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Cooling your cows when temperatures start climbing is not a novel idea, but it’s also not an idea to simply discard altogether.
Although we are still a ways from reaching those scorching summertime temperatures, now is the time to think about cow cooling.
Editor’s note: The following article is the first in a series of articles regarding current heat stress research and heat abatement techniques.
Winter in Minnesota, as usual, was very cold this year, especially in January. On one especially frigid day, the wind chill was -35ºF.
In the constantly evolving dairy industry, producers and nutritionists continuously seek nutritional tools for improvement of nutrient availability.
The goal is to meet the ever-increasing nutrient demand in support of the animal’s genetic potential for growth, reproduction, and of particular importance, efficient milk and component production.
What are they?
The use of live micro-organisms as feed supplements for ruminants is not a new concept. Particularly, feeding large amounts of “beneficial” microbes to livestock under stress or confronted with a disease challenge.
Microbial products used in this manner were originally called “probiotics,” or products “for life.” However, the term “probiotic” implied a curative nature.
Dietary potassium is a significant nutrient for good dairy cow health and nutrition.
This macromineral impacts carbohydrate metabolism, amino acid uptake and protein synthesis, all of which aid in milk production as well as reproductive performance, immune function and cow well-being.
A key part of your nutritionist’s role is to understand and properly utilize forage and feed analysis results from labs. That is a complex task.
Over the past several years, I have been involved with a group of labs that developed definitions for over 125 items that can be reported on forage analysis reports.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve been able to measure what commercial dairy cattle digest on-farm by analyzing TMR and manure samples that nutritionists send us from high-cow pens.
We measure TMR and manure nutrient content, a digestion marker, and then calculate what cows apparently digest (and conversely, what they did not). What we are measuring is in some cases eye-opening.
Three dairy producers share silage management practices
Over the next several months, three dairy producers from across the country will be sharing silage management strategies they use and steps they take to mitigate shrink loss.
Is your total mixed ration (TMR) uniform? Ever question if all forages, grains, protein feeds, minerals, vitamins and feed additives are evenly combined in a single feed mix? Ever question if your ration could be holding back production?
When corn is $7, we want to get everything we can from the corn we are feeding.
What do we have in storage? Is that really high-moisture corn?
How do we measure quality?
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