This article was #17 of the Top 25 most well-read articles on www.progressivedairy.com in 2014. It was published in the March 27, 2014 Extra e-newsletter. If cows were cars, you’d fuel them, lube them, check the oil once in awhile and occasionally wash the windshield. Other than that, you’d wait for a red warning light to come on or watch for a needle reaching the “red zone” before servicing anything major.
This article discusses your cow’s “red zone” – what to watch for, how to “service her engine” and addressing how “hot” her fuel needs to be.
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Dag-nabbit, if I can learn dairy nutrition, so can you. You’re not a nutritionist and I’m not a nutritionist, so let’s talk nutrition but on a scale we both understand.
Your car dashboard has performance indicators or gauges that tell you how much fuel you have, what your oil level is, engine temperature and whether your battery is charging or not. Each gauge has a red zone.
Similarly, each cow has performance indicators that will tell you what’s happening with her nutrition. We just have to learn how to read the indicators and, perhaps more importantly, how to respond.
There are several comprehensive lists available that talk about how to identify poor cow performance, but for our focus today, let’s look at a very critical stage in a dairy cow’s life that will likely affect her production throughout her lifetime. Sounds ominous, right? It kind of is.
The red zone
In a 2002 study, among 5,749 herds there were 624,614 cows culled (source: 2002, Steve Stewart, DVM, Dipl.-ABVP, Univ. of Minnesota, College of Vet. Med.). Roughly 11 percent were culled within the first 20 days of a lactation cycle. The next 20 days saw another 8 percent leaving the herd, and the following 20 days resulted in another 5.5 percent leaving the herd. Thereafter, the curve flattened out at around 3-4 percent every 20 days.
In other words, those first 60 days of lactation constitute the “red zone” in your herd.
The problem with that first 60 days of lactation is associated with energy loss. About two to three weeks before calving, a cow’s energy balance is going to start dropping in relation to reduced dry matter intake (DMI). She’s going to eat less as the calf within her grows and fills some of that space previously available to the rumen. Because she’s eating less, she’s going to struggle to maintain enough energy to meet her maintenance needs (for eating, staying warm and moving about), pregnancy needs and her own growth needs.
In addition, when she calves, she’s going to lose 100 pounds in calf weight, and another 60 pounds or so in water. That’s a huge hole to fill, especially with a rumen that has shrunk in size during the non-milk producing days prior to calving. And for another six weeks after calving, as she’s trying to produce milk she’ll struggle to meet her energy balance until her system and dry matter intake catches up again.
Fueling the tank
If your car is out of gas, you have to fill it, right? If it’s out of oil, you have to put some in. It’s not rocket science. The same principle correlates to the dairy herd. Achieving dry matter intake pre-partum should reflect very specific goals. For example, intake goals for dry matter fed in a low-energy ration for close-up dry cows might look like this:
- Mature cows – greater than 30 pounds DMI
- Mixed pen – greater than 28 pounds DMI
- Springing heifers – greater than 25 pounds DMI
Anything less than this would put the cows into the red zone for energy balance. Why will you care? Because down the road (pun intended), without fuel your cow (just like your car) isn’t going to serve you well and will develop metabolic issues. Ultimately, dry matter intake relates to milk yield (even if she’s not producing milk at the moment), and that translates to the health of your pocketbook.
We know we have to refuel the tank, but how “hot” does the fuel have to be? We’re talking about the car we’re driving to work every day, not the one we take out on the rural airstrip for Friday night drag races (oh, wait – that would be illegal, pretend I didn’t say that). The point is, how can we keep dry matter levels up (the fuel) while avoiding high energy feeds?
Glad you asked. Straw and grass, chopped to proper lengths, are options, as are soy hulls. For instance, if you provide 30 percent dry matter as soy hulls for a fiber source instead of a high-energy feed, this maintains energy intake using digestible NDF fermentation while avoiding the higher starch diet.
One dry matter recipe for the transition cow might look like this (all amounts are expressed on a dry-matter basis):
11.7 lb corn silage
4.2 lb of 4th-cut alfalfa hay – good quality
11.7 lb of by-product mix (vitamins, soy hulls, heat treated soy, DCAD, minerals)
= 27.6 lb of DMI (48 lb wet)
This diet calculates out to -5.8 meq/100 gm DM DCAD, 1.32 percent potassium; 22.1 percent ADF, 33.6 percent NDF, 16.2 percent CP – and yes, it will cost another dollar or two per day, but it’s a pretty good investment.
Wrapping it up
I don’t know how many times I’ve picked up my son-in-law on the side of the road, walking along with his gas can in hand towards the nearest gas station. His gas gauge doesn’t work and even though he sets his “trip” miles so he knows when to refuel, he pushes it. He tries to run on fumes. And it doesn’t work out that well.
It doesn’t work well to run your cows on fumes, either. When the dry matter in the diet decreases, it opens up a whole lot of problems – the empty rumen leads to displaced abomasum. If energy isn’t coming from dry matter then body fat is mobilized, leading to ketosis or fatty liver and impaired liver function. Lack of dry matter also sets up a poor immune response leading to greater incidence of mastitis and metritis.
How will you know if your nutrition program is working? Some goals to shoot for might be (and just so you know – there are several goal charts published which all vary a bit, but are roughly in the same neighborhood):
Goals for healthy dairies
- Milk fever < 3%
- Retained placenta/metritis < 5-7%
- Ketosis < 3%
- Displaced abomasum < 3%
- Mastitis < 3% per month/clinical
< 15% repeat cases in affected cows
So you see – we can learn nutrition, even if we’re not nutritionists or science-y. There are several webinars on YouTube by extension dairy programs that explain all aspects of dairy nutrition, and with a bowl of popcorn in your lap it isn’t hard to watch at all. In fact, I think I’ll find a webinar for my son-in-law to watch while I’m at it. PD
Many universities with dairy programs also offer easy to follow presentations on CD Roms that you can watch at your leisure. Here's one.
Lynn Jaynes
Editor
Progressive Dairyman
