If you know anything about dairy cows, perhaps you’ve heard that some of them eat skittles. It seems like a rather unusual headline, but it’s true and one farmer has a video to explain why.
Thanks to the now-viral TikTok video, we will never have to wonder why cows eat skittles any longer. The farmer, named Dan, uploaded the clip and it has been viewed millions of times.
He didn’t upload the clip necessarily to go viral but rather, to answer someone else who asked why dairy cows sometimes are fed skittles. This was an old story from 2017 as reported by CNN. In Wisconsin, they had found skittles by the thousands scattered across a road and it seems as if they were for cattle, not people.
It may have taken a number of years, but now we have the skinny on why skittles are eaten by some dairy cows. In the video, Dan begins by saying that it is not as strange as you would think.
He explains that his cows don’t eat skittles but if he had access to them, he would absolutely feed them to his animals. That is when he starts explaining things in an easy-to-understand way.
If you didn’t know, a farm cow’s diet is very consistent. There is a particular type of food that they regularly eat made up of grains and various nutrients. It is known as a total mixed ration (TMR).
Something that can be added to the mix is skittles because they are a ready source of energy for the cows. If you happen to live in an area where skittles are made, you may be able to get some that were not quite perfect enough to be sold in stores, so you can get them at quite a discount.
It isn’t that they are feeding the cows food that is low-quality, the skittles may just not have the letter S on them or maybe the coloring wasn’t quite right. Regardless, cows are not going to mind and they get the energy from the sugar all the same.
@iowadairyfarmer Reply to @butterflywandress cows are amazing at utilizing things humans don’t want. Skittles are simply a different energy source for the cow, absolutely nothing wrong with it.
