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In the recent past, distinct differences existed in the composition of diets fed to high-producing dairy cows in different parts of the U.S. and Canada. Forage availability often dictated how the rations were formulated.
Several factors dictated the main forages available, including weather and soil quality. The Northeast relied heavily on corn silage with some winter grass hay/silage; the Midwest, alfalfa silage with some corn silage and limited alfalfa hay; the West and Southwest, alfalfa hay and corn/sorghum silage.
Let’s say you’re in college, your tuition is paid, and you have $1,000 a month to use for living expenses (You wish, right?). What will you do with it? Well, let’s see – you have housing ($400); gas ($120); pizza, instant noodles and an occasional hot dog ($130); books, school supplies and parking fees ($300).
That leaves you $50 to spend on miscellaneous necessities (the dollar movie theater, breath freshener for your date), and that equals $1,000. Easy-peasy. It works.
Life is built on cycles; a familiar cycle is that of light and dark. Changes in daylight hours are sent to a portion of the brain, and appropriate metabolic adaptations to those changes are seen as cyclic variations in body composition, hair coat and reproduction. We’ve all seen that in our animals and ourselves, getting a little heavier in the fall and leaning out when spring rolls around.
Among the most critical nutritional tools available to today’s modern dairies are those products that enhance rumen function and efficiency.
These products, commonly referred to as rumen enhancers, increase the rumen’s efficiency by creating an environment that allows for the more complete digestion of ration feedstuffs. A resulting increase in the absorption of nutrients occurs.
Vitamin D is typically recognized as being necessary for proper bone formation and maintaining calcium and phosphate in the body. Recent discoveries indicate that vitamin D also is required for the activation of critical innate immune defenses of cattle against microbial pathogens.
Mastitis is inflammation of the mammary gland usually caused by a bacterial infection. Poor nutrition does not cause mastitis, but poor nutrition can make it easier for bacteria to become established in the mammary gland, resulting in increased rates of mastitis.
While doing some digging for an undergraduate nutrition course recently, I came across an interesting controversy from the early years of nutrition science.
It seems that Louis Pasteur, the renowned scientist who was responsible for identifying microbes as the causative agents of many diseases, dismissed suggestions that some diseases could be caused by nutritional deficiencies.
Higher grain prices in recent years have encouraged dairy producers to consider increasing the amount of forage and byproduct ingredients in rations for lactating dairy cows.
Because this differs from past traditional diets, a feeding study led by Dr. Kenneth Kalscheur at South Dakota State University was conducted to evaluate milk production with diets with elevated levels of forage and byproducts.
In the previous two articles, feed efficiency (FE) has been defined, and its use as a stand-alone monitoring tool or in conjunction with income over feed costs has been examined.
The other opportunity for using FE is evaluating the potential impact on manure volume excretion as well as its nutrients. This could have implications for farms with a limited land base or need to export manure off-farm.
Throughout this article, NDF refers to aNDF, determined with use of amylase and sodium sulfite as described by Mertens and official AOAC methods of fiber analysis. For brevity of the acronyms, the “a” is omitted.
Fiber digestibility is a critical factor in dairy nutrition. It is involved in many parameters used to balance rations and evaluate forages. It affects dry matter intake (DMI) and gut fill capacity as well as total chewing time both eating and ruminating, not to mention milk and milk components production.
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