Track Cows' Feed Efficiency to Boost Profitability

By Ron Johnson, Dairy Editor
Thursday, June 5, 2008 9:32 AM CDT

Fuel efficiency is on the minds of many people these days. But dairy farmers should also be thinking about "feed efficiency."

Instead of keeping track of miles per gallon (mpg), monitoring milk per pound of feed (mppf) can help keep a dairy farm on the road to profitability.

Mike Hutjens, an animal scientist at the University of Illinois-Urbana, talked about feed efficiency at the recent Minnesota Dairy Health Conference in St. Paul, Minn. He began by explaining that feed efficiency is simply the ratio of a cow's dry matter intake (DMI) to the amount of milk she produces.

If a cow eats 50 pounds of dry matter in day and produces 50 pounds of milk, her feed efficiency is 1.0. But if she makes 100 pounds of milk from that 50 pounds of dry matter, her feed efficiency rockets to 2.0 - vastly superior to the first cow and vastly more profitable to her owner, too.

Feed efficiency also goes by the terms "milk performance efficiency" and "dairy efficiency," Hutjens pointed out. Whichever of those terms is used, it's the number of pounds of 3.5 percent fat-corrected milk (FCM) produced per pound of dry matter consumed.

Not all that many dairy producers and nutritionists pay attention to feed efficiency, which is abbreviated as "FE," Hutjens noted.

"Monitoring feed efficiency in the dairy industry has not been used as a common benchmark for monitoring profitability and evaluating dry matter intake relative to milk yield," Hutjens said. "The focus on optimizing feed efficiency reflects the fact that as cows consume more feed, digestive efficiency decreases and milk production is subject to diminishing returns. The 'traditional focus' was that as cows consume more feed to support higher milk production, the proportion of digested nutrients captured as milk is proportionally higher."

In other words, examining a cow's feed efficiency will show that she produces less milk - proportionally - for every pound of feed she eats. She will probably still produce more total milk, but the cost of feeding her to get that extra milk rises. It's the old law of diminishing returns in action.

Looking at feed efficiency is a good way to find out whether one cow or an entire group is more profitable or less profitable than others. It's also a way to find out whether one cow or a group is encountering a problem that's limiting milk production. And, measuring feed efficiency can help a farmer evaluate the benefit of a feed additive or a new management practice.

How do you know whether an animal is producing well or poorly in terms of feed efficiency? One first step is to compare her to a benchmark.

Hutjens laid out several example benchmarks. One has a single group of cows 150 to 225 days into their lactations with a feed efficiency of 1.4 to 1.6.

That means that for every pound of dry matter they eat, these cows are producing 1.4 to 1.6 pounds of milk each. Looking at it another way, it means that if these cows are eating 50 pounds of dry matter a day, they are producing 70 to 80 pounds of milk per day.

Meanwhile, heifers less than 90 days into their first lactations should have a feed efficiency of 1.5 to 1.7, Hutjens said. That translates into 75 to 85 pounds of milk per day if they are eating 50 pounds of dry matter. If they're eating less - only 40 pounds of dry matter - the feed efficiency numbers equate to 60 to 68 pounds of milk per day.

First-lactation heifers 200 or more days in milk should post a feed efficiency in the ballpark of 1.2 to 1.4, Hutjens continued. Cows less than 90 days into their second lactations should have feed efficiency numbers between 1.3 and 1.5.

Acceptable feed efficiency numbers for fresh cows less than 21 days in milk are 1.3 to 1.6. And for "problem" cows the number might drop below 1.3.

There are a couple of ways to measure feed efficiency. One is to use a computer program like FeedAd, developed by Zinpro.

"Using spreadsheets, managers could enter days in milk, body weight, milk yield, milk fat test, protein test, changes in body condition score, environmental temperature, walking distances and the lactation number, using research-based and NRC (National Research Council) 2001 equations to adjust values," Hutjens explained.

Another way to gauge feed efficiency is to collect dry matter intake numbers. Subtract the amount of uneaten feed from the amount of feed delivered to the cows. Then collect daily milk production numbers by using milk meters or cow production summaries.

It's also possible to estimate feed efficiency, Hutjens said. This is an option for farms that do not record daily feed intake or do not weigh back or measure uneaten feed, or do not have numbers on group or pen milk components.

This estimating method uses 10 factors. They include the feed weigh-back, days in milk, the milk's somatic cell count, and changes in cows' body condition. Other factors are the amount of walking a cow does, whether or not a cow suffers from rumen acidosis, the amount of protein she is eating, whether or not feed additives are used, the digestibility of the fiber in the ration, and the amount of heat stress.

Numbers from an Illinois farm show the spread in feed efficiencies that might be found. The top cow was 56 days into her lactation. She ate 57.7 pounds of dry matter a day and produced 116 pounds of milk per day. That gave her a feed efficiency of 2.1.

Another cow was 357 days into her lactation, ate 51.4 pounds of dry matter and produced 82 pounds of milk a day. Her feed efficiency stood at 1.3.

Hutjens pointed out that examining feed efficiency numbers can alert a dairy producer to problems. For example, a high feed efficiency number after calving might indicate low dry matter intake.

The Illinois animal scientist shared numbers showing approximate amounts of dry matter cows should be eating after calving. First-lactation cows should eat 31 pounds of dry matter one week after freshening, while those in their second lactation should eat 36.5 pounds.

During the second week after calving, the numbers are 35 pounds for first-lactation animals and 42.5 pounds for second-lactation cows. In week three the numbers rise to 38 and 45.5 pounds. For week four they climb to 40 and 49 pounds. And for week five after calving they nudge up to 4.15 pounds and 52.5 pounds.

Of course, boosting feed efficiency can help a farm's bottom line. After all, with higher feed efficiency a cow is producing more milk from the same amount of dry matter. Hutjens gave a few examples.

Say that a cow has a feed efficiency of 1.2 and is eating 58.3 pounds of dry matter a day. Nudge her feed efficiency to 1.4 while she's eating 50 pounds of dry matter and you save 83 cents on feed per day. Multiplied across a 100-cow herd and the savings adds up to $83 a day.

Get that same cow to a feed efficiency of 1.6 - achieved with her eating 43.8 pounds of dry matter and another 62 cents per day are saved. And if you can get feed efficiency to 1.8 - on 38.9 pounds of dry matter - that's another 48 cents in savings.

As mentioned earlier, measuring feed efficiency can reveal the impact of management changes.

"A herd of 1,800 Holsteins dropped several feed additives, replacing them with a new, commercial product," Hutjens related. "Changes included an increase in milk yield, from 76 pounds to 80 pounds per cow. A drop in dry matter intake from 53 pounds to 51.7 pounds per cow increased feed efficiency from 1.43 to 1.55."

That increase in feed efficiency lowered this farm's feed cost per hundredweight of milk from $5.44 to $4.58. On a million pounds of milk, that's a feed cost savings of $8,600.

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