Most dairy producers always look for ways to reduce the livestock feed costs.
Some people have taken advantage that three-month-old replacement dairy heifers have a fully developed rumen and can truly digest lower quality/cost forages.
There is nothing wrong in feeding this way, but these forages must be well balanced with other more nutritious feedstuffs that together meet animals’ essential nutrient requirements. Plus, we need to avoid the common pitfalls, such as digestive upsets, which are associated with some diets — again, by providing the right overall nutrition.
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Regardless, I always keep in mind that good dry matter intake (DMI) comes first in setting up any well-balanced heifer replacement feeding program. It’s synonymous with essential energy/protein/mineral/vitamin intake that drives growth, optimum body condition and good health by the time they are ready to be put on the milk-line.
It has been my experience that many promising replacements don’t make their full-performance potentials and are culled, because their dry matter intakes were ignored or challenged.
Such good DMI is controlled by the natural forces of heifers consuming these forage-based diets and its ensuing fermentation in the rumen. At the same time, the rate of feed passage through a heifer’s digestive systems comes into play in a big way, which not only controls good dry matter intake, but almost every digestive process afterward, including cud-chewing.
That’s especially so when we feed them high-fibre, lower-quality diets, such as proposed by South Dakota State University a few years ago.
The SDSU researchers fed high-fibre shredded corn stalks supplemented with wet distillers grains to help meet the energy and protein requirements of a group of growing dairy heifers. The SDSU results showed heifer gains — although lower than conventional diets formulated with corn silage, haylage and alfalfa — were quite acceptable. A significant cost saving of 40 per cent was recorded because corn stalks and wet corn distillers grains were purchased at much lower cost than other routine feedstuffs.
Along the same dietary lines to save on feed costs I routinely balance a bred-heifer replacement diet (15–22 months) for a 150-lactating dairy. This diet is limited by the quantity of good-quality forages such as alfalfa hay and drought-stricken barley silage. Yet this farmer has a decent supply of low-quality barley straw and slough hay. So his current diet is what you see in the table here:
In review of this diet, I believe we are barely meeting these bred heifers’ dietary energy (64 per cent total digestible nutrients and protein (14 per cent) needs for 1.8 pounds gain per day. Plus, this total mixed ration is simply too dry and a couple of kilos of added water would improve its density. The funny thing is that DMI by these replacement heifers during the last few months has been acceptable (2.8 to three per cent of body weight).
Nevertheless, during our last cold spell of –30 C in January, a few heifers showed signs of anorexia, inadequate manure output and abdominal distention — all encompassing signs of impaction.
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photo:
Wally Wilhelm, courtesy ARS/USDA
Any threat of dietary impaction is serious and that is why I am vigilant of it when feeding low-quality forages to replacement dairy heifers. It can be fatal, and stems from:
- High forage-fibre content: the rate of digestion is slow since it takes a long time to ferment and break down lots of cellulose/hemicellulose fibre.
- Inadequate protein: heifer diets often do not supply enough dietary protein-metabolites to the forage-digesting rumen bacteria. It leads to decreases in the overall rate of forage-fibre digestion and feed passage, including DMI.
- Inadequate water: in feed digestion, water is a primary lubricant. For example, a particular dry heifer diet during an impaction incident is possibly more viscous, which impedes its movement throughout the rumen-gastrointestinal tract.
It is my understanding that this producer drenched each impacted dairy heifer with a gallon of mineral oil. Within a couple of days, animals were up to the water trough and feed-bunk. It was a lesson for me, namely that it is important to meet all essential nutrient requirements for growing and healthy dairy heifers. It can be done utilizing a cost-effective lower-quality forage as part of their whole diet, yet there should be a wide margin of adequate nutrition built into each diet.
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