The weather in Wisconsin this time of year can't make up its mind which way to go - above freezing and snow melting one day and teens the next night.

I bought a trailer load of cornstalk bales to try to stretch my dwindling supply of good hay as well as provide some bedding in my suddenly very icy feeding area.  Snow is not a problem compared to ice for a bunch of cows approaching 30 days from calving.

The stalk bales were really nice - out of a standard roll cornhead, not shredded, with lots of leaves, cobs etc. I figured I would try putting out half good hay, half these stalk bales and see what happens. If they only eat a third to half of the stalks and leave the rest for bedding I will be happy.  The bedded stalks will also get my C to N ratio up closer to 25 to 1 when I clean the area up into large compost piles when the grazing rotation start

So today I put out the first of the netwrapped only stalk bales and it was very difficult to get the netwrap off after several thaw/freeze cycles that had the outside of the bale frozen like an ice cube. I must have spent 15 minutes trying to get the iced on net wrap off of each stalk bale compared to under one minute removing the net wrap and plastic from the wrapped hay bales.

The net wrap and plastic covering the wrapped hay I put out at the same time  came right off. The obvious thing to do if this works out is to purchase the stalk bales in the fall and be sure to wrap the stalk bales also that I expect to use this time of year. One benefit of a lot of folk raising corn is that there appears to be far more good stalk bales available to purchase this time of year compared to good hay bales. Not to mention the price difference. But we'll see how this works out.