Cottonseed Cake

We started to feed some cake the other day and I got to thinking about the old cottonseed cake we used to feed. My dad always talks about its feed value, 40% protein, and how hard it was, the cows really had to slow down to eat it, but what I remember about it was how it came.<br />n<br />nOne hundred pound burlap sacks. My dad would get one to two semi loads each year. Oh, were they a nightmare to unload. Twenty five ton of feed in 100 pound burlap bags per semi. Most of the time we would get a few people together to help unload it but one time I remember me and a buddy of mine were the only people around to unload the damn thing. We were both about 16 years old. One person in the trailer and one on the ground in the feed shed carrying one bag at a time unloading it. Yes, unloading the cake is my memories of cottonseed cake, not feeding it.<br />n<br />nMy dad talks about when he bought the ranch from his dad, he found that the cake shed his granddad maintained on the place was chock full of old , rotten sacked, coon shit on, cottonseed cake. He remembers his granddad buying a bunch every year but not always feeding it all so he slowly built up quite a stash. My dad went and got himself a cake feeder since the bags were so rotten he couldn't use them, and commenced to feeding all the old cake to his cows. He says it took him over 3 years to feed up all the old cottonseed cake that granddad had stockpiled in the cake shed. Now I know he run fewer cattle back then than I do now but that had to have been a lot of cake.<br />n<br />nTalk about how feeding has changed over the years. Cottonseed cake was real popular many years ago for cattle. Today you don't see it very much around here. Why not? transportation costs. You can't afford to get it shipped up here anymore, the transportation costs would kill you. You can buy a locally produced grain based cake a lot cheaper. That is until now. This year I still got a locally produced cake but guess what was in it. Distillers grain from ethanol. Years ago the byproduct we fed was cottonseed and now we have a new byproduct, distillers grain. Ain't progress interesting?