dairy cattle economically by Bruce Nightingale Calves Keep them in a clean warm dry environment. They will start off drinking about 2 litres of milk morning and evening and this can be increased to 3-4 litres twice a day as the calf gets older. They should have access to clean water and as soon as possible encourage them to start eating calf early weaning pellets (which will include the required minerals). Increase the amount of pellets as the calf will eat them. Make sure the feed trough does not become dirty. Once the calf is eating a kg of pellets a day you can start decreasing the milk and continue increasing the pellets. By the time the calf is consuming 2 kg pellets a day it doesn't need any milk. Research has shown that the calf does much better if you reduce the amount of milk gradually rather than to suddenly stop feeding the milk. Feeding 2 kg pellets a day is cheaper in most cases than feeding 4-8 kg milk so the quicker you get to this stage the lower will be your costs of rearing. Once off milk, the risk of calf scours too is much less. The quicker your calf grows the sooner it can be mated and get into milk production itself. The younger you can get your cow into milk the more milk she will give you in her lifetime (but do not, in your enthusiasm, mate your heifer before she is big enough or you could end up with severe damage at calving). Milk is not an efficient food for calves that are older than 8 weeks. Weaners Continue feeding concentrates to your weaner, 2 kg a day, until she is at least a year old. She is not a true ruminant until then and does need the concentrates. The early weaning pellets can gradually be replaced with a cheaper calf rearing meal. I advise farmers with only a few animals, to buy ready mixed feeds from a reputable company who will have got the correct proportion of ingredients in their ration. When mixing your own feeds it is so easy to get things wrong and to end up wasting feed or not getting the desired growth and health results. Remember that if your young stock are getting fat you are 14 probably feeding too much energy. Protein gives you size, energy gives you body condition. You want the right balance. Feeding more than 17% protein to your young stock becomes inefficient and I recommend you do not go more than 16%. Too much protein increases early foetal death in both your first and later calvers. Throughout the growing period do not forget to deworm your youngsters regularly as well as to keep up with their vaccinations. Experience will tell you when to mate your heifer. Do not leave it too long as very mature heifers do not perform as well as their younger counterparts. If your rearing management is good you should have them calving down by 23-26 months without running into calving problems. A well grown young Holstein Friesian
Dry period management The two months before calving, the "dry period", is probably the most important time to get our management right to ensure the mountains of milk that we hope will follow. In simple terms, we give our cow two months without milking to let her get rid of last year's factory and to build a new one before calving. This is actually a complex matter that we shall not go into it here. If you have done your late lactation management correctly, and we shall touch on this later, your cow should not have to either lose or gain weight during her dry period. I like to have the backbone visible in the dry cow. She does not want to be fat at calving as this can lead to all sorts of complications such as retained afterbirth, possible infection and delayed getting back into calf. She will also have a reduced appetite. A fat cow is less efficient at producing milk than a thinner cow and will give you less milk over the year (again, I am not going into why this happens but take my word for it that it does!). During the first month of the dry period the cow does not need a lot, if any, concentrates, depending on the quality of your grazing or fodder - 2 to 3 kg a day should be plenty, less if the grazing is good. It is advisable too to change your mineral mix during this period to one specially formulated for the dry period. 3-4 weeks before calving you want to start introducing the feeds the cow will be eating once she has calved. It takes the rumen about three weeks to adjust to new feeds so don't move her from one ration to another overnight or you could be disappointed with your cow's performance. During this last month build up the daily concentrate intake to 4-5 kg, the silage, if you are using it, to about 12 kg a day and start using the fodder she will be eating later when she is milking. Her appetite will drop as she gets closer to calving, but once calved, you want her to regain an aggressive desire for food as soon as possible because it is now that you want her to eat as much as possible to meet the demands on her for milk. 15 The freshly calved cow Calving is a stressful time for your cow. Think what you can do to minimize the stress over this time (housing, space and overcrowding, comfort and cleanliness). Give her water to drink as soon as she has calved - this helps to stimulate her appetite and to get her back to the food trough. The calf should get 1-2 litres colostrum, the first milk, as soon as it is born, even while it is still wet from birth. This will help its resistance to disease as it is only in the first 24 hours or so that the antibodies in the mother's milk can pass through the stomach lining of the calf into its blood stream. The colostrum should then continue to be fed as it does still have an antibiotic effect in the calves, lessening the likelihood of scouring - do not throw this milk away just because you can't sell it for human consumption. I advise against leaving the calf with its mother. Let her lick it clean and dry, then take it away - the longer it is with her the greater her stress when you remove it! I give an anti-inflammatory injection such as Colvazone or dexamethazone to the cow, at
calving, to cut down on her pain and to help her contract. She also gets an injection of Ivermectin to deworm her, before her milk is going for human consumption. I have read that both these procedures help to lessen the time she takes to her showing her first heat. If you have a lot of cows it will pay you to keep your freshly calved cows in a separate paddock where you can increase the daily intake of feed until she is happily eating the full ration, without her having the stress of competition from the other cows. The quicker and the more you can get her to eat the sooner she will peak in her milk production and the more milk she will give you that lactation. Also take her temperature each day in the first two weeks to catch any uterine infection that may arise so that you can treat it in good time. Unless your cow is happy and healthy it is difficult to get optimum performance from her. In the first six weeks of production it is difficult to get enough energy into your cow and she is likely to lose body condition. The better you can manage this the more the milk she can give. If she gets very thin after calving, a sure sign of too little energy, she is unlikely to come back into season until her body condition improves. Again, if you have a lot of cows, it could possibly pay you to keep separate for 6-8 weeks these freshly calved animals while their feed requirements differ to the main milking herd. There is not enough time today to go into the formulation of a balanced ration for milk production. I do recommend however to anyone with less than 50 cows milking that they buy their dairy meal ready mixed from a reputable source rather than to try and mix their own feeds. There are so many places one can go wrong. Do check that the meal has a micotoxin binder included to prevent any aflatoxin poisoning to your cow. Successful dairy farmers assure us that in assessing the efficiency of milk production genetics account for somewhere between only 4 to 20% of the yield (this figure varies from speaker to speaker but is still a very small factor in determining how much milk you get). A further 25 to 30% of the milk comes from the 16 feed ingredients. The balance, anywhere between 50 and 70% ofmilkproduction comes from management. So before you rush off to spend all your money on buying an expensive cow think first on what you can do to get more milk out of the cows you already have. My brief today is on feeding the cow but one cannot divorce feeding from management - they are so inter-related. When in New Zealand I was told that if a country has to import its grain then it cannot afford to feed that grain to its livestock. Kenya imports about two thirds of its grain so no wonder our dairy feeds are expensive or of poor quality. My books tell me I should get 2.5 litres milk from 1 kg concentrates. I have found this to be very optimistic. I feel that you would be lucky to get 1.8 kg milk and are more likely to get nearer only 1 litre. In this country anything that can will go for human consumption, leaving byproducts available for animal feeds. This is what leads inevitably to the poorer conversion of concentrates into milk and the resultant lower milk yields. It becomes debatable as to just how much
concentrate we should be feeding to our cows and still remain economic. My advice is to increase the level of concentrate to your cow in measured stages. If you get enough of an increase in milk to cover the cost of this concentrate then increase it again until you no longer get an economic response. Much easier to control is the quality of the fodder we feed to our cows. Rubbish in is rubbish out. At the Dairy Cattle Research Project in Naivasha in the 1970s they were able to get 25 litres milk per cow per day on fodder only, no concentrates. So if one is getting only 10-12 kg where is one going wrong? One can lose up to 10 kg milk a day just by feeding your fodder when it is too mature. Putting this in basic terms, when the plant is very young it is all leaf, full of sugars, easily available to your cow and highly digestible. By the time that grass is three weeks old it is starting to make stems, cellulose is increasing and so too is the lignin that gives strength and support to those stems enabling them to stand up on their own. The more cellulose and lignin the plant produces the harder the microbes in the cow's rumen have to work to make nutrients available to her. These microbes are also using nutrients for themselves to survive and work, leaving even less food available to the cow for her milk production and other bodily functions. If the plant being grazed has started to make stems you are already beginning to lose potential milk yield. Grazing or cutting your grass on a rotational basis once every three weeks rather than every eight weeks could double your daily milk yield with no extra expense. Think about it! This will also apply to your napier grass - try cutting it much younger and see what happens to your milk yield. Keep the grass young by cutting or grazing more frequently and remember to also feed that grass with fertilizer or with manure after every grazing. If you can grow lucerne this has to be one of the best forages for dairy production, though there are many more - turnips, kale, fodder beet, lupins, sorghums, oats, clovers and other legumes. Conserve any surplus forage, at its optimum growth stage, for times when you do not have enough food. Whether you make hay or silage, remember that the 17 conserved food has lost some nutrients in the making and is never as good as the original green material. If you do not need to conserve then don't, as you are better off with the fresh green food. A problem we get when we move off grazing into more complex methods of feeding is acidosis of the rumen. Basically this means that the ph of the rumen gets too acid and the bacteria that live and work there get very unhappy and even die. Virtually everything your cow eats will be acidic, especially the concentrates, but her rumen has to stay at a neutral ph to function properly. In nature the cow deals with this in a cunning way. The rumen is a great big storage vat for all the food she eats. When she grazes she does not chew her food but swallows it more or less whole. Later, when she has time, she brings the food up again and chews it to a more digestible consistency and swallows it again. In the chewing process she produces saliva. Every litre of saliva has about 12 gms bicarb, an alkaline substance that when swallowed helps to neutralize the acidity of the food in the rumen. She produces about
200-250 litres of saliva a day and needs to chew the cud for approx.16 hours to do this. If she is not grazing and the food she gets is chopped or milled too finely then she won't have to chew the cud, she will not produce saliva and the rumen will very quickly become acidic. The bacteria stop working. The cow gets sick and if the situation continues she will die. More commonly, the acidosis is sub clinical, that is, not showing itself as actual sickness but definitely reducing the performance of your cow. Her milk will drop, she will lose condition and her coat will become rough. She may develop sore feet and will have trouble coming into season. So if your cow is being fed a Total Mixed Ration or is being zerograzed be careful you include at least 4kg dry matter per day in a "long chop form", at least 5-10 cms long. This will stimulate the rumen and encourage the cow to chew the cud. If the cow is grazing you are unlikely to have this problem. With high yielding cows you want to get enough food into them. With TMR the ration should be wet, 40-60% moisture, to stimulate appetite. Feeding several times a day will increase intake, but do remove uneaten food and keep the feeding area clean. Remember too that milk is over 80% water. Give your cow as much water as she will drink. It must be clean. A 10% reduction in water intake results in a 20% reduction in milk yield. At any one time at least half your cows should be either eating or chewing the cud. If they are not, you have a problem, probably sub-clinical acidosis from too little long chop in their feed. Do not let your cow get too fat during her lactation. As her milk drops she will need less food. This is very important, as discussed earlier. A fat cow is not efficient. Monitor her closely so that she goes to the dry herd with the body condition at which you would like her to calve down. - I say again, you should be able to see herback-bone. My time has run out. Love your cows. Treat them well and they will surely reward you. Bruce Nightingale's Champion Holstein Friesian at the Brookside Livestock Breeders Show 2009 pictured with the judge.