Dairy Nutrition
Feed costs will continue to be the No. 1 expense. Jim Salfer, Extension dairy educator with the University of Minnesota, offers some best practices to help producers lower feed costs.
A popular Chinese herbal supplement is being evaluated as a potential feed additive to mitigate the effects of heat stress in dairy cattle.
The livestock production businesses of the future will need to balance much more than the bottom line.
Head to Lancaster County Pennsylvania and the sweet aroma of candy can be smelled on a family dairy farm. Red Knob Dairy has been feeding upcycled Hershey candy waste to their cows for more than a decade.
More dairy heifer raisers are taking a page from the feedlot world these days by utilizing liquid supplements as carriers for vitamins, trace minerals, and feed additives in heifer TMRs.
Rumen pH is highly influential on how milkfat production can be maximized.
Raising heifers is expensive, to be sure. But in the long run, raising them right is far more important than raising them cheap.
What dietary supplements are best for preweaned calf rations? Out of the literally hundreds from which to choose, do any of them really work?
The “Wood Milk” ad— funded through MilkPEP —goal is to make people pause and question what they are consuming and the nutritional value of their choices.
“Pushing feed is perhaps the simplest and least expensive management strategy dairy operators can implement.”
Acidification of milk or milk replacer is a common practice for some calf raisers, with some studies showing it improves weight gain and fecal scores in calves.
Supplementing early lactation dairy cow diets with bile acids could provide a pathway to suppressing fatty liver and ketosis, and ultimately boosting milk production and profitability.
Feed additives can be included in dairy cattle diets for a variety of reasons. However, feed additives should not be considered a cornerstone to any farm feeding program.
When it comes to the products of rumen fermentation, butyrate is a beneficial amino acid superstar.
Could probiotics improve early calf growth? Researchers think so.
Have you ever noticed that cows who calve during the fall and winter months tend to produce less colostrum than their herd mates who calved during the spring and summer? Here’s why.
In our quest for healthy, growthy, efficiently raised calves, have we lost some of the more fundamental elements of what makes calves tick?
It has been well-documented that feeding preweaned calves on a higher plane of nutrition improves calf health and performance. However, providing calves more nutrients may also promote wound healing.
Sometimes called “sudden death syndrome” or “bloody gut,” Hemorrhagic Bowel Syndrome is characterized by dark, tarry, and sometimes bright red, bloody feces; dehydration; and decreased feed intake.
Inflammation creates additional stress at calving.
The transition period, 3 weeks before and after calving, is challenging for all cows. But for first-calf heifers, it’s likely the scariest and most stressful time in their young lives.
Creating a herd where all the individuals are healthy and normal increases your chances of economic success.
Feeding waste milk to calves captures high-quality nutrients and adds value to a product that otherwise would be discarded. But recent research sheds light on concerns about the practice.
Researchers at Virginia Tech University have investigated what effects infusing extra acetate or propionate, or lowering the pH, would have on thermodynamics of VFA in the rumen.
Extra water – along with a possible electrolyte boost -- is never more important than in the heat of summer.
Trace minerals are important to calves’ development, but these nutritional components can vary in source. It turns out some trace minerals are more palatable than others, resulting in differences in consumption.
Paying attention to feed-bunk behaviors can alert dairy producers to issues with diet, feed management or delivery that impact health and performance.
We now know the beneficial influence of feeding transition milk to calves. Is there a way to deliver that nutritional and immunological support and bypass the tedious process of harvesting and feeding transition milk?
The sooner calves eat enough dry feed to sustain themselves, the better equipped they are to bridge the nutritional gap between the fixed liquid ration and a weaned diet of solely dry feeds.
Its name sounds like something that belongs in the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. But festulolium actually is a highly useful hybrid forage grass – the result of a cross between fescue grass and ryegrass.