Feeding the Dairy Cattle Herd1
Feeding dairy cattle becomes more of a science each year due to an ever-increasing level of milk production. As the level of milk production rises, either the cow must eat more pounds of feed or the feed must contain more nutrients per pound. The latter seems to have prevailed in recent years. The amount of nutrients has been increased by the addition of an ever-increasing amount of grain to the ration. This seems to work so long as the amount of roughage in the ration is adequate. At some point, though, the energy content of the ration becomes too high and the amount of roughage too low, so that acidosis type conditions occur.
Footnotes
This document is DS39, one of a series of the [] Department, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida. Original publication date August 1992. Reviewed June 2003. Visit the EDIS Web Site at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu.
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