by Luiz Ferraretto

Feeding for milk components — milk fat and protein — is an indispensable practice to optimize dairy profitability.

Many factors affect the cow’s ability to produce more milk and milk components. Maximizing consumption of dry matter while maintaining rumen health plays a major role in improving milk and milk fat yields.

Optimizing intake and rumen fermentation goes beyond diet formulation. Providing a good feeding environment is often as important as formulating an adequate diet. Besides, the feeding environment is known to affect how the diet is used.

Dairy farmers surveyed

Researchers surveyed dairy farms in Vermont and New York and compared their nutritional strategies and management practices with production of de novo milk fatty acids. These are the fatty acids synthesized by the mammary gland, and herds with greater concentration of these fatty acids coincided with greater milk fat yields.

Creating an environment that maximizes rest, rumination and milk component production involves paying attention to stall stocking density, feeding frequency and feed bunk space.

Have you ever come across an empty feed bunk? Cows can’t eat feed that they don’t have or can’t reach. Making sure that fresh, well-mixed feed is always available for cows is critical for their health and productivity. Providing a well-mixed diet across the feed bunk so all the cows get a balanced diet helps promote rumen health and support targeted levels of production. Delivery of fresh feed incentivizes cows to go back to the feed bunk and increase intake.

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Frequent pushups ensure that cows always have feed available, limit refusals, and minimize sorting and slug feeding. Extra feed pushups on the first two hours after feed is delivered go a long way, as most feed bunk displacements occur during this period. Smaller, more-frequent meals help to stabilize the rumen environment. Less-frequent, larger meals can put cows at risk of reaching lower rumen pH, which can cause milk fat depression.

Don’t crowd cows

Overstocking stalls beyond 115% and feed bunk space with less than 18 inches per cow may also compromise consumption while increasing competition for feed. Competition often results in slug feeding and makes cows more susceptible to milk fat depression, as less-frequent, larger meals lead to a greater amount of feed being digested in the rumen at a given time.

Monitoring starch fermentability closely while proving adequate, physically effective fiber promotes a healthy rumen environment, and it is of even greater importance under scenarios of increased stall stocking density. Particles must be coarse enough to serve as physically effective fiber and stimulate rumination, but not too coarse to induce sorting. Diets containing too many coarse particles are associated with cows spending longer periods at the feed bunk despite consuming less feed. Longer periods sorting at the feed bunk come at the expense of resting and rumination times.

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Other factors affect milk fat yield too, such as feeding diets adjusted for type of fatty acids or containing feed additives with rumen buffer effects.

Overall, to boost milk component yields, cows must experience a feeding environment that allows them to both rest and eat a well-balanced diet that provides all the required nutrients while stimulating rumination and a healthy rumen environment.

Ferraretto is ruminant nutrition specialist with the University of Wisconsin Extension.