approaches and we are all busy either buying or wrapping presents or arguing who we should and should not send a Christmas card to spare a short moment to think of the cattle that are still out on site, contentedly grazing away through the ever shortening days and ever more increasingly frosty mornings.

We still have cattle on the majority of our project sites as their eating habits change dramatically during the winter months to when they would normally be on site during the rest of the year. Instead of eating all of the fresh luscious green grass that grows every second of the day, or picking off the leaves that have caused the trees lowest branches to bend to within reach of the cows long tongues, the cattle switch to eating brittle and spiky old gorse bushes, next years tree buds, holly leaves and berries, any bramble leaves which continue to avoid the frosts or basically anything which has some kind of vitamins or minerals in it.

This alteration of cattle eating habits has massive beneficial impacts on the site for the following year by keeping all of the scrub in check and preventing it from spreading out into the more important heather dominated heathland.

Some of you may wonder whether the cattle can get enough vitamins and minerals from just eating these morsels around the site and the answer would have to be no they cannot. Historically the sites would have been so big that they would have been able to support more animals throughout the winter but nowadays with the heaths all being fragmented up by roads, railways and housing they are too small to support the cattle on their own throughout winter.

So how comes we still have cattle on site if the sites cannot support them on their own? I hear you say...the answer is by reducing the number of cattle on site in the winter months and by supplementary feeding them what are known as mineral blocks or licks. these take many forms but a re generally a plastic bucket full with what looks like a big oxo cube. They are made up of a variety of things including ash, and seaweed (for a full list of ingrediants check the side of the bucket) and act in the same way as any vitamin or mineral tablets that you or I may take throughout the year. We would not necessarily die if we did not take them but it certainly cannot hurt us to take them and hopefully keeps away and colds or infections and makes sure we are all fit and strong come springtime and raring to go.

Well now that I seem to have endorsed all vitamin and mineral supplements I should counter that by saying we should all eat an healthy balanced diet of meat and two veg, 5 glasses of water a day, 5 bits of fruit and veg a day and so on blah blah blah.

So hopefully that has explained a little bit more about how we manage to keep animals on the heaths over the winter months.

Elliott