The cost of growing beef for finishing, the store cattle market or for rearing dairy replacement heifers, can put huge financial pressure on your business. Whatever system employed, realising a sustainable profit once all costs are considered can be challenging. With increasing fixed costs, an ever-uncertain political landscape and opportunity cost of the assets used, it is as important as ever that operators remain as efficient as possible to generate profit
You may have noticed recurring health problems in your livestock but are not sure of the reasons why? Our Wynnstay Specialists are trained to recognise the symptoms of common mineral deficiencies and are here to help you to get to the root of the problems and to help to rectify them.
Feeding minerals to livestock, especially through the winter months, helps to correct mild to serious dietary deficiencies in grazing, forages and straights, to maximise health, fertility and performance and improve disease resistance. Getting the mineral balance right produces visible results in sheep and beef. Performance indicators include: wool growth, milk production and weight gain.
Holstein-Friesian heifers calving at 23 to 25 months of age have been shown to outperform later calving cows in terms of fertility, milk production and survival over their first 5 years of life.
With high numbers of dairy x beef calves entering the beef chain (and the current beef price not setting the world alight), it is important to consider potential finishing rations and their cost implications.
Whether our aim is to improve growth from our youngstock, improve feed conversion rates of our beef animals, or to just simply produce more milk from dairy cows, one sure way to enhance this is by increasing nutrient utilisation.
This is a free tool - we just need to learn how to use it to our advantage.
An amino acid is the building block of protein and needed for many vital processes like the synthesis of hormones, neurotransmitters, and cell structures. There are twenty that are required, with ten of those called essential, because the cow cannot produce them herself.
Transition cows are the next generation of milking cows in your herd, so every effort should be made to ensure that they have the best transition into milking and become profitable long-term herd members. Just letting one thing slip under the radar - such as diet, or space allocation - can unknowingly cause costly health problems later on.
Ruminants are fascinating creatures. What sets them apart from monogastric organisms with one simple stomach, is that they possess a huge fermentation chamber - the rumen. The rumen is full of a microbial population made up of bacteria, protozoa and fungi. This microbial population is able to break down forage and raw materials, that aren’t edible for humans into essential nutrients that can be used for body function and performance.
An annual pattern of milk composition has been well recognized on dairy farms across the world for years, with the highest milk fat and protein concentration in milk observed during the winter and lowest occurring in the summer. This trend is manipulated solely by season, and impacts housed and grazing cows similarly. So, when we get to spring, and then turnout for some, and milk butterfats start to decline- how do we know if this is real milk fat depression or not?
