Meeting the nutrient requirements of a high-producing dairy cow without disrupting the rumen environment can be challenging. Starch is a key energy source but can also lead to acidosis if it is overfed.

What inflammation can tell you about what’s happening inside the cow It’s no secret to most dairy producers that the transition period – spanning the three weeks before and after calving – is a challenging time in the cow’s production cycle.

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.