Changing your feeding strategy
How to develop the right feeding strategy?
Less rest feed, a more balanced meal for your cows, or less labour hours... there could be several reasons why you want to implement or optimize your feeding strategy. And yet, you might feel overwhelmed about where to start. Changing your feeding strategy can be a significant step, especially when you want to start feeding according to a totally new strategy. No matter your story, we are happy to get you started and share some tips.
Five steps to the right feeding strategy
1. Define your vision: where to start?
Start by defining your overall farm and personal goals. What do you want to achieve, and within what timeframe? Next, outline your farm management goals. Think about where you want to improve processes or increase efficiency for example, by automating feeding tasks. Finally, clarify your feeding goals. Do you want to improve feed quality or use a wider mix of ingredients? A clear vision helps you align your management approach with the needs of your animals.
2. Understand your farm capabilities
With a feeding strategy that suits the goals of dairy farming, but also the environment, you can run your farm as efficiently as possible. It is a given that you are dependent on the location of your dairy farm. What soil do you own? Can you graze? What rates are generally asked locally to buy feed? All elements to consider when defining your feeding strategy.
3. Calculate your home-grown and purchase feed demand
Once your farm, feeding and goals are set, you can have a look at your available feed resources. The key number to look at is income over feed costs. To get your feed balance, you need to subtract feed costs from your revenues milk yields. Up next is deciding whether you want to influence the income over feed costs on short term with the feed you already have on farm in your inventory, or what you need to purchase. Alternatively, you can change your long-term strategy.
4. Focus on the feed costs and quality
Up next is to define what you can influence yourself. You do not have the power to influence the milk price, but what you can influence are feed costs and feed quality, which in turn affect the milk the cows produce. It’s about finding the right balance between feed quality, cow performance and costs. The six feed principles are at the base of every feeding strategy and are of interest when improving the feed quality. You can read more about the six feeding principles, click here >
5. Contact your local Lely Center
Once you have outlined your vision in combination with the available feed resources based on your farm’s location, you can have a look at suitable automation solutions. Technical innovations can contribute to a better feeding strategy and cost control. Think of an automatic feeding system like the Lely Vector to get the right ration to different animal groups.
Lely Center specialists are happy to think along with you, so you can make a choice for automation solutions that best suit your farm goals. Click here to find your local Lely Center. The choice of feeding system you use on your dairy farm determines for example, whether you have a lot of rest feed, and whether the intake of feed is optimal for your cows. Read more about automatic feeding and feed pushing for an improved farm performance.
