November 1, 2015
PRACTICAL ADVICE
We are frequently asked by publications to help provide insight into essential and prevalent issues. These include animal nutrition features written by our technical specialists. Practical advice that works made available to you. Sit back and have a read.
October 1, 2015
Feeding & Fertility
Many dairy farmers have adopted an aggressive culling policy due to the low milk payment forecasts, to enable better feeding of home grown forages to remaining cows, and to reduce requirements for purchased feeds. This has reduced the size of their breeding herds, making it more important that remaining cows become, and stay pregnant to [...]
September 1, 2015
Inoculants Help Achieve Maximum Use of Home Grown Forages
It is important to maximise growth, conservation and utilisation of home grown feeds, as farm overhead and running costs attributed to them cannot be avoided. Repeated dairy industry surveys and competitions (Dairy Business of the Year) have highlighted this as a major driver of farm profitability irrespective of farm system (1-5). This is even more [...]
August 1, 2015
Nutrition & Feeding Strategies at Low Milk Prices
Farmers are faced with some difficult financial and management decisions during low milk price cycles; one option being to cut costs, particularly inputs. This may help achieve a short term goal of balancing cash flow, but may adversely affect production and profitability later on. One needs to be careful with cutting inputs that directly affect [...]
July 1, 2015
ME Best Predictor of Feed Value?
Feeds for dairy cows are often valued according to their price per megajoule (MJ) of Metabolisable Energy (ME), as energy intake is usually limiting with cows during early lactation. ME is a measure of the energy available to cows, after losses from undigested feed, urine and methane are accounted for. ME has some limitations as [...]
June 1, 2015
Colostrum Quantity & Quantity on Replacement Performance
Recent research has demonstrated how plane of nutrition and diet during pregnancy can affect colostrum production, milk yield and calf health. Feeding cows to match energy, protein, mineral and vitamin requirements during pregnancy, supports production of colostrum and milk components, essential for the health and development of newborn and growing calves. Research in both cattle [...]
May 1, 2015
Importance of Good Transition
It is important to include fixed (land, interest) and variable (seed, fertiliser, sprays) costs in growing and harvesting pasture or crops to properly evaluate cost benefits of using inoculants when preserving forages. Effective lactic acid producing inoculants have been demonstrated, in controlled trials, to reduce dry matter losses by 5->10%, under good ensiling conditions. Inoculant [...]
April 1, 2015
100 Years Progress in Dairy Cow Production and Feeding
There has been considerable change and progress in cow production and feeding over the last 100 years from 1915, which was also when The Danish Mineral Company formed (now Nutritech International Ltd). There were about 1.1 million people, 634,000 milking or dry dairy cows, 270 butter and 355 cheese factories, producing 31,330 t butter and [...]
March 1, 2015
Mineral Types and Availability
There appears to be some confusion regarding the types of minerals, their availability and factors affecting it. Minerals are usually referred to as being in the inorganic or organic forms, which refers to whether they are bound to inorganic (e.g. chlorides, oxides, sulphates) or organic (contain carbon e.g. amino acids, peptides) elements or compounds. The [...]
February 1, 2015
