ACROSS CLAMP SILAGE QUALITY VARIATION IMPACTS COW PERFORMANCE

13 August 2015Grass silage quality can vary just as much across a single clamp face as it does between different cuts and clamps, and the resulting day-to-day differences in nutrient intake could easily cause daily milk yields to vary by more than 2 litres/cow. “Data generated last winter using NIR4 Farm, a new portable NIR unit for on-farm feed quality analysis, shows that key parameters like dry matter (DM) can vary by as much as 10% from the top to the bottom of each clamp, and by as much as 8% from side to side,” states AB Vista nutritionist Dr Derek McIlmoyle. “For a cow being