Extracted from Dales Diary, Scotmin News Spring 2010 (by Neil Dale)

Talk at spring often centres around the value of grass. Most of you will know my thoughts but the fact is that grazing alone will not support high yielding cows. The level of buffer feeding will however depend on the quality of grazing,target milk yield and stage of lactation.  Combinations of various feeds grazing/silage/draff/wholecrop/maize and concentrates will all prove cost effective.

Work done at Hurley showed that allowing cows access to a mixture of brewers grains and silage over night works very well.  Cows on the grass silage and Brewers Grains maintained better body condition and fertility also.

By the way make sure minerals are also added to the buffer feed .I would normally suggest a high mag mineral initially but if this is not practical ensure Megamag 50 tubs are made available. Grass is a poor supplier of minerals and this should not be ignored.

The timing in the day when buffer feed is offered is also critical if it is to work for early lactation cows in particular. They should have access to buffer and buffer only for 2-4 hours before afternoon milking. The amount needs to be adjusted so that it is more or less cleaned up 20-30 minutes before milking. Grass consumption is higher after evening milking because the leaves have a higher sugar content and dry matter is higher at this time of day. Feeding the buffer before afternoon milking allows the cows to take advantage of this better quality grass. Concentrates can also be fed as part of the buffer. Allow 4-8kg of drymatter from buffer.

It has been shown that feeding at or after milking with buffer results in uneven and lower total forage intakes and consequent wastage of buffer.

The main constraint on cows at grass is an effective energy shortage due mainly to relatively lower total intakes of forage from grazing. This results in,
•    Condition loss
•    Poor fertility
•    Poor milk quality
•    Shorter lactations
•    General health problems

So the message is clear,if you have high yielding cows at grass they will require buffer feeding but timing of this feeding is critical. If this is not practical consider keeping high yielders in at night or indeed full time. This allows the lows to become the grazing unit with much more efficient utilisation of grass as a result.

Don’t forget pre bulling heifers who will at least need some trace element supplementation to ensure bulling and conception are maintained.