Dairy chit chat II

kowtow wrote: »

I wish someone had told me that a couple of years ago.

To a cold eye mine are wide mouthed, fat bellied, and not too clever. They are capacious only when it comes to food and oversized bull calves, any milk they are kind enough to produce must be stored in odd corners where it is hard to get at.

Will have a word with the AI man.

Edit: but reading that article the issue that strikes me is that there is a dip in the linear response somewhere in between all grazed grass and all indoor feed. The energy 'wasted' by the grazing cow cannot be seamlessly replaced by concentrates because pasture quality suffers from her inattention.

Doesn't all that add up to a case for enhanced returns from zero grazing? Maybe not enough to justify the expense or fuel etc. But nevertheless a benefit often overlooked when ZG is subjected to analysis.

Would ZG + nuts be better than pasture and nuts - all else being equal?

Has Zero grazing been properly tested and fairly evaluated in a research scenario? With Ireland's fragmented farms it's a fairly obvious option that will have to be seriously considered by many land locked farmers in coming years.

I'm big fan of Moorepark team etc but their one blind spot is closed minds to any technology that doesn't fit their world view. Research stations are the place to test these things - a trial doesn't mean you endorse something.

I don't think zero grazing will stack up once all costs are fully included by the way!

Timmaay wrote: »

For the 100 odd cow single labour unit farmer, there is utterly no way in hell he'll have time to be pricking about with a ZG during the spring or any other busy times of the year, you would need to factor in a contractor doing all of the work.

No need to be pricking around with a z grazer Tim just let your local contractor do it ,works for me at stages during spring and back end ,it's an option certainly not to be just a flat no guys like Brennan and jack kennedy in the journal are so general and black and white in the crap they spout lads need to step back .way too many are taking this as gospel when there are real viable alternatives to doing things

Buford T. Justice V wrote: »

At the risk of starting WWIII, I'll add a link from Dr. John Roche on supplements on grass.

http://i.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/advice/92338064/john-roche-pasture-is-an-excellent-feed-unless-you-mismanage-it

Decades of research in New Zealand confirm that cows consuming the same amount of metabolisable energy from pasture, or pasture plus a supplement (eg sugars, grains or silages) produce the same amount of milksolids

The real issue in an Irish case anyway is making sure that cows are actually eating the same amount of energy as supplemented ones. There is work that has been done showing as grass DM declines so too does intake, and this was conducted inside so any effects of wind/rain will be additional. Unless the herd that's supplementing is going to cut their rates on days when cows are under pressure they'll maintain higher energy intakes and higher yield.
100mj of me from grass won't be equal to 100 from meal, in that system there was a conversion factor to convert metabolisable to net energy. Because meal will have a higher metabolisability it is converted more efficiently, there's only a few percentage points of a difference, but sure with a bit of statistics, small numbers or not measuring everything you can make the numbers say whatever you want to back up a point.

However, more recent research has highlighted that this depends on the type of protein and is largely untrue for the type of protein in pasture. There isn't a large cost to excreting surplus protein that is degraded in the rumen and this is the main type of protein in pasture.

Have never seen anything to suggest that this is the case, there is certain steps that take place in the liver to convert ammonia to urea that require energy. It doesn't matter where the protein comes from it passes through the same process. This can be the energy equivalent of over 1kg of meal a day.

The only information available for grazing dairy cows suggests that fertility improves with increasing blood and milk urea nitrogen (Roche et al., 2011) . This evidence comes both from experiments and from testing bulk milk from real farms.

I would think this is coming from cows with high milk ureas are likely to be grazing young high quality grass thus it isn't really right to come to that conclusion that high milk urea doesn't impact fertility as energy levels etc are going to be interfering with the negative effects of high urea, correlation does'nt prove a cause.

The main factor that influences how much pasture a cow refuses when she eats a supplement is her pasture intake before she was offered the supplement (Stockdale, 2000) ; the more pasture a cow is eating, the more pasture she will waste when she is fed a supplementary feed. Because of this, we recommend that cows should not be supplemented unless the post-grazing residual is less than 3.5 cm (7 clicks on the rising plate meter)

Milk yield is also very important on regulating substitution so using their low yielding cows is going to backup their point compared to a cow that was fed to drive on yields. Teagasc have done this before too where they apply the substitution rates measured for fairly low yielders right across the board, if they were familiar with the finer details of the french feeding system they would see that this is one of the main variables...

Agreed with all above.

My point on ZG was not the wider one - whether it is a good thing or not - like most I suspect it has a place and I suspect it takes a lot more time and cash than one might imagine. I have a feeling that to really get the best of it you'd need to be indoors a lot and possibly pairing it with robots. In a sense that is a different discussion.

My point was whether the published analysis of Zero Grazing has fallen short by not addressing the potential optimisation of grass - the demand / substitution challenge which is identified in the article above. I know some advocates of ZG have claimed vast improvements in utilisation and/or profits and I wonder if those claims might have been dismissed too readily by the Journal and others.

I'm not so much concerned about zero grazing as I am about rigorous and unbiased analysis!

It seems to me that many aspects of Irish dairying suffer from these 'inflection points' that we are only really beginning to feel our way around. The crossover from grazed grass to meal is one of them, as is the herd that is 30% bigger than the one man / one inherited farm baseline, but not yet (or perhaps ever) big enough to justify two or three full time labour units. To my mind these are danger areas where it's possible to lose money even while doing everything right on the road to an expanded / efficient farm.

jaymla627 wrote:

Visited a robot/zg fully housed unit last week when buying a bull, can't say I was impressed a lot of the cows where in pretty poor shape, farmer in questioned reckoned grass was worth 20 litres and the 4.5 kgs of ration going in supported the 28 litres he was doing, something about cows housed full-time just dosent sit right with us they always look very raggy and this unit was top class regards cow comfort

I'd be uncomfortable with full housing too, even with ZG, although I'd be relaxed about extended housing at the shoulders. I've always assumed that ZG would be the perfect way to maintain yields as well as milk flavour while buffering but it's a big enough price to pay alright.

Did you get the impression his cows would have been doing 28 litres with that ration if they'd walked in from the field?

jaymla627 wrote: »

Id reckon so, was a funny herd half the cows where fleck crosses and then the remainder hols, the hols where probably doing 30 plus but milking of their backs and the flecks where mud-fat, 6-8 kgs needed to be going into the hols ladies minimum to support production and help with bcs

You would have thought decent FTY would be the easiest thing to sort with a robot?

Dwag wrote: »

Cows indoors because of drought with a fortnight.
Bf was at 4.4 and pr at 3.3.
Switched to indoors at night and bf dropped to 3.6...not tooooo bad.
Then last test was 3.3pr and 3.2bf.

Feed 18kgdm forage maize (33%dm 37% starch 10.1%pr)
6kg maize crimp.
5kg soya crimp.
600g straw.
Herd average 37.1 litres.
High yielders get an extra 3kg maize crimp.
42% of the herd over 210 dim.
Milk urea 28.

Nutritionist here this morning and scratching his head...maybe Tim is correct.

Tim was correct. There was a problem in the laboratory. I got a sample tested and it was 4.45bf, so I got onto them and they said that it was an admin mistake.

So much for independent lab analysis...

Buford T. Justice V wrote: »

Typical of that generation, no dedication...

:pac:

Ah no chief.

I went to the Champs Élysée yesterday expecting to see a phalanx of goose stepping, jackbooted Germans triumphantly marching along, with Frau Merkel and M.Junker gracefully accepting the keys to the palace...not so.
Weird to see a nation capitulate so easily and not a shot fired...

What about zg being used where cows are walking1km to milking shed? Would it make sense if you take labour in walking them in, lameness, milk loss.

Irish weather has a huge impact on grazing. How many days in the year do we have soaked wet grass compared to Nz?

Dwag wrote: »

Those days are gone.
Drought is the new buzzword...shortly be seeing large scale pivot irrigation systems being installed across Irish dairy farms.


Interestingly do the Kiwis ever show the investment cost of irrigation systems?

Irrigation channels being dug as we speak!

No idea on that but in Western Australia the majority of dairy guys have ceased irrigating grazing crops. Maize is the only thing irrigated. And I reckon it's going to stop in Victoria too. Irrigation is only used to extend the shoulders of grazing. Nothing like staring out at hectares of burnt grass and not enough feed!

einn32 wrote: »

Irrigation channels being dug as we speak!

No idea on that but in Western Australia the majority of dairy guys have ceased irrigating grazing crops. Maize is the only thing irrigated. And I reckon it's going to stop in Victoria too. Irrigation is only used to extend the shoulders of grazing. Nothing like staring out at hectares of burnt grass and not enough feed!

The cost of water is more the problem then the cost of running irrigation systems, superannuation funds bought up a lot of the water rights and increased prices by 100's of %...

CowMeister wrote: »

Lads that AI once a day. What way do ye work it?. If a cow is seen bulling in the morning do ye AI straight away or wait till the following morning. I'm coming from TAD am/pm way and interested in yer thoughts on OAD

What ever is bulling since the technician was here the previous morning and what ever has been bulling that night and morning

CowMeister wrote: »

Lads that AI once a day. What way do ye work it?. If a cow is seen bulling in the morning do ye AI straight away or wait till the following morning. I'm coming from TAD am/pm way and interested in yer thoughts on OAD

GrasstoMilk wrote: »

What ever is bulling since the technician was here the previous morning and what ever has been bulling that night and morning

Same as here, anything that is on/has been on since the previous call. Tech often doesn't arrive until after 3, not ideal but has always been this way. Bulls in about a weeks time