New nutritional recommendations for dairy cattle will help fine tune dairy rations even further, says a Manitoba Agriculture animal nutritionist.
“Overall it’s another step in the refinement process,” said Karen Dupchak of the National Research Council’s Nutrient Requirements of Dairy Cattle 7th Revised Edition.
“It’s extremely detailed.”
The book is the bible for dairy herd rations.
A group of nutritionists get together about every 10 years to review scientific information released since the last edition. The group then makes new dairy feeding recommendations.
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“It’s an extremely detailed and well researched document,” Dupchak said.
The 2001 edition has 224 pages more than the 1989 publication.
Formulating dairy rations is more complicated than formulating beef rations. While beef producers may use three or four factors to balance a ration, dairy producers must use up to 15 factors.
Dupchak said when she started working as an animal nutritionist 17 years ago, she formulated rations by hand using only crude protein, calcium, phosphorus and possibly total digestible nutrients.
Now she takes into account 15 different minerals and five different kinds of protein.
“The whole of the dairy nutrition is not even close to what it was before,” she said.
“For dairy rations, you just can’t do it without a computer any more.”
