What should you do if you find yourself out of feed? If you ran out of corns, go and get some more as soon as you can. With that being said, there are times where you are unable to immediately restock your feed. Luckily, you can substitute feed as a temporary solution. The way to do it is to substitute a feed with one of two alternative feed with similar nutritional make up on protein, energy or fiber basis.

Protein Feed

• Protein feed examples are such as soybean meal, distillers dried grains or canola.

• If you are out of one type of protein feed, you can substitute using another protein feed on a pound for pound basis.

• When using high moisture protein feeds, convert the amount to dry basis when calculating how much dry protein feed to substitute.

Energy Feed

• High energy feeds such as corn, barley, hominy can be substituted with each other.

• Distillers grains can be used as either high energy or protein substitute.

• Medium energy feeds such as beet pulp, corn gluten feed or wheat middlings can be substituted for each other.

Fibre Feed

• Fibre feed such as roughages, alfalfa hay, corn silage or haylage can be substituted on a pound-for-pound basis.

• It is important to substitute on dry matter (DM) basis.

• Liquids and high moisture feeds have a wide range in protein and energy level.

• Hence, use water and medium energy feeds as a combination for substitution.

• There is no good substitute for whole cottonseed as it contains protein energy and fibre. Distillers can be used as a temporary substitute for a limited amount of time.

It is crucial to not run out of corn, corn silage or alfalfa hay as they form the basis of the animal's diet. An important note to substituting is to use feeds with similar protein, energy, fibre or moisture levels. When you are unsure what to substitute, feed more roughage.