Whole Cottonseed Can be Beneficial in Beef Cattle Rations
By Heather Smith Thomas
Whole cottonseed and alfalfa are two of the very best feeds for growing calves,” according to Ron Gill, PhD (Texas A&M). “We also mix a lot of cottonseed hulls into cattle rations. There is very little nutritional value in those hulls but adding these to the ration increases feed intake because cattle like them. It’s a really good roughage source if you need to add fiber to a ration,” he says.
“There are many competing uses for those products, however. The dairies use a lot of cottonseed in feed rations, and other industries use the hulls and lint. The fracking business uses some of those products to plug wells, for instance.
Cottonseed has been fed to cattle for a long time, but in recent years there has been renewed interest in this highly nutritious byproduct of the cotton industry. Cotton Incorporated now has a Beef Advisory Council to help beef producers understand the benefits of feeding whole cottonseed.
Alisa Ogden, a member of the Beef Advisory Council for Cotton Incorporated, farms and ranches in southeastern New Mexico. “In addition to having a cow-calf operation, we also raise cotton and alfalfa. Some of us on the Cotton Board realized that not many beef cattle producers were using whole cottonseed, so the Cottonseed Beef Advisory Council was formed. Whole cottonseed had been fed to dairy cattle for years because it increases production of butterfat and has other benefits, but beef cattle had never been targeted in educational efforts about this feed. As a rancher and a cotton farmer, our family has utilized whole cottonseed for decades to feed calves after weaning, and feeding yearlings. Benefits of cottonseed include the oil (fat) and protein,” she says.
One of the goals of the Beef Advisory Council is to educate nutritionists who work with feedlots, and also to dispel some of the misconceptions about use of whole cottonseed with beef cattle.
Blake Wilson, another Beef Advisory Council member and Associate Professor at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater specializes in ruminant nutrition and beef cattle nutrition. “I’ve conducted several research projects with whole cottonseed in feedlot cattle as well as in the cow-calf sector,” he says.
There are many potential benefits in using this feed as a supplement or in a ration for beef cattle. “This is the seed, left over after the cotton has been harvested for fiber. The seed left behind contains some residual lint or fiber, which helps give whole cottonseed some of its unique composition as a feedstuff for cattle diets,” he says.
“Old school terminology described whole cottonseed as a ‘triple-20 feed’, meaning it was approximately 20% fat, 20% protein, and 20% fiber, and all of these are important for a beef cow or feedlot animal. Cottonseed is unique compared to other feed ingredients in that it is very high in those three characteristics; no other feed has that same nutritional profile.”
There was a lot of early research on cottonseed, but there wasn’t much new research in the past 20-plus years. “Interest in this feed picked up again about the same time the Beef Advisory Council was formed. There is renewed interest, as the dynamics within the feed industry have changed—not only with the COVID pandemic but also with fluctuations in the supply of other feedstuffs,” he says.
When feeding a total mixed ration in a feedlot, whole cottonseed can be included at about 15%-20% of the mix. “It can replace protein, fat and fiber from other ingredients in a feedlot ration, with either no detriment to performance or in some cases improved performance compared to the ingredients it replaces.” In some situations, the standard ingredients of a ration become too expensive or harder to come by, and whole cottonseed might be a viable alternative.
“It may not make sense in every ration or for every feedlot operation, but it gives us another option, another ingredient we can bring into a ration and get those valuable nutrients. It’s also an effective supplement for beef cattle on pasture. At OSU we’ve been comparing whole cottonseed to what would be a traditional winter supplement for cattle, such as a 20% breeder cube. People in this area often use a supplement on weathered mature pasture or medium or low-quality hay. With various supplements, we compared differences in animal performance and rebreeding,” Blake says.
“We are also looking at methane emissions. We’ve seen data in stocker cattle that showed supplementing whole cottonseed can reduce methane production, perhaps due to the high fat content. There could be several benefits to feeding this product, so we are trying to collect more data on that aspect, as well.”
Whether or not a beef producer uses whole cottonseed may depend on location and transport costs. “The farthest north that cotton is grown is in Kansas and Missouri in the Midwest, Virginia in the East, and California (mainly in the San Joaquin Valley) in the West,” says Alisa. “Many feedlots are in areas where cotton is being grown, so that’s another reason it makes sense for whole cottonseed to be fed to beef cattle,” she explains.
Dispelling Old Myths
Some beef producers still worry about potential risks of cottonseed on bull fertility, but this is not a big issue. Blake says there is new research coming out of universities in the southeast, like Georgia and the Carolinas. “They are investigating reported issues with gossypol and bulls. There was a study in the past few years in Georgia in which they supplemented bulls with various levels of whole cottonseed for a 60-day period and didn’t see any negative impacts to semen quality or on breeding soundness exams,” he says.
“In that study they fed young bulls three different diets. One group got 7 pounds of dried distillers grains, another group got a blend of distillers grains and whole cottonseed, and the third group got 7 pounds of whole cottonseed. They compared those groups, tracking them for 60 days–the equivalent of a normal breeding season. They didn’t find any difference in the percentage of normal sperm among any of those groups, out to 60 days. They didn’t go any longer than that, but even at a fairly high level—7 pounds—they didn’t see a negative impact on sperm quantity or quality,” Blake says.
If a person still wants to play it safe and is using a defined breeding season (45 days, 60 days, or even 90 days) the bulls are not with the cows year-round and you can plan the diet so that the herd is not being fed cottonseed at a time it might possibly impact the bulls. “The sperm present in those bulls at the time they are turned out with the cows were being produced 60 days prior to that. Even if the bulls are eating along with the cows during the breeding season, the sperm would not be affected during a short breeding season, and only at the very end of a longer one,” he explains.
“In our studies, we’ve shown that at normal supplementation levels, there is either no detrimental effect, or only a minimal effect. A person might have problems, however, if overfeeding whole cottonseed. In the feedlot, for instance, we’ve seen animals start to eat less or back off feed due to the high fat content when fed at very high levels. There’s no point in feeding levels high enough that would cause problems, but there’s been some interesting research in recent years that helped dispel that old belief that you can’t use this feed in a cow-calf operation because the bulls would have fertility issues. That idea was based on very old research, and we are now realizing this is not an issue.” Even if there might be minimal effects, those could be eliminated by not allowing bulls access to this feed year-round.
The amount you’d want to feed is about 0.5% of the animal’s body weight, which can vary from 5 to 8 pounds of feed per head per day. “You don’t need to feed any more than that,” Alisa says. In terms of the cost of feed and efficiency, if you feed too much it can be counterproductive—and a waste of money.
Feeding Cows, Calves And Yearlings
“We background our calves and have always fed cottonseed,” Alisa says. “When we have cottonseed in our ration, it is the first thing the cattle eat. They like it and sort it out to eat first. They nuzzle through the rest of the feed in the bunk to find it; you can hear them crunching on cottonseed before they go back and eat the roughage. They want the best first!” she says.
“We also found that whenever we had sick animals, if we fed cottonseed meal or whole cottonseed, it seemed to help them recover faster.” It was probably more palatable than other feeds and could entice them to eat when they were off feed. Her father also felt that it would pull toxins out of the gut. This might be due to the ability of the fiber to keep everything moving through and the gut working properly.
Her family usually only fed cottonseed to calves being backgrounded so it could be fed in bunks. With cows out on range pastures, some would be wasted fed out on the ground. “We’d want to feed it in bunks, and that method is impractical out there on big range pastures,” Alisa says.
“Back when we had a cottonseed oil mill in our little town, they produced old-style cottonseed cake—which cows can readily eat off the ground. The cows flourished on that product, because the mill ground up whole cottonseed and put it with the oil to make the cake pellets. When we had to change to a different pellet that was grain based rather than cottonseed base, cows would not eat it. If a person feeds cake (something that can be spread on the ground for cattle) if you can get the old style with cottonseed in it, cows do much better on that. It’s easier for a processor to make the other kind of pellets, however,” she says.
Blake says whole cottonseed makes an ideal receiving diet for young or stressed calves, partly because it does contain a little roughage. “Whole cottonseed is a good source of nutrients and a good source of energy, but where that energy is coming from is different compared to a cereal grain. The animal is not getting energy from starch (which can be detrimental at high levels) but from fat and fiber. You can provide the nutrients and energy the animal needs, but the mechanism for delivering it is a little different. This influences what’s happening in the rumen. Acidosis can be a problem when adapting cattle to high-grain feedlot diets; if you can get more energy into cattle while feeding less starch, you have a lot of benefits,” he says.