Guests: Dr. Chris Reynolds, University of Reading and Dr. Mark Hanigan, Virginia Tech On this episode of the Real Science Exchange we focus on ways to improve protein utilization in dairy cows to reduce our overall environmental footprint. Dr. Chris Reynolds said that moving towards precision feeding and feeding animals closer to dietary requirements would reduce surplus nitrogen. (8:19) It was mentioned by Dr. Mark Hanigan that a small, internal survey was taken in which nutritionists said they were focusing on nitrogen efficiency, which shows the industry is evolving. (18:41)
On this episode of the Real Science Exchange we focus on ways to improve protein utilization in dairy cows to reduce our overall environmental footprint.
Dr. Chris Reynolds said that moving towards precision feeding and feeding animals closer to dietary requirements would reduce surplus nitrogen. (8:19)
It was mentioned by Dr. Mark Hanigan that a small, internal survey was taken in which nutritionists said they were focusing on nitrogen efficiency, which shows the industry is evolving. (18:41)
Furthermore, Dr. Chris Reynolds referenced the variation in forage composition and that cows respond to the longer term average, not the day-to-day variation. (39:05)
The conversation continued as Dr. Mark Hanigan said a practical way to decrease nitrogen is to decrease salt in the diet. You can always figure a benchmark for your herd once you figure out what the milk-nitrogen rate is for that diet. Then you can start pulling some protein out. If you don’t lose production or dry matter intake, then you have a new benchmark. (51:17)
To conclude, Dr. Chris Reynolds talked about the possibility of genetic testing cows for nitrogen efficiency. If we can phenotype enough cows we can look for a genetic correlation and find out if it's an inheritable trait. (57:43)
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Scott Sorrell (00:00:07):
Good evening everyone. And welcome to the real science exchange. The podcast we're leading scientists and interest rate professionals, beat over a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal nutrition. The real science exchange is brought to you by Alchem animal nutrition and health. Visit balchem.com to see how our line of encapsulated nutrients, colon chloride, and chelated minerals can improve your bottom line. Hi, I'm Scott SRE. One of your hosts here tonight at the real science exchange production ad culture continues to be touted as one of the villains in climate change. As an industry, it's impaired that we continue to proactively look for ways to reduce our overall environmental impact on the planet. Tonight's discussion focuses on ways to improve protein utilization in dairy cows to rev reduce our overall environmental footprint. Back in October 2021, Dr. Chris Reynolds from the University of Redding joined us on the real science lecture series is to share new research on this very topic. Chris, welcome to the exchange, and thank you for joining us tonight from the UK.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:01:09):
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be
Scott Sorrell (00:01:10):
Here. Can you tell us how a young man from Tennessee found his way to the UK?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:01:17):
Yeah, it's a, there's a bit of a story. Heard it, mark heard it before. But yeah, I was working, I started my career after doing my Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville working at the Ru nutrition laboratory of the U S D an R S in, in Beville, Maryland. There was a room, actually a room at nutrition laboratory back then we had about 16 scientists in the lab. And I'd worked there for about nine years and an opportunity came up to move to the UK and work at the University of Redding that was in 1993. They just established a, a, a center for dairy research and established a new metabolism facility. It was a great opportunity. You know, people asked me why in the world would you leave a really good position at Beltsville to go work in the UK and work in a position where you had to secure external funding to do your research. And I'd tell 'em it was, it was just such a great opportunity to work with people like David beaver and John and, and work with the new facilities they just established. But the real reason was in, in, through previous collaborations in the UK, I I met my wife I married an English woman and it was easier to move me to England than to move her horse to America. Yep.
Scott Sorrell (00:02:40):
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:02:53):
Well, I've known Mark for a long time, and I'm pleased that Mark agreed to join, join us tonight. And I, oh, geez, mark. We first met, I guess, at about nine, about the same year I moved to yeah. To, to Redding or, or maybe the year after
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:03:08):
I was, at the meetings just before you went. So yeah,
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:03:11):
So, well, yeah, in, in Maryland, the 93 meetings and mark had, was moving, I guess when we met from, from Davis to a position with Purina and Purina was very much involved in one of the sponsors of, of a, a large collaborative project on the regulation of milk, protein synthesis that, that we were working on. And so I got to know, know mark through what we call the snowball project at the time. The project that we were on at the start was, was renewed. It was a, I think it was a four-year project or five-year project and renewed for another four years. And so mark and I collaborated on that project and then we've continued to collaborate ever since. And of course, mark has now in Virginia in a distinguished professorship.
Scott Sorrell (00:04:02):
Yeah. Well, we thank you for inviting mark. You're no stranger to the real science exchange table. So welcome back. This, this has gotta be becoming one of your favorite bars, I would think
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:04:22):
My, I'll start with my favorite one is that Chris just got married when he moved over. Okay. And, and so he now has children as do I, and you know, like any good science enterprise, I guess you, you tend to have a few things that get left behind bottom drawers, John, I would refer to it. And so you, you always try to pull those out, you know, when you get a chance and get those done. And it seems like only a couple of years have gone by, but I started visiting each summer thinking, well, maybe we can resurrect, you know, these four or five papers. We still have left from that, that project and, you know, and get him did. And so I, after about three summers of spending, you know, at Chris's house and, you know, eating dinner with his kids and stuff
Scott Sorrell (00:05:25):
Yeah. That's
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:05:26):
Funny. Just like a fine wine mark. Yeah.
Scott Sorrell (00:05:31):
All, yeah. We're also pleased to welcome back Dr. Clay Zimmerman back in the cohost seat tonight. So welcome back clay. Chris, to get us started, you stated in the webinar that 75% of dietary nitrogen is excreted, which sounds inefficient. But you also said that it contributes to greenhouse gases in the form of nitrous oxide. Can you talk a little bit about that and then talk a little bit about maybe some of the top-line tools that producers have in their toolbox to help mitigate these issues?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:06:06):
Hmm. Okay. Thank you, yeah. I mean that 75% that's a figure I quoted was based on a summary of a large database of nitrogen balance measurements in cows, where, where researchers had measured proprotein intake of cows, and then excretion of nitrogen in the feces of the urine and the milk. So only about 25% of the nitrogen was, was excreted as milk. And so, and the red rest was a small amount retained in the body, the rest excreted in feces and urine. And that, that excretion of nitrogen can have several effects. Then, the lay nitrogen can contribute to nitrous oxide emissions as you refer to. Although in terms of, I guess, ruminate production agriculture, a lot of the nitrous oxide emissions are associated with fertilizer use for, for, for forage production and also nitrogen that comes from excretion during grazing.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:07:14):
So grazing animals, certainly that's the case here in the UK. A lot of our not rou oxide inventory is, is fertilizer use and then urine and, and, and fecal nitrogen deposition during grazing or manure spreading. So, so the other ones are, are ammonia, of course, which isn't a greenhouse gas per se, but, but it's a concern in terms of environmental impact and then nitrogen leaching as nitrate into groundwater. And over here in the UK, we, we have historically had areas that were considered nitrate VO vulnerable zones, where we had very strict regulations about spreading of slurry or manure, and when we could do it and those, those nitrate vulnerable zones have been increased quite dramatically in recent years. And interestingly, we, you know, we're now seeing more and more regulations around phosphorus as well. And, and so in terms of toolboxes in, in terms of trying to reduce that, that excretion it's about improving efficiency.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:08:19):
And I think what we talked about in the webinar was around really moving towards precision feeding. I think feeding animals closer to requirements, historically we've overfed protein, partly through using safety factors. But if we can feed closer to requirements, if we can use some of the tools we have for balancing for amino acids, you know, thinking about some of them, some of the work that's mark been doing has, and his colleagues have been doing on, on the new nutrient requirement system for the states. Then we can reduce that surplus nitrogen that's being fed to animals as, a pa protein that, that doesn't contribute to supplying essential amino acids to the animal.
Scott Sorrell (00:09:04):
Hmm. You know, as a benchmark do we, do we have a good feel today for what most producers are doing? And so, do we know how much improvement can be made if we do adopt some precision feeding techniques?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:09:19):
Well, that's a really good question. And I think we, yeah, I, I don't know what the situation is in the states. But certainly, you can go to specific farms. If you work with a nutritional advisor for a specific farm and you can look at, or records, you can get, you can get a, a good handle, but in terms of national nationally, what's happening, it can be, it be, can be quite difficult to get good data on. What's being fed on farms. You know, a lot of it's considered proprietary information. If you, if you're working with a feed company, they might how to share their, their, their information. And we've tried in the past, to get information just about the sort of state of the industry in some of these respects. And, and it can, it's surprisingly difficult to do although, although there, there are estimates that are made just based on, on surveys that are done of, of specific farm farming farms, sorry, in specific regions.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:10:23):
I think you know, the case is different in the, I, I don't know about many other countries, but I do know in the Netherlands they've got a much better handle on it that they have a good system or forage analysis. And so they have a, they have good data on the composition of the forces that are being fed and they, they have more specific information about the other components of, of rations that are being fed. And so, I don't know, mark what the situation is in the states in terms of being able to access data from some of the analyticaappspp to get a, to get a handle on that.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:11:00):
Yeah. I mean, you can, it was certainly we accessed a lot of data to use for the NRC, but it's all on ingredients, right. And so you don't know what the diet is. And you know, my, my perception on, on, you know, a small number of forms that I would, or nutritionist I've interacted with, I think over the last 10 years with protein prices, having been generally higher you know, historically relative to the energy that they have screwed down the amount of protein diet. And I think there are lots of farms that are operating, you know, high cow rations that are at 16, or even less than six, 16%, even down to 15%. But to go below that, I think then you have to pay a lot more attention to amino acids and that, you know, that was something that was still somewhat lacking.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:11:46):
So, I've seen numbers here in us particularly when, you know, when you look at high cow diets that are, you know, obviously producing a lot of milk in some of these cases, I, you know, I've seen groups with, you know, perhaps up to 35% nitrogen efficiency in some cases, but I'm curious with both of you, you know, in your research what sort, what sorts of improvements have you seen in nitric efficiency through some of your research trials?
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:12:22):
We, you know, I, Chris probably needs to speak to what he saw on the, you know, in his long term trial, but, you know, let me contribute two things, I guess. I mean, one, because we've been historically studying amino acid responses, we can't interpret those without having a negative control that causes a loss in production. And 15 years ago, when we started running those trials, we thought 15% protein diets would be fine, you know, that they would always cause a loss in production. And I would say probably at least three-quarters of the time, you know, over the couple years we did that, we didn't get a loss in production at 15 on high cow groups. OK. And so then we had to reap and go to 14. And I know when we were working on the snowball project too, I think our standard sort of low protein diet was more like 13%. So, I think 15 on well-managed dairy is probably fine in most cases. Now I know I've, you know, being old clay, I forgot the second part of your question.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:13:27):
I, so I'm curious, you know, if, if you calculate nitrogen efficiency oh,
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:13:33):
And these, yeah. We're at about 30, we, we get about 35%, you know, on, on those diets where we start to lose production and, and our not gotten
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:13:44):
Better than that. Sorry, mark. Our, our low protein, you know, which was 14%, which was intentionally deficient in our system. You know, we were around 33%, something like that. So efficiency goes up, but you lose milk, protein yield, and you know, you're losing production. So, and, and I think part of it depends on your, your sort of your production system and your forage base. And I think energy is rea ally important t mark, in terms of maintaining that, that higher level of efficiency and maintaining milk protein yield at those lower protein concentrations. And, and, you know, here in the UK, we don't tend to feed as much starch. So, you know, and I think our high protein diet in our study was shorter, fermentable energy. We, don't have a lot of maze grain, to feed the cows.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:14:40):
So we're, we're normally feeding much more degradable start sources. We use we, we, you know, it's often wheat and barley or starts coming in from co-products. For, for wheat, we, we would tend, a lot of producers would use something called soda grain or caustic treated wheat. Then they'd soak wheat with sodium hydroxide to soften it. And it feeds well. It's a good feed and it's, it's, you know, it's, it works. But we're using grass silages right. Grass silages. And so, you know, we, we, we do have a lot of producers, a lot of our higher-yielding herds or bigger herds would be, would be in areas where they can grow may silage it. We can't grow it everywhere, sorry, corn silage. But you know, that makes a real difference when you have mixed forages when you've got corn silage and, and you get enough starch and you can, I think that energy effect is really important in terms of maintaining protein, milk, protein yield. So, do
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:15:38):
Your dietary starches, do they tend to be
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:15:41):
In the low twenties?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:16:39):
But yeah. Yeah. So, and back to the sort of protein levels being fed you were asking about that earlier. We've seen the trend over here in terms of protein levels coming down. Our herd's currently at 16%, it was probably at 18 and a half when I came over from Ohio back in 2006, and there's a downward trend. Part of it is the more strategic use of fertilizer. So, our grass silages are lower in protein than they used to be. And so there's less protein in through the forages. But also there, there's just downward pressure on using supplemental protein. There's, there's a there's a lot of concern over here about feeding soybean meal because of consumer perceptions, that sort of thing. So a lot of a are herds that are on consume sorry, on supermarket contracts. They're not allowed to feed soybean meal. And then more recently because of the ban, on Neo Nick and Neo Nicks, we have more of a flea beetle problem with our rapeseed. And so there's not nearly as much Rapee or canola being produced. So we, we, we're having more issues with a supply of rapeseed meals. So that's sort of put pressure on, on, so there's economic pressure and supply pressure. That means people are looking at lower protein diets plus concerns about environmental impact.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:18:08):
Yes. I mean, I acid supplementation increasing in the UK.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:18:12):
I don't, you know, I don't have a good feel for that. It's a good question. But I'd have to say, I don't know, to be honest, I don't know any producers that are feeding protected amino acids, at this time. Okay. But I don't know everybody, you know, so, so yeah.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:18:33):
Mark, one of your, one of your graduate students did some survey work in this area, didn't they,
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:18:41):
A little bit, it was more on nutritional nutritionists themselves, you know, what they were doing and trying to get a sense of, of how much they were focusing on nitrogen efficiency. And I, I was a bit surprised by that. I, you know, maybe people tend to tell you what they think you want to hear. Right. And so that, that could be that what influenced that survey, but, you know, a lot of 'em, you know, at least answered that they were, you know, paying attention to that. And I sort of figured that very few of them were that they were just letting it go where it may, you know, and a lot of it I think has evolved. And, you know, I think it's unfortunate and maybe people get upset at me for saying this, but, you know, when I entered the industry 30 years ago, things were all linear.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:19:28):
And so we were using the linear program and a lot of the good nutritionists were optimizing their rations with linear programming. And then when it went non-linear and the nonlinear optimizers don't work as well, they're not as easy to use. They work fine. They're just not as easy to use. Okay. They required retraining and people just, I think in mass abandoned it, you know, they weren't, they weren't fast. So, or they couldn't get answers quickly. They probably weren't very robust at the time. And so I sort of thing that a lot of 'em are just saying, Hey, I know this kind of diet works. Okay. And I'm just gonna put this diet together and that's what I'm gonna stick with. And if it's 17% protein, then I'm just sticking with it because I know it works. Right. And it's, there's nothing like some, some lean times economically too, to make people reassess what they do.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:20:18):
Yeah. Yeah. But I think as part of our long-term project, we did have a stakeholder group and we, we, we did try to work with stakeholders, consultants, veterinarians feed com founders. And again, people are reluctant to give you hard numbers. But the one thing that was clear in our dialogue and, our interactions with those stakeholders was risk aversion. The concern about the risk of lost milk yield or lost performance, if when you start taking protein out of the diet, you know, like Mark's was saying, you've got a diet that works. And if you start tweaking that, you know, there's, there's that risk and everybody's risk-averse. And, and what we need to be able to do is provide the technology you know perhaps for guys over here having a better way of assessing the composition of their, of, of their forages and, and, and how that varies over time so that they can form rations that are closer to requirements without having to worry about any drift in terms of component composition and things like that.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:21:35):
But I was also gonna say about what we were talking about earlier, I did have a part three student, a final year undergraduate student and, and our students over here at through honor honors degree program, they have to do a project. And my student Rosie for her project, shd a survey of protein feeding practices on farms. It was it, you know, it's not something we could publish. It was people she knew, you know, she came from a dairy farm, but she also worked with some of the nutritionists in her region and got a, got good feel for people's attitudes, towards protein and most of the producers. And certainl,y the nutritionist they were that were working with the farms that, that she interviewed were very aware of concerns about overfeeding protein and were thinking about ways to reduce protein to try to improve protein efficiency and Rosie was doing on-farm calculations of protein efficiency. So, yeah, I think, I think the industry is moving in the right direction.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:22:39):
Definitely. So, Chris, I've got a couple of, I'm gonna ask him one at a time. I've got a couple of questions about your, your three lactations per study. So I wonder if you could address these questions from that perspective and mark, I'm wondering if you could address it, from an NRC perspective. So, Chris, my first question has to do with, with fresh cows, you know, those cows, the first 30 or so days in milk. Could you speculate on maybe, you know, maybe what's happening with, with those cows feeding, you know, some of these lower protein levels in very early lactation and, and could it have made a difference maybe, you know, in early lactation milk and peak milk, for instance,
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:23:40):
That's a really good question. And as mark knows, it's sort of a, something we're interested in. And I guess, you know, we we've talked before clay, but, but just to, just to clarify for our study, because of our sort of Calvin system, the cows didn't go onto their experimental diets until probably about day four after Calvin, something like that. But they were, you know, they were recovering from Calvin and they were getting back on feed and, and getting onto their lactation rations. But I am, I do think that that very early lactation period is really important in terms of setting set, you know, setting the cow up for lactation in terms of milk, milk, yield, and milk, protein yield. And but I, I, I think there's a window of opportunity. That's, that's very early, you know, within hours of calving.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:24:35):
And, and so we were, we were missing that opportunity. But so, I think, and, and some of them, the work that MOS Larson has done in Denmark has, has, you know, really highlighted that using AMA infusions of casing that start as soon as the cow calves and seeing some dramatic increases in milk yield. So it's something, yeah. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm running outta years. I'm, it's not something I'm gonna be able to spend a lot of time researching, but I think it's an area that needs a lot more research. So, and there's a lot of opportunities there. So, and yeah, and the other thing to say is we had done some work oh, 25 years ago, and on the sort of stair-step protein levels. And, and we did the same thing with fat looking, you know changing levels at different stages in the rising phase of lactation to, to, to see if we could have beneficial effects of protein in, in very early lactation that carried over. And I, and, and I think, you know, Mo's work shows that that can happen, but I think we start started a bit too late. We were already into lactation and we may have missed a window of opportunity by a week off, by the fir the end of the first week of lactation. Some, some random thoughts. I hope that's okay. No, that's great.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:26:02):
Yeah. A, from an NRCS perspective, I mean, it has to be based on the, that are available. Right. And so it just, there, isn't an update. I mean, you know, you just sort of say, okay, well, we can calculate what it should be, you know, from a factorial standpoint. And then we'll set that as the requirement and it's generally considered as safe. Right. Which is more of our, our current sort of thought process on a lot of these things, even that our, our idea of a firm requirement is sort of going away. But I, I think that's probably not, well, I guess it depends on what you measure, right? I mean, we probably don't have enough cow observations, Chris, to know whether or not there are any health benefits outta some of these things we're doing. I mean, your long-term study was probably one of the few that, you know, if there was gonna make major health events associated with the low protein diets, they should have shown up in three years surely.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:26:55):
Okay. And but most of our studies with three years, six or even 10 weeks studies, they're not gonna show up. And I think the same thing around calving, I mean, we got most of our cow culling, our, you know, our, our non-voluntary culling curves around calving. And so, I don't know, you know, I'm sure there's probably some dietary things that are influencing that it's so bloody hard to figure that stuff out though, because you need lots of observations, right. I mean, unless you can figure out some way purposely caused them to have these things. You're now looking at running a thousand cows study to get enough observations, to have a hope of being able to predict differences. Well, none of us can afford to do that in general. I mean, they're just, there isn't that much money research. So, I think there are probably things there that we don't know, you know,
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:27:43):
That's two, two things to add. One is, is my interest in that area is, is, is about some of these essential amino acids as signals and sort of switching on protein synthesis in the memory gland. So, so actually changing the requirement of the cow. And the other is, is I've. I have a concern that if in, in that, in that case, we might actrease yield to the, to the extent that it, it increases energy deficit and, you know, which ma might make it more challenging in terms of you know, keeping blood nonterrified, fatty acids under control and avoiding high Keone bodies. And that sort of some of those health issues around that. And I, I always think back to Bob Orco old study, where he was feeding cow's grass silage and, and was supplementing them with fish mill and early lactation.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:28:44):
And he got so much of a milk yield response that he had to stop the study because they all got keto. So, you know I think there's an analogy there. It was different, the genetics of those cows was very different, you know, they were working with probably some pretty poor quality grass silages, but they still got this big milk yield response to fish meal. So, and yeah, sorry, long the long term study, you know, we were underfeeding protein, 90% of requirements in terms of metabolizable protein. And I was impressed at how resilient those cows were and how few problems we had. You know we did, it was just, it was just reduction infertility, especially in the third lactation. But otherwise they, they, again, I'll just say it, cows are resilient
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:29:37):
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:30:13):
Mm. Yeah. Chris, can you, can you remind me so in your long-term study, during the dry period, what levels of pro were those cows fed at that point?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:30:26):
Oh, they were on our standard farm sort of dry cow program with a three-week pre-expected Calvin close-up period. And they, in the far off period, I think they were, it was a crude protein concentration of 13% as I, as I remember now normally in our herd, in the summertime, the dry cows would go out to grays, you know, so the the the the nutrition of those cows would be slightly different. But our cows all were all kept indoors all year round just to maintain. So they were being fed the same formulation of diet. I mean, you know, it varied because the silage you know, there was, it was straw and some silage. And so that was, that was it. And then they had a close-up period where they were getting more supplements. They have some DEC a and some lactation ration.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:31:22):
Thanks. So my, my second question related first to your, to your study, Chris is so there were, there were not rumor protect amino acid supplemented during the trial. Could, can you speculate on what may have occurred with amino acid supplementation?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:31:46):
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. You know, there are a thousand ways we could have formulated more than a thousand different dietary formulations we could have used. But I would just, just to say that our diets were based on a previous study, we had run where we looked at the effects of level of protein and grass silage to may silage ratio in a factorial experiment, a three by two but it was in a changeover experiment with five-week periods, but we, we had 14 16 and 18% crude protein. But for that study, with those diets, we used a room and protected soya product. And our 14% crude protein diet was formulated to meet protein requirements. And they did well on that, but it was a, but that, again, that's where I kept saying, okay, we had numerical reductions in milk yield, but it wasn't significant.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:32:57):
And I kept saying, gotta be careful, it's a changeover experiment. We didn't allow time for the cows to truly adapt to the diets thinking about what Henry Terell told me when he was mentoring me at Beville about, you know, adaptations to changes in dietary protein. And that was the Genesis of the long term study that we defer scientific advice turn around and says, well, well, okay, let's do a long term study. And, and so, yes, I think, you know, we, we did feed lower protein diets with room and protected protein and the cows did well on it. So, yeah. Thanks. And there's another example, there are loads of examples in the literature of that.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:33:39):
Mark, would you want to speak to that a little bit you're doing a lot of, lot of amino acid work in your lab.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:33:49):
Well, certainly the protein provides amino acids and so less protein is fewer amino acids and they require the amino acids and not the protein per se. So, I think, you know, any, any of those studies when you interpret them, I mean, you know, we may be interpreting them historically from a protein basis, but there is an underpinning on an, of an amino acid response surface. And I, I try to avoid saying requirement because it, you know, within the ranges of invi that, you know, that we look at typically, I guess, would probably range from maybe 12 to, to 20% protein as a, as a normal range, they appear to be linear responses throughout that range. So, you know, you can, you can add pro add amino acids to most of these diets and probably get a response. Will it cover the cost of the amino acids?
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:34:40):
Probably not when you're in the upper end of the range and maybe, maybe more likely so at the bottom end, but again, they appeared linear all the way through. Now I know from a biology standpoint, they are not linear forever. Okay. They are curving off it's just within the range of data we had. That's what we could see. Okay. And so, I mean, there were hints of, you know, and then beat that and, and poor Roche Martin. Oh, I think she beat him up for a, you know, three or four months trying to demonstrate that, you know, she could work out those curves and you could get the curves, you know, but they were not significant. So, I mean, you know, it would solve for him, but the linear ones solved just as well. So I, I think, you know, I, I would have to say based on pure science and, and being a scientist that if Chris had added amino acid to those diets, they probably would've responded whether they would've responded significantly, that he could observe it. I don't know, but you know, all the data suggests, you know,
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:35:36):
Collectively that yes, they would've responded.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:35:40):
So, Chris my last question, maybe my last related to this, you did a, I think you did a very nice job pointing this out during your webinar back in October, but you know, 1, 1, 1 thing we hear about feeding, you know, extra protein in these lactating diets is the day to day variation in protein in these TMR. You wanna speak to that a little bit?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:36:10):
Yeah. It's, it's probably, you know, it, it's the data that came out of our long-term study that I, I guess caught my eye when I first saw it. And I, I probably get asked about it. I get more questions asked about that data, you know, than, than some of the other responses. And just that we, we were it's, it's just very notable data that for our clamps, you know, for, especially for our grass silage less so with the maze, but, you know, the ma the corn silage has a lower protein concentration. And this is just talking about KD, all nitrogen. So crude protein content, it's crude protein concentrations. We had substantial variation from week to week which makes sense when you look at how the forage goes into our clamps, you know, it's, we're at the mercy of the weather over here.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:37:10):
We're also at the, in our, for our farm, we're at the mercy of our contractors who, who are, who are chopping our silage and, and, and it in our clamps. So, you know, it's going in as wedges in, in, in a, in a, in an Ailish clamp. So forget my terminology, a bunker. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So we don't have upright silos, very, you know, they're very rare over here. And so they go in his wedges. And so as you're working back through the face of a clamp, you know, you're, you're working, you have variation within the face. And, you know, as you move, you know, your block cutting, and as you cut through, you know, you're getting variation there. You know, you know, bill Weiss project, you know, looking at variation in, in, in forage composition and its impact on, on production is, you know, fantastic work.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:38:09):
And, you know, the bill talks about in some of his presentations about how to sample, you know, and how to, how to take this, these, the tons of silage in a clamp and get that down to 500 milligrams that are used for an analysis, you know, and it's very challenging, but we do a really good job of, of sampling our forages and our, and, and our feed ingredients. There's variation in terms of the analysis, but it was the same person doing the analysis week on week, and we were using control samples. And I think the variation was real. So that's sort of the underpinning variation. And I think the, my sort of impression, one based on our, our rolling average of, of the composition of as ingredients, we did make adjustments to try to keep within a Bo a boundary of just crude protein concentration, usually by adding a bit of soybean meal.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:39:05):
So we reduced some of that variation. But again, the cows were resilient. My impression is that they produced to the longer-term average. It's not, you know, the day-to-day variation. It's kind of like variation during the day and, you know, all the work around synchronization and cows being able to deal with asynchrony and, and produce to an average. And it's the same thing in terms of day-to-day variation. You, you know, it's when you get into weeks the weekly average, that's where you start to see the the the the movement in terms of production. I think there's also that interesting story about oscillation and recycling, and whether you could, you can take advantage of, of the ability of the cows to recycle and, and make them more efficient by, by intentionally oscillating protein.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:40:00):
But there's, in most cases, it doesn't have, it's looking at the literature. It's hard to find cases where it shows a positive effect. It often shows no effect compared to a control where you're feeding the same concentration every day, day in and day out. But it's hard to show a benefit. There are a few cases, you know, where, where, where you can see that, but, you know, I've always been fascinated by, and it goes back to working with Bob Cochran at, at Kansas state years and years ago in the 1980s, talking about, you know, only supplementing protein to range cows once a week, you know, and then doing just as well as if you, as if you gave the same amount of protein daily. And it, and it always intrigued me, how did cows do that? You know, how, how right. You know, how, where is the protein going? You know, how do they make use of it? And, and it's, you know, biology's fascinating. It is. But yeah, I think that from an S to the long-term average, right.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:41:01):
But, you know, I think part of it is that ability to sort of recycle things and keep them in the system longer. But certainly I, and so I think that's what helps buffer those day-to-day things. But if you, you know, if things are tied and you do sustain a deficiency, it, it looks like, you know, from the data that van DeHart students published last year. And, and we saw it anecdotally, I think with the snowball project, when we were creating these deficiencies within a week, you, you have the maximum response. And even when we had animals that were deficient on snowball and added, you know, back amino acids, you know, to, to study them in the next milking, you could already see a response. So I think relative to energy, the responses are generally quicker, but they can cover up that, you know, if it has to be sustained for more than one or two days, okay.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:41:50):
Before you can, you can get them not down. And you know, I think there are probably other things that are going on there that could have a long-term effect. But when you look at Vander, hard's student's study, I mean, I think there were 14 week periods or something like that. It was a crossover, you know, for 28 weeks, Cal started on high or low. And then they crossed over to the other one and he was using 14 and 18 or so, or 13 and 17 maybe. And, you know, the low cows lost 4, 4, 5 kilograms of milk. They, as soon as they switched the diets, they went back to the same curve that the other cows were on. So it doesn't look like after maybe the first part of lactation we changed the machinery, right. We, we adjust the set point. It's like your thermostat, right?
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:42:34):
We aren't shutting down and de lowering the size or decreasing the size of the furnace or increasing the size of the furnace. We're just changing the thermostat. And it can be changed back again later. But I don't think that that's probably the case in early lactation. I think that's what, you know, the group in Denmark is seeing. And we, we saw some evidence of that as well, looking at that first week or maybe 10 days. And I think that's about it. Cause Maland looks like it's still growing for that amount of time. And there may be opportunities to ramp it up and grow a little bit longer or grow faster and make that furnace get bigger so that when you turn the thermostat up, it doesn't. But I know when I was, was farming, you know, even before Chris and I met, you know, that, you know, all the extension, people always told you, oh, you had to, you had to get cows to PE high, cuz it was 200 pounds of milk for every pound of milk you got at pee. Well, yeah, anecdotally, that, that, that statistics, okay. I mean, they're following a normal curve, you get them to peak one pound higher, and then they hold that from another 300 days. That's how much you get. But everything we looked at since then says, they're, you know, the machinery set, they, they'll run it up and down depending on what you do.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:43:46):
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:43:47):
That you can still get them to milk well and late lactation.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:43:53):
Yeah. I'll never forget those proteins. Those are amino acid responses. Mark. When, when I first start getting involved in a snowball and we were creating, those protein deficiencies, and then we were infusing a mixture of amino acids, all the essential amino acids in the same ratio as milk protein. And within one, as you say, within one milking, we'd see, 90% of the response. It was, it was remarkable, but that was the whole point behind wanting to do the long term study is when you switch them when you stop those amino acids, it, it, it didn't drop 90% at the next milking no longer, you know, it took much longer for the, for the milk protein concentration to come back down. And yeah, that's, that's the whole basis of the long term study is I think in those,
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:44:40):
In those studies, I mean, we had 'em on grass silage, which generates, you know, a pretty low level of RUP probably, it was a low protein diet. They'd already been on it for quite a while. I think all those cows were probably protein deficient in general to start with. And then we made them even more so, so I think once they saw some hint of some good nutrition, they said, aha, you know, it's Christmas time. Let's, you know, let's have a party
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:45:05):
They've responded
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:45:07):
Of this again. And it was
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:45:09):
A weird diet. I mean, John Sutton ages sort of trying to find low protein concentrates to put in the, concentrated blend and yeah, it was casava meal and stuff like that, you know, it wasn't, it was, it wasn't the UK feed ingredients. It was, it was just, what could we come up with that would produce a protein deficiency. Now another
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:45:28):
The question, just so from a, for, from a practical standpoint and looking at nitrogen efficiency, are there, are there any Indi indicators on the farm we could look at to try to monitor nitrogen efficiency?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:45:49):
Yeah. It's another quiet question we talk about. Well, it's not the first time I've been asked that
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:47:05):
And so it was to sort of look at the same responses in the grass, but with a grass base. And, we also had a demonstration trial up at SR U C Scotland's rural university and, and, and colleges up at Creton. And, and there, it was just CALS fed grass silage in the winter and grazing in the summer with some concentrate. And we had two levels of protein in that. And for both of those studies with the grass base, we didn't get nearly the response in terms of milk yield, to the lower protein. So they maintain reasonable milk yield on low protein diets. It was, it was quite remarkable. And I was worried that John had done something wrong with his diet formulations, or they were feeding it wrong, but you look at his milk areas and it was obvious the cows were on a low protein diet and, you know, they were on the nor, you know, it was quite clear that they, they had the protein response.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:48:05):
But they, they, they, the response was very different on a, on a high grass silage basis. And mark referred to grass silages and some of the differences you can get with grass silage so milk Korea, but, you know, we know there are so many other things that can affect the milk. And, and so there's a lot of interest in other proxies or other indicators we could do use. We're part of an EU infrastructure project called it's infrastructure for cattle research facilities called a smart cow. And it's, it's just coming to a, an end, it's a four-year infrastructure. We're gonna maintain it as a European research group. Andre we're also, we've also just found out yesterday, we're gonna be involved in another infrastructure. That's looking at sustainability across production systems, not just animals, but also crops. And for that project, we've been looking at some of these biomarkers of, of, of, of sustainability and including NA use EF and the one.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:49:12):
And in's leading this colleague at en RTE in Claremont raw. And they've been looking at N 15 enrichment. So the differential between plasma, Cal plasma, or other protein pool in 15 enrichment versus diet in 15 enrichment. And it's pretty good, it's a pretty good proxy for nitrogen use efficiency. And it's related to the amount of protein or amino acids that are being metabolized in the liver. And then there's just good old minute infrared spectra, and, you know, a lot of interest in, can we predict nitrogen use efficiency from, from mid-infrared spectra doing, you know, the machine learns, learning artificial intelligence if, and, and, you know, so we're, we're, we're very interested in pursuing that clay in terms of, you know, something we might be able to use. So not just spectra for, you know, Ure or something else, but a combination of spectral properties that might be related to nitrogen use efficiency. Thanks. Those are some ideas for me. I don't know, mark, if you've got any
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:50:27):
Thoughts, you know, I think in the near term, you know, I think all those points are, are good ones. And, but, you know, today, I mean, even though there are factors that affect milk nitrogen, and some examples would be high salt diets, you know, cause greater urine excretion to get rid of that salt. Right? Well, it carries a degree along with it. So if you feed a high salt diet, you'll have lower milk and nitrogens, but within the herd, you know, as long as you aren't changing these background things, you have a fairly good benchmark. And so the key is, and this is the point I've made on several extension type talks is, you know, benchmark your herd. I mean, put it on a diet where you it's basically at NRC requirements or whatever system you want to use, right?
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:51:17):
Just something that you have a benchmark figure out what the milk Korean nitrogen is for your herd on that diet. And then you can probably start pulling some routine out. I mean, this is outta the old system, certainly, we were overfeeding RDP, right? So you could pull out a half-point of that, probably most of the time, without any effect, it's gonna lower Milky and nitrogen with a very repeatable and, you know, sustainable amount. Right? And so if, if nobody loses production and, and you don't lose dry matter intake, which is one of, of the big things that happen on these low protein dyes, that's the first thing you see is dry matter. Intake goes down. Once that happens, you're done. Okay. You gotta go back again, cause this is not gonna come back. But if you don't lose dry matter intake, you know, and, and, and if it was economically favorable, well, then now that's your new benchmark for your
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:52:05):
Then you can take some out of RUP and do the same thing maybe. And until you get it whittled down where you start to lose production, then restore it a little bit and say, okay, well, on my herd, under my feeding conditions, I'm at nine or I'm at 10 or whatever it is, that's your benchmark. Okay. You know, it doesn't have to be the same as the next farm. It takes a little bit of effort to establish that for your farm, but there's a lot of money on the table here. So why not make use of the things that we have today? I, you know, like the N 15 approach. I haven't studied up on that much, but you know, those, those have good precision, that kind of measurements. They're not as easy as mu to make, but hell it took the, you know, the American industry in the about 20 years to figure out how to measure mu N reliably.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:52:47):
And even today, I'm not sure we're doing it. Hell, the milk co-ops I think that DHI got it all sort. There are still some milk co-op numbers. I see that are like good Lord, man, go find out what machine they're using and tell 'em it's 50 years old and throw it away and get another one or put, and people call to say my, my herd milk, you know, my, my on my boat tank samples too. Did I say, well, are cows all dead? Because if it's at two, they're all dead. Okay. No, they're not dead. Well, okay. Then the number's bad.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (00:53:19):
Mark. I, I think I shared my personal story with you a few years ago where I was monitoring some herds and getting one, one to two. Yeah. Coming back on Monday and I made a phone call, and the answer was, well, they were reporting negatives, but we that on,
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:53:45):
Yeah, those whole infrared machines weren't, they were able to do it, but it required a lot of fussing with them, to keep them in calibration. And the, you know, the DHIS was doing ring tests, so they knew they were having trouble. And so they would stay on top of it. The milk co-ops nobody's paying on mu N no, it's a free service. And so it, they got the value back that you put in. Okay. You got almost zero value back.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:54:10):
It's interesting. Mark Henry Terell was running, a lactation study at Beltsville. I think right after I finished my postdoc and moved into the energy lab with him and his Patty, the woman that looked after all his data came in and said, there's something not right with these proteins and fats. They've all changed. They just changed last week. And Henry was looking at the diet and going around, you know the farm must have done something with the ration that, you know, and finally, Patty called the the the the the lab. This is, oh yeah. We changed our standards.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:54:56):
Well, another, another funny story from, from when I first joined tech was that, you know, I'd been working on protein stuff before our PR and of course, none of that was getting published. And so there was a really important RDP study that I had run there that I felt needed to be, you know, published. And it was a dose-response. And so I, I essentially redid the same study and, you know, the low protein diet was 14 and it went up to like 18 or something at four steps. And the MNS came back with a nice linear response, just like you'd expect, but like four units above what they were for the same essential levels of a protein that I ran a PR. So I'm on, I'm like Henry I'm on a, on a mission trying to figure out what the heck is going on here, you know,
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:56:00):
So I, I go over and I get the lab manager who I had met. Right. You know, not the lab, but the DHI manager, not the lab manager. And I, I get him and the poor fellow died a few years ago. So I can, you know, say this without worrying about offending him. But, you know, I decided, okay, well, I'm gonna go talk to him. And then he's, he's gonna help me go up and, and sort of carefully sort of do this, you know, approach. And so I go over and talk to him and I tell him what the, you know, what I'm seeing. He goes, okay, well, let's go up and talk to the lab manager. So he goes up to the lab, we go up to the lab manager who goes in. He goes, Hey, this is mark again. He's a faculty member here. He started about a year ago and he wants, to know what the hell you're doing, screwing up
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:56:43):
Missing mark.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:56:45):
Is it over again?
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:57:43):
That's interesting, mark. You mentioned genetics and I, I was gonna come back to, to Clay's question about, you know, ways of monitoring. And, I think one of our interests in proxies is having a tool to phenotype cows for nitrogen efficiency. Because you know, if we can phenotype enough cows, we can start to then look at genetic correlations and, and is it a heritable trait? And you know, that would be useful. And, you know, that's part, you know, you mentioned Mike Vander's student study you know, that was about, you know, our, some cows more resilient to low protein diets than, than, and others. And is it a genetic trait? And we're interested in that. And that's the other thing that has been most interesting to me from our long-term study is the variation between cows on each in terms of nitrogen efficiency on the east, on each of our experimental diets.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (00:58:45):
And the variation was very similar, whether they were on the low diet or the high diet you know, I'm, I'm sure, well, it is related to feed efficiency because we're just calculating gross nitrogen use efficiency. So it's driven, you know, it's driven by intake and milk yield, milk, protein yield. And I think too, to, to come up a, a way of sort of measuring residual pro metabolize protein intake or something like that and to, to assess it, but we are interested in, in, you know, is there a, is it a genetic trait that we could select for, in terms of nitrogen efficiency or is it just feed efficiency, but, you know, or is it feed efficiency and some other components of, of perhaps metabolism or other aspects of, of, of milk production that, that that's charitable so we could select for it? Well, you know, you talk about gen genetic differences in, in milk concentration, mark, there's a there, you know, that's related to that.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (00:59:48):
Well, and I, you know, we published a study last year. It had been it's a bit like some of the snowball data had gotten fairly long in the tooth before it got published. And, and we had some challenges, you know, the student did with some of the nitrogen analysis, to begin with, and a post got it sorted out a year ago after like a 10-year hiatus. And essentially we are asking that question, is their variation among cows in their ability to transport Ure back into the room and probably also to excreted in urine because there were the same transporters on a common diet and the answer was you, yes. I mean, you put, put these eight cows on a common diet and they, and we picked them to have high or low milker. And then we looked at the UEA transport and the UEA transport was what was driving that there, some cows are better at putting urea back from the blood back into the room and in recycling than other cows.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (01:00:39):
So I would just point to the fact that in us, you know, we, you know, when we select for milk production over the last a hundred years, we're primarily selecting for energy efficiency because we're providing more than enough nutrients, right? Other nutrients, all the vitamins, and minerals are generally fed the above requirements because we don't know for sure what they are. We've just had a long discussion about, we generally have probably protein above requirements, cause we didn't have a good idea what they were and everyone's risk-averse. That means almost all the genetic selection's been energy efficiency selection. So if you look at what we did when we just selected for milk production for about a hundred years and didn't pay any attention to breeding efficiency, it went away, right? And, and now we're paying attention to it and it's coming back and you know what, the New Zealand people that had to get animals bred within a, a two or three cycle period. So they would keep in sync with the for, and, and the milking cycle. They didn't have any trouble with their breeding because they cold all those cows. Okay. They put genetic pressure on it. We put no genetic pressure on selection for nitrogen efficiency to this date. So I would be, I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that there's plenty of genetic variation we can select from, for that. And I'll bet you, we can make a lot of progress cause we have ignored it for a moment.
Scott Sorrell (01:01:59):
Yeah. Gentlemen, this has been stimulating conversation, but I think we're gonna need to call the last call here, Chris. I know you've got someplace to go. With that, I'd like to ask each of you guys to give us kind of two takeaway messages that either a dairy producer or consulting nutritionist veterinarian can take away from the conversation today. Clay, why don't we start with you?
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (01:02:24):
Yeah, certainly. So, you know certainly one topic we hit on is, you know, is the importance of fresh cow nutrition, you know, from, from a, from a UR standpoint. So I think we need to remember, or not, not to overlook that when, when we're talking about you know, nitrogen, amino acid nutrition, and the other point which Chris, you hit on this a couple of times is how resilient these cows are, at least in the short term to these day to day variations. So it's, it is pretty remarkable. What, what can happen in the short term long? The term's a completely different story.
Scott Sorrell (01:03:12):
Yeah. Thank you, client.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (01:03:13):
So just add, to add to that for my, you know, two answers, I guess Scott is that we didn't talk about this, but when you look at what the amount of milk loss was on Chris's diets or many other diets relative to what the old NRC and other models that have been in use for quite a few years would predict was the loss. It's usually about a third of that loss or maybe a half at most. Okay. So if we go back to this idea of risk aversion, the perceived risk was about twice what the real risk was. Okay. And so this is not as risky of a decision as you would think. And I remember one of the mantras, you know, from the administer, the, you know, the people that were managing us at, at PR was the easiest decision to make is reversible.
Dr. Mark Hanigan (01:04:02):
You're not gonna damage the cows, by losing a little bit of milk. Okay. Pay attention to it, make your reduction, see if you get a loss within a week, if you haven't got a loss in a week, it's not gonna happen and, you know, go on down the road. And if it does happen, just reverse it again. So you lost a little bit of milk over a week, it's half or a third of what you thought you might have lost on the old system. So I think, I think that's one key point and the other one is, you know, spend some time to try to, to titrate that protein feeding down to make the animals more efficient. It's good for the environment. It's good for your pocketbook. Okay. You can use mu N to help benchmark this, to keep it on track, you know, and take some of that money and probably invested in your fresh cow program. Put some, put some more goodies in that it, it might pay dividends and everyone will be better off then.
Scott Sorrell (01:04:52):
Yeah. Great advice, mark. Does Chris have our featured guest what thoughts do you have final thoughts? Well,
Dr. Chris Reynolds (01:05:01):
One just say thank you very much for the opportunity to have this conversation and thanks to marking for coming along. I always enjoy talking to mark and it's been, it's been a real pleasure, so thanks very much. You know, I, I think, yeah, there's, I think as an industry we need to be looking at improving protein efficiency and there there's lots of benefits as a mark just said. And I think, you know certainly, there's a lot of concern out there about environmental impacts of our production systems. And, and so let's take some steps and I think, but I think we can move in the right in that, right in that direction towards more efficient production with less environmental impact. Mark's right. I think the risk is perhaps not as great as many people have fought. And so I think we should, it's something we should be doing in terms of sort of two takeaways for me.
Dr. Chris Reynolds (01:06:04):
I think one of them is this variation in animal efficiency. And I think we, you know, we should be looking to see if, if we can use genetics to reduce environmental impacts and including, including in that nitrogen efficiency and, and, and improved efficiency of dietary, nitrogen utilization, dietary protein utilization and, you know, I think we need to, we, we need to think about this variation in diet composite. How much of a problem is it? Is it really and where it is a problem? How, how can we address it? And, and, and there, I'm thinking about minimizing risk again. Okay. Let's, let's, let's get to a good handle on understanding the risk. And I, I refer to bill Weiss's project, looking at this where they intentionally made variations and the, you know, the negative effects weren't as substantial as everybody thought they might be. So let's, let's understand what the true risk is. And then if it is important, let's, let's see if we can apply some technology, some creative thinking to, to how to, how to address it.
Scott Sorrell (01:07:20):
Yeah. Excellent comments guys., this has been great. I've enjoyed it, and honestly, I'd look forward to doing it again sometime I'm sure, our audience will have a bunch of questions, so we'll make sure we get this scheduled on the docket again. We'll see you next time here at the real science exchange, where it's always happy hour, and you're always among friends. Thank
Speaker 5 (01:07:41):
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