Pre calving dry cow diet

[farmer JD]

Ok thanks everyone it's interesting listening to what everyone does I'm thinking of going down the simplicity route haylage and dry cow nuts ,and mag chloride in water , does everyone else use mag chloride ? would you give them a dry cow lick block too lick at ? Or free access minerals in a tub ? Also do I need calcium sulphate in diet ? As that's going in at min

 

[dinderleat]

Ok thanks everyone it's interesting listening to what everyone does I'm thinking of going down the simplicity route haylage and dry cow nuts ,and mag chloride in water , does everyone else use mag chloride ? would you give them a dry cow lick block too lick at ? Or free access minerals in a tub ? Also do I need calcium sulphate in diet ? As that's going in at min

I think that sounds better as your trying to do to much, a mix and ad lib I don't think it works. 'Kiss' I would just do haylage and dry cow rolls and mag in the water there should be more than enough minerals in the rolls.

 

[Clay52]

We use the binder as we had big troubles with sub clinical milk fever that seems ok now ,ok what sort of haylage do I go for ? Can I use a dry haylage which is soft to get the intakes ?is hay no use ? I find haylage has better intakes,for concentrates what would you feed at min,it's a transition nut with allminerals in etc and zeolite, i top dress that once a day ,what exact diet plan do you reccomend it's for a herd of 475 and 9500 litres yield and if I just fed haylage , how would you get mag chloride and Calcium sulphate into them ? At min it goes in tmr ,also if I made my own pre mix in what way is best to get minerals into them ? I just thought the nut was more accurate , I'm interest exactly what you reccomend ,btw are your cows high yielding ?

I don't know why you want to bind calcium. That will do more harm than good. With anionic salts you want more calcium available to the cows.

Test may show calcium ok, what were the actual results. Cows are telling you otherwise. I'll go with the cows.

We were 10,000lt before we struck some bad bad silage.

Do you have an independent nutritionist who is not aligned with a feed company?

 

[Clay52]

Crikey this makes some reading. I had a little flare up of rims about Christmas and I'd put it down to stress. So all cows are dried and moved from cubicles to straw courts. Diet is silage, straw and mins in mixer. After the flare up I started being stricter on moving to calving pens at least two weeks prior calf, there they just get silage and plenty dry cow nuts and working a treat.

Yep. Pen moves will depress cow intakes for a few days to a week as they sort the pecking order out again. it's not something that you want to happen close to calving.

 

[farmer JD]

I'm using forfarmers Translac advance 2.5 kg per cow dry cow nuts it was designed to deal with sub clinical milk fevers , I'm using a totally independent nutritionist /adviser , also regarding haylage I have found some local it's dry and smells nice , do I need too worry about potassium levels in it etc ? From what you all say if I just feed ad lib haylage and a nut that will work ?

 

[farmer JD]

Coomoo do you just give your close up cows silage on its own with nuts ? What type silage do you feed, btw Clay how many cows do you have ? You block calve don't you ?

 

[Clay52]

My pre fresh diet is reasonably simple.

I move them to the pre fresh group 25-30 days before calving.

The get ad lib cereal hay or silage in rings. Must have enough rings that can all feed at once without bullying.

Depending on your definition I don't feed haylage as I don't make it. To me it's just silage that has been made too dry and a stuff up.

I feed 3.5kg of my custom pre fresh grain mix in plastic troughs that I get made up in bags. Its wheat, protein meal and minerals. It contains lime, mag ox, salt, vitamins and trace min and anionic salts.

So it's just cereal hay or silage and grain mix. The grain mix has taken some trail and error to get how I want it.

The anionic salts are balanced to acidify the blood and get urine ph around 6. Its a high calcium mix.

Things that made the difference for fresh cow health.

Getting cows onto pre fresh diet early enough.

Getting enough protein. Cereal hay at 8% wasn't enough without adding protein meal.

Getting enough anionic salts to acidify the diet enough.

Upping calcium fed to pre fresh.


Still I wouldn't blindly follow stuff I'm saying. It's hard to make specific reccomendations over a forum because a lot of this stuff needs to be fairly precise. Too much anionic salt and cows will be down everywhere.

The nutritionist at the feed mill hates my grain mix. He disagrees with most of it but his degree was done in the 80s and he hasn't bothered keeping his knowledge updated. His grain mix was useless.

 

[farmer JD]

Ok clay could u send me the spec of your grain mix in detail for the last 5 years the ph on the cows has always been 8-9 alkaline can never get it down we feed partial dcab is yours full dcab ?

 

[coomoo]

Coomoo do you just give your close up cows silage on its own with nuts ? What type silage do you feed, btw Clay how many cows do you have ? You block calve don't you ?

To suit my set up close up dries get silage out of the Dairy cows tmr before the blend, mins and molasses is added. As say working well then just have a bag of the nuts to feed on top.

 

[Headless chicken]

@farmer JD if your using zeolite then you should be able to pretty much feed them anything and get away with murder.

 

[farmer JD]

Well it does not seem too work , I'm going to try good haylage on its own today with just dry cow nut at 3 kg what's best ways of getting mag chloride into them would you go for a bag in water trough ? And leave it too dissolve or add it daily

 

[Ducati899]

we add it to water trough daily

 

[farmer JD]

Hey when u add it daily do you mix it with warm water or just put it straight out the bag in water trough ? Will it dissolve ? As tried it before and does not seem too dissolve ??

 

[lazy farmer]

blimey when did dairy farming become so complicated.

 

[farmer JD]

It certainly seems to be

 

[Ducati899]

Hey when u add it daily do you mix it with warm water or just put it straight out the bag in water trough ? Will it dissolve ? As tried it before and does not seem too dissolve ??

Chuck it straight in trough

 

[Ducati899]

blimey when did dairy farming become so complicated.

Makes what I do with my high yielders look a doddle,does worry me that people get easily led or sucked in by reps and end up massively over complicating things

 

[cowcrazy]

Ours move to a transition pen on very palatable bales adlib made with no fert, a dry cow roll at 2 kgs and 3 kgs of the milking cake.Top spec Dry cow minerals add lib in a feeder on the gate. Also get one Agrimin 24/7 bolus at drying off. No transition issues, can't remember when I last had a milk fever. Rise really quick when put on the robot screen shot is of a third calver she's now 42 days calved and at 66.8kgs.

 

[lazy farmer]

I know I don't count as I have apparently have grazing rats that give no milk. but ours get a bit of grass silage a bit of maize silage mixed together with minerals and 25kg of mag flakes. and about half their diet is big bale silage.

this yr we had no vet assistance for calving.
1.5% retained cleansing (5)
.77% milk fevers (2) though we did use some calcium boluses on some old ladies.
and 1 LDA . successfully treated

so we used 1 ton of dry cow mineral and 1.5tons og mag flakes on 270 calvings.

could it be better? of course. last yr we had no LDAs but overall it works well and is simples

 

[Cowski]

I know I don't count as I have apparently have grazing rats that give no milk. but ours get a bit of grass silage a bit of maize silage mixed together with minerals and 25kg of mag flakes. and about half their diet is big bale silage.

this yr we had no vet assistance for calving.
1.5% retained cleansing (5)
.77% milk fevers (2) though we did use some calcium boluses on some old ladies.
and 1 LDA . successfully treated

so we used 1 ton of dry cow mineral and 1.5tons og mag flakes on 270 calvings.

could it be better? of course. last yr we had no LDAs but overall it works well and is simples

Are you fussy about which grass silage you use and what Fert/slurry it gets?