Short Communication: Effects of Feeding Level on Energy Concentration in Grass Silage-Based Diets Offered to Dairy Cattle

Feed conversion efficiency as a key determinant of dairy herd performance: a review

This paper focuses on dairy herd performance in the United Kingdom and southern Australia, where feed costs have been estimated to comprise between 40 and 67% of the total costs of production. The efficiency of conversion of grazed pasture, home grown forages and purchased feeds into milk has a major bearing on farm profit. Feed conversion efficiency (FCE), defined as ‘kg milk of standardised composition with respect to protein and fat concentrations produced per kg feed dry matter consumed’, is a useful measure of the performance of a farm feeding system, but is seldom used by dairy farmers. It could also be defined as ‘g protein plus fat produced per kg feed dry matter consumed’, given that farmers are often paid for these components. The value of estimating FCE on an annual or shorter-term basis is discussed in relation to accepted principles of feed utilisation and dairy cow energy requirements. The implications of feed intake, conversion of ingested nutrients into absorbed nutrients and the subsequent utilisation of these nutrients for milk production or other purposes, as well as the effects of stage of lactation on FCE, are reviewed. Measuring FCE and identifying opportunities for improvement is relatively straightforward in housed feeding systems, but is more problematic under grazing. Hence, approaches and the key assumptions in estimating FCE in grazing situations, as well as possible limitations of these estimates, are discussed. Finally, a case study examining the potential impact of improved nutritional strategies on FCE and on margin over feed costs is presented. It is concluded that, to remain profitable, dairy farmers need to have a sound knowledge of cow nutrition, along with appropriate measures of FCE to monitor the performance of their milk production system. Such indicators of the biological performance of the farming system are most useful when used in conjunction with appropriate measures of economic performance.

Associative effects between feeds when concentrate supplements are fed to grazing dairy cows: a review of likely impacts on metabolisable energy supply

Efficient conversion of grazed pasture and supplementary feeds into milk is essential to the profitability of dairy farming in southern Australia as costs of production continue to rise. The application of diet formulation approaches to the nutritional management of grazing dairy cows provides unique challenges in predicting the interactions that occur between grazed herbage and supplementary feeds. How feed intake and associative effects between feeds in lactating dairy cows grazing pasture might affect estimated metabolisable energy supplied by the diet are examined. The effects of increasing feed intake in high-producing dairy cows on decreasing the digestibility of energy, and the compensatory effects of reduced methane production, are reviewed. The factors affecting intake of grazing cows and possible effects on digestibility are considered, and include characteristics of the pasture/forage and amounts and forms of concentrates. Estimates of the potential magnitude of negative associative effects in dairy cows have been made using 2 datasets from recent experiments. Finally, the potential importance of understanding and predicting the magnitude of associative effects for efficient pasture-based dairy production is discussed. It is concluded that although associative effects between feeds in grazing dairy cows cannot be predicted with certainty, and although they involve complex interactions among a number of variables, ignoring their occurrence can lead to significant errors in both feed evaluation and ration formulation.