Feed & Nutrition

The ideal pre-fresh period is 21 days. Too much corn silage makes heifers fat. Excess dietary salt causes udder edema. The younger the age at first calving, the better.

These are just a few things we’ve been told about pre-fresh heifers, but are they facts or fallacies?

Fiber is a key component of the ruminant diet and can frequently account for over 50 percent dry matter intake through the inclusion of silage, hay and fibrous co-products.

Direct-fed microbials (DFMs) are defined as products that contain live (viable), naturally occurring micro-organisms such as bacteria and yeast. The term “probiotic” is commonly used to describe DFMs.

Often when nutritionists think of fatty acid nutrition, our minds turn to fat supplements. However, the area is much broader than dairy cattle diet fat supplements and should be recognized as such.

A successful breeding program starts with good, early lactation nutritional management. Getting cows off to the best possible start in early lactation is critical on every dairy farm.

In box-type automated milking systems, rest feed is feed programmed for the cow to receive at the robot but not consumed for various reasons.