We use cookies to provide you with a better experience. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies in accordance with our Cookie Policy.
The most profitable cows on your dairy are the fresh cows. Attending to their good health should be one of the top priorities of your herd management. There are essentially two critical areas of focus with regards to fresh cow health: nutrition, both prepartum and postpartum, and housing and grouping strategies.
Presenting a nutritionally correct diet is important when caring for a dairy cow, but to assume that it is all that is required in terms of the animal’s nutritional well-being is incorrect.
“We need to focus on what the cow does with that feed,” says Trevor DeVries, associate professor in the Department of Animal and Poultry Science at the University of Guelph – Kemptville.
The drought of 2012 left most farms, in a large part of the county, short on forage inventory either because they harvested less tonnage or their forage supplier has less tons to sell.
Record-high replacement forage cost makes purchasing unpalatable or decreases already thin profit margins with higher feed cost.
There seems to be a fair amount of confusion in our industry over the status of charcoal powder as a feed ingredient. In 2012, the Association of American Feed Control Officials gave a ruling effectively banning the addition and manufacture of plant-based activated charcoal for feeding purposes.
A recent TMR audit on a 7,200-cow dairy operation focused on its complex feeding system. As dairy size increases and multisite dairies become more common, feeding operations are becoming more complex.
Tax season is here and many of us are meeting with our accountants to summarize last year’s balance sheet and plan for 2013. We likely consider different ways to minimize tax implications on our business, planning ahead and investing in various areas of our business.
The full impact of the 2012 drought continues to be calculated and reports of hay and forage shortages persist. Forages that are available are generally expensive.
Not surprisingly, dairy producers are concerned about feed cost, quality and availability – and with good reason.
The recent hike in feed ingredient prices, at a time of moderate milk prices, has dairy producers and their consultant teams focused on ways to protect their income over feed cost (IOFC).
With dairy farms utilizing more corn silage as the majority of their forage base in milk cow rations, the increases in market prices for the key protein ingredients have assumed greater significance in dairy farm feed budgets.
It used to be so easy. We didn’t decide whether fields would be harvested for corn grain or silage until the end of the season. Usually the worst-looking corn was taken for silage.
In the past, there was very little data on corn silage quality or performance, and hybrids were chosen based on grain yield.
Until recently, we ignored the nutrient qualities of our corn silage hybrids.
RSS
