Alternative forages, such as sorghum or milo silage, have gained momentum with growers and producers. Sorghum, sudan, sorghum-sudan, milo and millet are all tropical grasses (C4 biology; warm-season grass).

CompaniesNeogen – Pat Frasco, Director of Milling and GrainLallemand Animal Nutrition – Tony Hall, Technical Services – RuminantBiomin America Inc. – Paige Gott, Ruminant Technical ManagerAlltech – Max Hawkins, Alltech Mycotoxin Management Nutritionist

Today’s dairy cows are genetically superior to your father’s cows. Intensive selection for milk yield and stature has produced bigger, more productive cows. When you combine this with improved nutrition and cow management, it’s easy to see why dairy feed efficiency in North America has doubled in the past 100 years.

Your fresh cow program can make or break the economic success and health of each cow’s lactation. It is important to get these transitioning cows off to a solid start.

Thanks to new research, we now have the ability to routinely evaluate the profile of butterfat as an indication of how it’s being made by the cow.

When a cow becomes pregnant, some of the nutrients it consumes will be used by the developing calf. There is no other time in the calf’s life when the development of tissues, organs and systems is occurring as rapidly as early weeks in utero.

The single-most important metric for formulating dairy cow diets is knowing how much a cow eats each day. However, the consistent and accurate measuring of dry matter intakes is probably the most elusive component of nutrition management on the dairy farm.

Probiotics have been gaining attention in all segments of animal agriculture in the last several years. Although this has been influenced by several factors, the biggest overall driver has been the goal of reducing antibiotic usage due to government regulations and consumer demand.

When we think of palm trees, we usually think of sandy beaches and coconuts. Though fig- or coconut-bearing palm trees are generally the most recognizable, I am talking about the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), one of the most important commodity crops in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Packing, preserving and properly feeding from the bunk silo relies on feeder knowledge of the chemistry behind the crop. That was the basic premise behind the two-day “Feeder Schools” held by Cornell Cooperative Extension last fall and hosted by dairy farms in different regions of New York.