Improved diet formulation and feeding systems for dairy cows

Diet formulation systems for GB dairy cows are based on energy and protein. The Feed into Milk (FiM) model predicts the supply of energy and protein to meet the requirement of dairy cows. There is a need to explore factors affecting feed efficiency, environmental impact, animal health and product quality. Strategies could include getting more milk from the same feed intake, the same milk from lower feed intake, or better quality milk at the same level of gross feed efficiency. The implication of each strategy for GHG emissions and animal health will be clarified through research. Diet formulation tends to use instantaneous views of cow requirements to produce diets for a given level of milk yield at a certain stage of lactation. A longer-term view will be taken by considering the whole lactation, in particular, the need to control body condition score at calving in order to minimise the detrimental effects of negative energy balance, optimise feed efficiency and GHG emissions whilst improving or maintaining animal health and profitability.

Aims & Objectives
To deliver improved diet formulation and feeding systems for dairy cows by:

• Improving feed conversion efficiency and reducing losses of nutrients to the environment by integrating measures of feed conversion efficiency, environmental impact, fertility and animal health into a least-cost diet formulation model.
• Improving the nutrition and health of transition cows by developing, testing and refining feeding systems using existing research databases, on-farm data, on-going research, literature and focused experiments.
• To produce a suite of spreadsheets, tables and advisory leaflets, covering aspects of diet formulation, for different stages of lactation across a range of dairy systems.