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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.
It never ceases to amaze me how some dairy farmers treat their dry cows. I mean, they build these incredible palaces to house their milk cows, feed these cows diets balanced to the fourth decimal point and worry and fret on how they are performing.
But dry cows are second-class citizens on many farms: stuck in sub-par facilities, overcrowded and fed rations that are neither balanced nor high-quality.
“Steve, you gotta take that expensive blood meal out of my mix. That stuff is costing me a fortune,” growled the grizzled dairy farmer whose hair was in little tufts from trying to pull it out while doing the monthly financial books.
I had heard it before. I knew the reasoning behind it. If it costs a bunch, it cannot be good.
Back in 1990, I worked with my first 90-pound dairy herd. It was a very high crude protein diet (22 percent) and contained 42 pounds of grain in only 56 pounds of dry matter intake, making the ration a mere 33 percent forage. Fortunately for the cows, several pounds of soyhulls and cottonseed made up a large proportion of the TMR grain mix, helping to maintain rumen health.
The starch content of a dairy ration, how fermentable this starch is in the rumen and the total tract starch digestibility have a huge influence on many facets of a dairy operation.
