Feeding animals in winter?

[pyremind]

So I have a nice little paddock of Alpacas and they are happily eating grass. However it's the fall and winter is around the corner, where I assume all the grass will die or be covered. Are they going to starve? How do you keep them alive during this period?

[Quazyrage]

I have always just grown a large plot of hay in an out of the way place. It keeps for seasons if you have it under a roof. I always seem to have more then i could use, to be honest once i get a few harvest in feeding a large heard of live stock becomes trivial

[Spear Deer]

Yeah, hay takes care of livestock very effectively. Kibble is also pretty easy to make, since it comes in stacks of 50.

[DevHyfes]

As the others said, my typical plan is as follows: In the summer, I confine them to an area with lots of open grass, including a barn for them to sleep in. That barn has a small 4-5 square stockpile of animal feed, set to lowest priority.

Separately, I have a large field of hay growing and a stockpile NOT IN THE ANIMAL AREA where I am collecting the harvest of hay. I tend to have a butcher station there where I can also convert that to kibble or (I have the vegetable garden and gourmet mods) sileage. If I get an infestation of bugs that I kill off, that insect meat all goes for kibble. All summer long while the animals graze, I am producing my winter stock and storing it in a stockpile where the animals never get to it.

Once winter comes and the grass is all gone, I flip the small stockpile to "Critical" priority, and then haulers will slowly bleed down the summer holdings, taking sileage/kibble to the barn stockpile. This keeps the animals more or less fed, but they don't constantly attack the main stock pile and it lasts me throughout the winter.

This system is usually setup by my second winter- in the first, I usually only have a couple animals so I get by making animal feed as needed. By the second winter I usually have several herd animals, a few dogs that can haul, and a good backlog of animal feed to serve them. My rule of thumb is 300 kibble/sileage per animal to last the winter in temperate climates, but the needs of the animal and nutrition of each type of feed means this is only a rule of thumb.

[Numbers]

I had a group of animals in winter once. Most of them would eat my stockpile but for some reason a few wouldn't. At the end of the day, when the animals collapsed from starvation, the doctors just fed them meals.