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Long Lactation Surprise

Longer lactations may prove superior to the traditional 10 month lactation as performance of cows in research trials at DPI Ellinbank continues to surprise.

By Department of Primary Industries - 25th May 2006 - Back to News

Two experiments so far have provided valuable data, demonstrating that many Australian Holstein Friesian cows can lactate successfully for 19 to 21 months.

Annual production from extended lactation cows can be almost as high as 10 month lactation cows when inter-calving intervals were 15 or 18 months.

The production did drop for 21 and 24 month inter-calving intervals, but not by a lot. This loss would need to be made up through other benefits such as the need to replace less cows or rear less replacements. These cows were reasonably well fed with production at 500 kg MS/cow in the first 300 days.

To test the effect of feeding level on persistence of extended lactations, a second trial is being conducted.

Cows are fed a modest diet, a high nutrition diet or an intermediate diet. The cows on the lower intake and intermediate intake are persisting well after 20 months in milk. On the high nutrition diet, the result has been much more variable with some producing much more milk and others getting fat and drying off early.

The test of extended lactation milk increases dramatically, especially protein test, offsetting some of the drop in litres. The extra days in milk (fewer days dry per lactation) is another reason why extended lactation cows keep up with annual solids production of cows milking for 10 months.

"It is important that extended lactation milk does not have a detrimental effect on manufacturing quality," says project leader, Dr. Martin Auldist.

This is another focus of the research. Far from having detrimental effects, milk from extended lactations yielded significantly more cheese than the traditional lactation herds. Once the cheese has matured it will be graded to check on its quality.

Assessing the economics of all this is quite a challenge, given the almost infinite number of applications of extended lactations envisaged on dairy farms. Members of the project team are steadily working their way through some options to assess whether extended lactations are likely to be profitable. It seems they can be!

The project team is beginning to envisage extended lactations being superior to 10 month lactations at some time in the future, should it be possible to select cows suited to extended lactations. But let’s not get too excited, there are some important hurdles to jump yet!

"The Extended Lactation project team urges a cautious approach to extended lactations," says Greg O’Brien, project extension leader.

The systems implications need to be considered and all the feeding of the research cows has been at a constant level unlike the more variable conditions experienced on commercial farms".

The project is funded by the Department of Primary Industries, Gardiner Foundation, Dairy Australia, Dairy Herd Improvement Fund, Keenan, and The University of Melbourne.

For further information contact Martin Auldist or Greg O’Brien at DPI Ellinbank on 5624 2222.

Source: http://gippsland.com/

Published by: news@gippsland.com