At a discussion group meeting last week, I was shocked by how much concentrate feed was being fed to stale cows by the group members.

Many were on 5kg to 6kg of meal and were either grazing by day only, or had the cows fully housed and were eating silage.

The argument in favour of meal is that milk price was high and they were getting close to 80c/l for their milk, after accounting for fat and protein percent.

Relative to meal at 42c/kg fresh weight, each litre of milk is worth nearly two kilos of meal. This is a much greater differential than any time I can remember in the past.

However, that doesn’t mean that it still pays to feed more meal because what governs economic response to meal is the agronomic response to meal, that is, how much extra milk is produced from every extra kilo of meal fed.

Nobody really knows what this figure is because unless you run a controlled experiment based on the exact same cow type and exact same silage quality it’s not something that you can be 100% sure of, or even 80% or 50% sure of for that matter.

Most of the herds in that discussion group were producing between 11 litres and 13 litres of milk per cow per day.

Despite feeding more meal than normal, most were producing the same level of milk as normal which indicated to me that there was a poor response to meal.

There is still a high margin to be made over feed costs, but there would be an even greater margin to be made if they reduced back to 3kg of meal or so because I suspect the additional few kilos of meal aren’t making any difference to milk yield.