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Speaking at the IFA Smart Farming conference on Tuesday, dairy production lecturer in UCD Karina Pierce had some advice for dairy farmers trying to stretch fodder reserves during this difficult time.
“Farmers need to be doing a good assessment at what fodder they have on the farm and looking at ways to stretch that,” according to Karina.
“You would be surprised with how low you can actually drop fodder within the diet, but the important thing with that is that you are doing it with advice.”
She continued, outlining that there is the possibility of dropping fodder in the diet to as low as 6kg to 8kg, but to ensure that any changes that you are making are done over a period of time and are not rapid changes.
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“The same counts for when grass comes back into the diet, that you don’t change from a no grass or very low grass diet to a high grass diet. You have to consider what is happening in the rumen and make that change gradual,” Karina said.
Options
There are a number of options when it comes to stretching fodder on the farm at the moment, according to Karina: “Looking at fodder stretchers, they are mid-day feeds that are less starch-focused and more digestible fibres. You are looking at soya hulls, beet pulp, palm kernel, maize gluten and feeds that which have higher fibre and less starch.
“A lot of farmers are feeding meal in the parlours already so you have to be careful of the amount of minerals that are going into the diet at the moment because it can make cows very loose … that type of a feed in the middle of the day (with fodder stretchers) is without minerals. A lot of those ingredients, soya hulls, pulps and so on, are generally feeds that we would commonly feed at grass. I would definitely consider them as a mix because you would also have a lot of cereals going in for in parlour feeds so you really need to be careful of overloading on cereals.
“If you have a lot of cereals going in you need to be looking at sodium bicarbonate or some kind of rumen buffer to try and neutralise those acids in there.”
Native cereals
Questions from the floor raised the possibility of using native cereals such as oats and wheat as a buffer feed. “A lot of in-parlour feeding would have high amounts of good quality in parlour rations would have quite a lot of cereals,” said Karina. “We just need to be careful of the amount of starch going into diets (if using them for buffer feeding). Oats probably offers a happy medium at the minute. It is lower risk, with fibre levels falling somewhere in between soya hulls and barley. It is a very good quality feed as well.”
Another issue raised was the reluctance of some merchants to give the ingredients in rations when farmers requested throughout the year. “If merchants are not telling you what you want to know, there is plenty of competition out there and you can move pretty fast,” according to Karina.
Haylage imports and €30 discount on fodder stretcher – Aurivo
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