Tag Archives: Forage
Making & Feeding Quality Forage – Tools
Last month’s article covered some key aspects of the ensiling process. This month will consider some tools to assist in ensuring the best possible preservation. Two of the key principles mentioned last month were, achieving the fastest fermentation to preserve as much forage as possible, and achieving anaerobic conditions by preventing oxygen leaking into the [...]
Making & Feeding Quality Forage – Principles
Maximising growth and utilisation of high quality home grown forages is a key component in driving dairy farm profitability, particularly with low milk prices. This includes both grazed and conserved pastures and crops, as dairy farmers will need to feed both to match forage supply with herd requirements. This is the first in a series [...]
The Key to Maximizing Profit: Quality Silage
Making high quality silage is about achieving the twin goals of rapid, efficient front-end fermentation and back-end stability during storage and feedout. Even in the best situations, there are likely to be challenges simply due to variability in the crop or weather variations during harvest. However, focusing on good management practices, including selecting the right [...]Nutritional strategies to help maintain production and body condition in late lactation
Although we’re aware of the importance good management over the next three to four months has on next season’s production, working out the optimal time to dry off can be far more challenging. Assessing condition scores (CS) of your herd now is an important first step to making informed decisions. Target condition scores are 5 [...]
Strategies for El Niño
Reduced pasture growth in the East due to lack of moisture with this year’s El Niño conditions, makes it more important to conserve as much of any temporary pasture or crop surpluses. This will reduce requirements for supplementary feeds, or the need to dry cows off early. Conversely, wet conditions in the West may result [...]
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 [...]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 [...]
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 [...]
Strategies for a Lower Payout
Financial cycles are a normal part of agriculture, subject to international factors beyond farmers’ control. Farmers need sound business strategies to deal with these fluctuations, to ensure their long term future. Large companies used to such cycles, tend to build up equity during positive cycles, and reduce it during negative ones. Released equity is used [...]- 1
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