That's Shortcake, one of our cows, eating sweet feed in the head gate. We don't have a proper chute, so this is how we get cattle to put their heads through our head gate when it's time for collar maintenance.
The sweet feed is just a little treat. It isn't part of their normal diet, and we avoid feeding grain when we can. Think of it like candy for us. It gets their heads through the gate, and then we can check and adjust their collars.
The head gate is one of the most useful things we've built on the farm. We built it from plans in Joel Salatin's book, Polyface Designs. It gave us a very functional head gate for only a little money and a little building time.
Join the Firm Foundation Farm email list to follow along as we build and fix things here. Have you built something that ended up being more useful than you expected?