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Thought For Food

As we come out of winter and into spring, it might be a good time to review feeding options for your herd.

By Department of Primary Industries - 31st August 2005 - Back to News

This season the margin over food costs is better than usual due to the higher opening milk price and many feed prices are not high by recent standards. In economic terms, this means cows can be supplemented to a higher degree than normal to achieve the same marginal return from extra feed.

Generally the cheapest and easiest option is to boost pasture growth with nitrogen fertiliser. Boosting pastures with urea now would provide feed at about 12 cents per kg DM or less. Remember not to apply fertiliser to saturated soils or when run-off is likely to ensure maximum profit for you and high water quality in your catchment.

Given the shortage of high quality hays in storage in south-eastern Australia, you may consider making a bit more silage this year. Use your contacts to get a feel for how the hay season is going in the regions that are supplying high quality hays. If you think it is more cost effective or good risk management to have more home-grown silage in reserve, then a nitrogen application in late-winter may be just the thing.

Feeding a high-energy supplement will help cows to peak higher by lifting the energy density of their diet. Cereal grain balances well with spring pasture as they are low protein and pasture is high protein in winter/early spring. Keep an eye on fibre levels if concentrate is fed at more than a third of the diet with lush pasture.

Feed to the break-even price if your aim is to maximise returns. Break even price will vary between farms depending on feeding costs, milk price and milk response. If the concentrate cost per kilogram is two-thirds the milk price per litre then you need to get two-thirds of a litre extra milk for the last kilogram of concentrate fed to break even.

It is not easy to measure the actual milk response from extra supplement fed on your farm. A combination of indicators can help; eg cow behaviour (are they looking for extra feed or getting lazy?), the amount of pasture left after grazing (approximately 5cm height between clumps and grazing to the edge of clumps) and changes in milk production (per cow and total in the vat).

Be wary of the trap of over-feeding to get a short-term gain in milk production that is at the expense of future production (due to a loss in pasture quality).

A good strategy is to adjust the area of pasture offered each feed to get the cows grazing to about 5cm between the clumps. Stemmy material will develop in response to undergrazing and cows will be unable to eat as much pasture. Stems that are two or more grazings old are very tough. Check it out this spring and imagine how tired a cow's jaw would get trying to graze them. The new shoots are easy to graze and result in high intakes being maintained which in turn supports sustained peak milk production.

For further information contact your DPI Dairy Extension Officer.

STOCK CONTAINMENT GRANTS
FOR EAST GIPPSLAND

Financial assistance is available to farmers in the East Gippsland Catchment Management Authority area for the establishment of stock containment areas.

Stock containment areas are a carefully selected part of a property that are set up to hold, feed and water farm stock during adverse weather periods such as drought and cold weather.

Stock containment areas should be considered part of a property management plan and once established should be maintained and be available for use during emergencies.

The benefits of stock containment areas are:

• reduce the impact of soil erosion on the whole of the property by the protection of vegetative cover.
• confine the spread of weeds from imported feed.
• reduce the time taken for animal health and husbandry tasks.
• allow pastures to regenerate.

Grants of up to $2,000 are available for materials for fencing and water reticulation.

Source: http://gippsland.com/

Published by: news@gippsland.com

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