NUTRITION
The cost of low animal performance
By Dr. Jim White
The other day I got a phone call.
An excited dairy producer gleefully announced, “Guess what, I got a bunch of hay really cheap!”
I replied, “Oh? Is it good hay?”
The response was, “Well, no, it isn’t, but it was cheap. Cheap is good and the only thing better would be if it was free.”
I wasn’t sure about this. I recall a couple of free nights I spent in jail, and I think I’ll pass on free government lodging in the future.
The producer was adamant: Free would be better, and if all the hay was free, it would be fed as the sole forage.
An experiment in Wisconsin in the early 1980s (Kawas et al.) looked at what happens if one alters the amount of grain fed and hay quality on feed intake and milk production. I suggested that we assume that the hay in question had a cost of zero, and evaluate the feasibility of using said hay, given the Wisconsin data set.
The Wisconsin work used excellent pre-bud hay; good hay with some flower; some fair 50-percent-bloom hay; and mature “grinder” hay. The hay was off the same field and cutting; the scientists just cut the excellent material first, letting the others mature. They then fed milk cows the excellent, good, fair or grinder hay with 20, 37, 54 or 71 percent concentrate. They measured feed intake and milk production. For economic evaluation, I assume hay costs of $120, $105, $90 and $0 dollars a ton, using grain rations costing $180, $194, $202 and $213 per ton.
Table A shows the feed intake with the assumed costs.
Note that dry-matter intake was highest with high quality hay, and lowest with the low quality hay.
Table B shows milk production. What I have always found interesting from this experiment is that moving the percent concentrate from 20 to 71 percent, across hay quality yields 10 pounds more milk. Moving hay quality from low to excellent, across concentrate feeding levels brings nearly 24 pounds of milk. It reinforces the principles that a stronger forage base gives more milk; poor quality forage cannot be corrected by feeding more grain; and if you are faced with poor quality forage, in order to protect milk, feed grain.
Assuming milk bringing 17.5 cents, the table below (Table C) shows the income over feed cost.
Given the assumed feed prices, and the results for feed intake and milk production of the Wisconsin trial, the use of free grinder hay would yield about 80 percent of the income over feed cost than would using $120 a ton dairy hay.
After going through the exercise, the producer had another question.
“Hey, Doc, want to buy some hay? I’ll sell it cheap.”
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