In my opinion straw is the best. Easy to spread by hand, absorbs moisture well, provides excellent insulation properties for livestock, and breaks down well in a manure pile so that it goes through a manure spreader well. I would say that oat and winter wheat straw are the best followed by spring wheat and barley. Some people use corn stover bales as bedding. We bale cattails and rushes when its dry enough and use those for bedding in the feedlot pens and out in pastures during calving if needed. Have used poor hay in the past also in feedlot pens. Its amazing how much of those cattails and poor grass those calves will pick up and eat. If you try and use cattails for bedding you'll really want to run them through a bale processer. Mainly because they'd be about impossible to spread by hand and because it chops them up a bit which makes cleaning the pen in the spring a lot easier.

I'm sure you could use almost any crop residue as bedding.

 

Factor in they are going to eat pert of your straw..... Mel

 

We used to use almost all straw years ago. Now all cornstalks, even for baby calves. I have no desire to go back to straw.

 

We use some soybean stalks they are nice and fine when we bale them combine chops them up

 

I use mainly corn stalks. I do keep some small squares of straw around also for calving pens and other small areas. Usually I just drop a corn stalk bale in and let the cows do their thing. They will eat some then spread the rest out and lay on it.

 

Cornstalks is what is mostly used here.Heck stock cows will eat most of it,supplement with better feed and your other feed supply will go farther.

 

We use sawdust in our tiestall when its available. Otherwise use hay and other feed refusals when I clean manger twice a day. Same with the heifer pack hay and sawdust. Straw is expensive and scarce here. Have baled cornsatlks and soybean straw and both work well. But weather is a limiting factor at combining time. The best mix for baby calves is oat straw and sawdust from a bandsaw mill. Sawdust keeps them dry and the straw insulates.

 

Getting harder and harder to find sawdust around here with all the small mills closing. I switched to wood chips last winter for a bed pack and it worked well.

 

We use ground peanut hulls in the freestalls they are much less likely to attract mastitis causing bacteria than wood shavings . they stay in stalls better than shavings . moe expensive than wood shavings or sawdust

 

I was down in the Delmarva last week saw two semis from Ontario Canada loading straw

 

Most of our fields are rented out, and with the non-stop rain last spring about half didn't get planted (first time thats ever happened). They did mud in some beans. I could maybe bale up the bean chaff.
Otherwise I'll be cleaning up some tree lines - I was debating on renting a big chipper and run all the branches through to make bedding, and then maybe buying a little straw as well.