Feeding at Night

My family, being relatively new to the beef cattle business, has had to take everything day-by-day. My parents had a cattle background, from their dairy farm, but the two types of cattle raising are completely different. As a family, we've learned most things through trial and error. Of course, we have always had a great group of neighbors to give us advice and, often times, hands-on instruction. But I'd like to think that being first- and second-generation ranchers, we have had an opportunity to find a new way to do things. It always helps to look at something from a new perspective. One major thing that has changed since most of the neighboring families started ranching: the internet was invented. At least once a week I find myself on Google looking up something farm and ranch related. One of the techniques that Google has provided my family with is feeding cattle at night during calving season. There's something about feeding at night that delays calving until morning. For the most part, that is. For example, this calving season, we have only had one calf born at night. This particular calf was a stillborn, so that leads me to believe something was probably wrong that caused the cow to start calving. Even so, I know a lot of the ranchers around here who feed their cattle early in the morning during calving season. It's the way they've always done it and the way they always will. I think it's easy to get caught up in traditions like that without thinking about how it effects other segments of the business. I know a lot of the methods used by my neighbors are tried and true, but I still can't help but think that sometimes it might benefit them to break tradition.

Here's a link to one of the articles I've found on the effects of night feeding: http://www.cattlenetwork.com/cattle-news/Night-time-versus-day-time-feeding-influences-time-of-calving-135874173.html