FROM THE FARM REPORT: IMPLEMENTING A FEED PROGRAM EVALUATION

A group of us from Miner Institute recently attended the Cornell Nutrition Conference in Syracuse. It had a great lineup of speakers this year and the program was very good. One of the speakers was Dr. Barry Bradford from Michigan State University. He has a dual appointment for research and extension and was able to share some of his recent work in collaboration with Martin Carrasquillo Mangual on evaluating feeding programs on Michigan dairy farms. Together with their MSU Extension team they created a list of 104 feeding program characteristics that could be evaluated on commercial farms by two experts.

The aim was to determine opportunities for optimal use of resources, including feed, equipment, time, and human resources, while supporting herd productivity. With feed cost comprising over 50% of milk production cost, the feed program of each farm is central to its profitability. Therefore, they sought to be able to provide actionable recommendations to the farms to enhance efficiency, safety, and productivity.

To date the MSU extension team have evaluated 18 farms ranging in size from 180 to 3,500 cows and a range of management styles and facility designs. The assessment tool has 104 management factors that were all categorized into broader categories of safety, mixing, hygiene, shrink, efficiency, and production. The assessment tool itself can be downloaded (https://www.canr.msu.edu/dairymetabolismgroup/Decision-Tools/). Each factor is evaluated on a 1 to 5 scale with 5 being the gold standard practice and a score of 1 representing a missing practice or one highly divergent from best practice. If a factor is not relevant to a farm it can be excluded. Some takeaways from the evaluations they have done so far for each category are as follows:

Safety: Safety was emphasized to value and safeguard people on the farm. Key areas that farms could improve include mitigating risk of silage face collapses, maintenance of PTO covers, appropriate lighting in the feed center, and use of high-visibility clothing. One farm even indicated their insurance made high visibility clothing a requirement for coverage.

Mixing: With this part of the assessment included particle size evaluation across the feed bunk, feeding equipment fit for task and mixer maintenance. Furthermore, they used feed management software to look at ingredient loading accuracy. In general, they noted very accurate and consistent additions with less than 2% deviations. However, one example came up where the feeder had a 33% deviation for soybean meal which cost the farm over $7,000 for a single month! Certainly, something to keep track of by monitoring this routinely.

Hygiene: This category tried to capture feed lost from pests or by spoiling and having to be discarded. The problems that were most noted included feed exposure to the elements, excessive bird populations, and suboptimal silage face management.

Production: For this category the main factors were related to the impact something might have on the cows’ ability to maintain a high level of production. It included assessment of the feedbunk. One way in which this was evaluated was from video over 4 to 5 days in which they looked at feed delivery (timing and distribution), push-ups and redistribution, cow lock-up, feed availability throughout the day, and feed cleanout. One point of note is that farms were often good about pushing up feed 5 to 6 hours after first feedout and the amount of feed at the bunk was good. However, with the largest meal after first feeding, within two hours the feed was often unreachable and would have benefited from a feed push up earlier. Furthermore, a surprising number of farms ran out of feed repeatedly 4 to 6 hours prior to feeding. Using either cameras or overnight workers to monitor this could help improve feed access while still managing for target refusals. Often when targeting 3% refusals the feed was often unreachable and ignored by cows for several hours.

Shrink: This category included areas related to feed loss from spoilage, spillage, or mismanagement. They attributed up to 10% of feed costs lost as shrink and noted that if feed costs account for 55% of total production costs, a shrink of 10% would account for 5.5% of the cost of milk production, which quickly eats into your margin. Some shrink is inevitable but emphasizing proper silage storage and handling, as well as investments into facilities and commodity handling equipment could help cut shrink. Finding ways to minimize wind and precipitation exposure can go a long way to protect the costly premix and grains incorporated into diets on farm.

Efficiency: The main emphasis for this category included appropriately scaling equipment for pen sizes, efficient routing, and use of “cheater piles” that help save time as loads are being mixed and feed locations may be spread out.

Overall, this is not a new concept, and many companies have evaluated this on farms routinely. However, I think it is a great reminder to continually evaluate yourself and look for your blind spots that might be eating away at your margins and feeding program. The evaluation tool is available, so I encourage you to look it over and use it on your farm or farms you are working with.

— Sarah Morrison

morrison@whminer.com