First Milk Home

Willie Thomson, Technical Director of feed supplier Harbro looks at the current feed situation and passes on some thoughts when it comes to your winter feeding strategy. What a period of change in dairying! If trying to keep up with the incredible changes in milk pricing wasn’t hard enough, trying to keep tabs on the feed and raw material market has proved even more challenging. You can see from the graph just how much the market has shifted since last year.

Poor Harvests

The reasons for the increases are well documented; poor harvests in many countries coupled with the massive increase in demand created by both biofuels and changing consumption patterns in the Far East.

The market may well have over reacted, but the underlying fundamentals dictate that we are looking at a period where commodity prices will remain high, certainly in the short to medium term.

Profitability

What will this mean for dairy profitability? The average concentrate feeding rate for cows is approximately 0.35kg/l and, if we assume a £45/t increase in feed price, this will put costs up by just over 1.5p/l.

Feeding strategy for Winter 2007/2008

With the whole feed market up, bargains are rare and the major decision affecting feed cost will be the feed rate used. Reducing feed rate and relying more on forage will be a temptation but generally, most producers will find that the strong milk price will allow them to avoid drastic change.

Early Lactation

One key area of feeding where producers may be able to reduce the overall feed input is by targeting more feed towards early lactation – this can give higher peak yields, a more efficient cow and, when combined with a reduced feed strategy in late lactation, a reduction in overall concentrate/litre.

Feeding this year will be a major challenge: silage analyses are variable with many low energy, wet samples, cow condition is reported to be lower as a result of a poorer grazing season and many feeds and forages are contaminated with damaging mycotoxins.

This year’s feeding strategy needs careful review taking into account forage quality, stocks and target cow performance.

First Milk Direct and Harbro can assist you in ration planning and forage analysis.