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Dairy farmers as a rule have enough silage, but there are some farmers who are short. Some who don’t have enough silage are replacing with straw and meal.
Dry cows that are not calving until March, April or May are ideal candidates for feeding straw and meal.
A cow requires in the region of 1.5t of fresh silage per month
If late-calving cows are dry now they have time on their side to gain condition score during the extended dry period. So one of the first jobs to do is match the calving date to each cow.
The late calving cows are not priority if they are in good condition. So that’s job two – alongside the calving date, you need the condition score of each cow.
You can feed more meal to dry cows, but it is expensive and you are better off trying other options for sourcing forage, but be real on the cost.
If you have to drive 50km in a tractor, take up a day of your time loading and unloading, and pay good money for average-quality silage, then buying meal might be a much better option.
Remember, feeding 1kg of meal will replace 5kg to 7kg of fresh silage.
Feeding meal but not reducing silage offered is probably one sure-fire way to increase cost and not save any forage.
Stock will get fat and land the extra energy up on their backs. While it’s in the cow’s bank, you won’t get a good return and overfat cows have too many problems calving down and immediately after calving.
Right meal
Job three is to feed the right meal. Feeding the right meal is important to complement what small bit of silage you have. At an Arrabawn open day in Galway last week, two 18% crude protein rations were presented.
One was classed as a high-energy nut, with the other an 18% crude protein premium nut. As you can see from Table 1, while the high-energy nut is higher in cost per tonne (€254 v €240) it is actually slightly better value when you compare on an energy basis.
Look at the ingredients – all are good strong ingredients compared with some more byproduct-type ingredients in the other 18% nut.
Job four is to decide what class of stock to cut back on forage or feed more meal. At a minimum, ruminants need 1% of bodyweight, so a 600kg cow needs 6kg of dry matter when she is probably eating 2% of bodyweight in total.
The same holds for young animals, so 250kg weanling heifers need 1% (2.5kg) of dry matter as a minimum and the rest another 2.5kg can be made up with meal if silage is short.
The final and fifth job for most dairy farmers is to do up a monthly feed requirement.
A cow requires in the region of 1.5t of fresh silage per month, an in-calf heifer 1.3t/month and up to one-year-old requires 0.7t/month. To calculate what you have, multiply the pit length x height x width and divide by 50 to get the total fresh weight tonnes of forage.
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