John,

No, there are probably not enough cattle in the corn belt to make a significant dent in the massive amount of wet corn in the fields. Would it be economical to bring cattle in to graze this corn? With few fences and the need for access to water not to mention low fat cattle prices, I'm not sure that grazing standing corn would work as a harvest method for most large scale corn producers.

As Fenceman correctly pointed out earlier, the key to success here is limiting the area until they clean it up as shown in my first photo above. Letting a large group of cattle out to roam a large field of high moisture, high yielding standing corn is probably not a good idea for the cattle or the cornfield.

This is just an experiment that is probably mostly useful as an option to the smaller producer. However in a drought situation such as western ND, I would think even large scale cattlemen would be grazing any corn available.

Grazing harvested stalks is something that I would think would be fairly common in your area (SD) and could be used more in the cornbelt. However if you mention the word "cattle" to most cornbelt producers they tell you how glad they are that the cattle that many of them used to have are gone.

Thanks for your comments.

Jim at Dawn