Guests: Dr. Bill Weiss, The Ohio State University; Dr. Paul Kononoff, University of Nebraska, and Journal of Dairy Science Editor-In-Chief. Co-host: Dr. Clay Zimmerman, Balchem We’re excited to introduce a new segment into our podcast rotation; The Journal Club. Styled after the traditional journal clubs convened at universities across the US, we’ll take a closer look at some of the newest research being published. Once a month we will welcome Dr. Bill Weiss, Emeritus Professor from The Ohio State University, to the pub table where we will discuss selected papers that were recently published. To gain additional insight and liven up the discussion, we’ll also invite the authors to join us whenever possible.
Guests: Dr. Bill Weiss, The Ohio State University; Dr. Paul Kononoff, University of Nebraska, and Journal of Dairy Science Editor-In-Chief. Co-host: Dr. Clay Zimmerman, Balchem
We’re excited to introduce a new segment into our podcast rotation; The Journal Club. Styled after the traditional journal clubs convened at universities across the US, we’ll take a closer look at some of the newest research being published. Once a month we will welcome Dr. Bill Weiss, Emeritus Professor from The Ohio State University, to the pub table where we will discuss selected papers that were recently published. To gain additional insight and liven up the discussion, we’ll also invite the authors to join us whenever possible.
Dr. Bill Weiss introduced two papers that the guests would discuss throughout the episode. “Effects of rumen-protected lysine and histidine on milk production and energy and nitrogen utilization in diets containing hydrolyzed feather meal fed to lactating Jersey cows” published in June 2020 by Dr. Morris and Dr. Kononoff at the University of Nebraska. The second “Effect of sealing strategy on the feeding value of corn silage for growing dairy heifers” published in March 2021 from a lab at State University of Maringá in Brazil. (1:37)
Dr. Bill Weiss discussed the first paper about feather meal. He explained that feather meal is a bargain feed, however, you get more nutrients for a cheaper product. The research was also done on Jersey cattle instead of Holsteins which is unique as there is not as much research done on Jersey cattle. (7:06)
Dr. Paul Kononoff discussed feed bypass sources and milk performance while feeding feather meal within his study. He also discussed the variance in feed composition, for example, dry matter content, crude protein, and crude fat differences of feather meal. (11:17)
Dr. Paul Kononoff discussed a theory that one of his grad students (who was also an author on the paper) brought to his attention about methane production relating to rumen-protected lysine. (29:21)
Dr. Bill Weiss discussed the second study about feeding corn silage to dairy heifers. He explained the silage sealing and feeding processes used within the study. (41:11)
Dr. Paul Kononoff discussed palatability and animal behavior as it relates to the silage study. A producer has to consider the economics of affecting feed intake with picky animals. Is the saved cost worth a loss in intake? (47:06)
Chart Referenced as Table 7 on page 11 of the paper.
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Scott Sorrell (00:08)
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Real Science Exchange, the pub cast where leading scientists and industry professionals meet over a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal nutrition. Hi, I'm Scott Sorrell, one of your hosts here at the Real Science Exchange, and tonight we're excited to introduce a new segment into our podcast rotation: the journal club. Styled after the traditional journal clubs convened at universities across the US and around the world. We'll take a closer look at some of the newest research being published today. Once a month we'll welcome back Dr. Bill Weiss, emeritas professor at The Ohio State University to the Exchange where we'll discuss selected papers that were recently published in selected scientific journals. To gain additional insight, and to spice up the discussions, we'll also invite the authors to join in on the conversation whenever possible. Bill, welcome back to the exchange and thank you for taking on this role as discussion leader for our new journal clubs here.
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:08):
Thank you for having me back.
Scott Sorrell (01:10):
first tell us what you're drinking tonight and then tell us which papers we'll be discussing.
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:15):
Okay. Well, I, I recently moved to Cincinnati Ohio, so I'm drinking a local beer called Garage Beer, and it tastes a whole lot better than it sounds. And I can actually see the brewery from the back of my house. So I'm drinking a very local beer here.
Scott Sorrell (01:31):
Yeah, you may have to have to pipeline the stuff.
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:37):
Well, it's across the river. But for the first one, I picked two papers and they're actually very, very different. And I did that so if one doesn't catch your fancy, the other one might. Both are quite applied, which again, I think for this audiences is the best choice. the first paper we're going to talk about was published last year in the Journal of Dairy Science, and the title is basically -I'm condensing a little bit- but Effect of rumen-protected lysine and histidine on milk production on energy and nitrogen utilization and diets with hydrolyzed feather meal fed to jersey cows. And that's from Paul Kononoff’s lab in Nebraska. The second paper is, is also in JDS and this was published earlier this year, so both are quite new. And it's the title of this paper is Effect of sealing strategy on the feeding value of corn silage for growing heifers. And it's published for a group from the University of Moringa in Brazil.
Scott Sorrell (02:37):
Excellent. Looking forward to hearing about these I see Paul Kononoff is also joining us. Paul's one of the authors, for our first paper, and also the editor in Chief for the Journal of Dairy Science. Paul, you just joined us on the Real Science Lecture series of webinars, but this is your first time to the exchange. So welcome! And can you us a bit about the Journal of Dairy Science and your role as editor-in-chief?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (03:04):
Yeah, thank you, Scott. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, as you mentioned, I'm currently serving as the Editor in Chief, and I have to tell you that's a great highlight of my career and it's really an honor to represent the Journal in that role. As far as my responsibilities in that role, it's really just to oversee and to be a liaison within the community of dairy scientists. And I say that very sincerely, I get a wonderful opportunity to interact with authors, reviewers, and editors from around the world on a daily basis. And I know, I have to tell you in that last segment I was on with you folks, it was just a tremendous opportunity to have international discussion and engagement, and that's exactly what the journal allows me to do.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (04:01):
So in terms of what I'm specifically involved with. Obviously some routine editing and review of each issue. In fact, today, the next October issue of the Journal of Dairy Science arrived in my inbox and I'll be reviewing what’s roughly a thousand pages over the next 10 days. I'll be, I'll be looking at that. I get an opportunity to, to work with editors as they're handling papers. And then of course also with, with authors we also recently had a podcast , and those are available on the website and they were just workshops on publishing in the Journal of Dairy Science. And I reviewed what's required in terms of submissions, some of the technical details around submitting a manuscript and just outlining what happens when it goes through the process. And that was a great opportunity just to interact with authors around the world. So, yeah, that's kind of a thumbnail sketch of my activities with the journal.
Scott Sorrell (05:05):
Yeah. Thank you for that. Can you give the audience an idea where they can find your- the podcasts that you just mentioned?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (05:11):
We can post that, but if, if you actually go to the ADSA website, and then I believe it's on the Journal of Dairy Science website, you can find links to that, but I, I can supply that also when we're done here.
Scott Sorrell (05:26):
Okay. All right. Thank you very well. We also have a Dr. Clay Zimmerman back at the pub table tonight. Clay, welcome back from vacation. Did you come across any new, exotic drinks while on vacation?
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (05:39):
That's a good question. I did not. I'm enjoying my favorite beverage in my Balchem thermos, though.
Scott Sorrell (05:47):
Okay. And that favorite beverage might be what, today.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (05:51):
This is actually my favorite diet soda, okay. I'm taking it easy today.
Scott Sorrell (05:56):
Good. Not a bad Scott.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (05:58):
Scott, what are you, what are you having today?
Scott Sorrell (06:00):
I've got something unique. It's called forever bourbon. And so the backstory to that is I was at a Zach Brown concert a couple of weeks ago, and my buddy was, we were talking bourbon, and we talk a lot about bourbon, but he was telling me about forever bourbon, which is basically what you do is take either a decanter or an old bourbon bottle, and you just kind of combine, you know, the bottom portions of all your, your bourbons as, as you get them empty. And it's, so it's constantly changing. And so it's, you know, kind of creating your own bourbon. So, I’m going to get a decanter but right now, I've got mine in an old Elijah Craig bottle, but I saw this really cool decanter. It looks like a globe and it's on a spindle on it. And so I'm, I'm looking at investing in that here pretty soon. So looking forward to that anyway, enough of that- let’s dive into the first paper. Bill, give us some background on the first paper and how did you choose it? And perhaps a bigger question; what's the criteria you plan to use when selecting papers in the future?
Dr. Bill Weiss (07:06):
Okay, let's start with the last point you raised. And again, this is, these are applied papers, and it's going to have to obviously have to do with dairy cattle, but not just, not just lactating cows. I'm going to try and limit it to the last year, so it will be up to date. And some may even be your JDS, now offers you can see papers actually before they're published. So really hot off the presses. And again, I, I think I want to pick things that are a little broader interest to me, but also to hopefully the general audience here and the paper today, the first one we're going to talk about, which is the amino acid and feather meal paper, I picked this one for a couple reasons. One is, you know, a lot of people don't know much about feather meal.
Dr. Bill Weiss (07:55):
And if you follow the Ohio State dairy website, they publish, you know, feed prices every other month using the Sesame program. And over most of the year, feather meal is always what we call a bargain feed. You get more nutrients at a lower cost than a comparable feed based on MP (metabolizable, protein) energy, and fiber. The most recent one, it wasn't in the breakeven category, but it's, so it's always usually a reasonably priced feed. Another reason I picked this one, it has to do with jerseys and it's not, I know jerseys are a small portion of the dairy population. But can we extrapolate Jersey data to Holstein and vice versa? So that's a thing we might discuss a little bit. Another big thing about this paper, which I liked is it, it's a paper about amino acids and bypass amino acids, bypass protein.
Dr. Bill Weiss (08:59):
And in this paper, Paul actually measured rumen undegradable protein in the feed stuff. And most of us, and I'm guilty as anybody. We just use book values, even though we're comparing this. So I think that's important. We should, I hope to talk a little bit about the value or the importance of really characterizing the, these, these feeds. And lastly, this is, you got a lot of data, which we won't have time to talk about. Both on energy metabolism, really measured energy metabolism, not calculated and nitrogen metabolism. So it's tying a lot of things together with measure data rather than a lot of calculations. And I thought what we do is I'm going to give a very brief overview of treatments. We can't go into a lot of detail just because of time. And in this series, we are not going to go into a lot of technical details about the paper.
Dr. Bill Weiss (09:50):
We're not going to talk about statistical analysis and analytical procedures. I'm going to say if I pick a paper, in my opinion, all that stuff is correct. So that we aren't going to discuss that. In this paper, they had 12 Jersey cows at about three months in lactation. So around peak lactation. They fed a basal diet, which was 5% feather meal. So there was the feather meal was in, in all the, all the diets. It was about 17% protein. I'm looking here at my notes. 56% forage, which was predominantly corn silage with some alfalfa hay, a little bit of soybean meal and corn grain and soy hulls. They also, all diets were, were supplemented with RP methionine, which I think so we can eliminate methionine from this thing because all diets were supplemented with that. And they also provided about a hundred grams of urea per day. And first thing I like Paul to get involved here. And, you know, I, I've done a lot of research in my day and we've, we've evaluated products and feed stuffs. And I typically, if I'm evaluating blood meal, I'll go by blood meal and evaluated, or if I'm buying, evaluating corn, gluten, I go buy it and evaluate it. But Paul, on this feather meal, he actually took multiple sources and feathers. So why did he do that?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (11:17):
Good. Yeah. Good question, Bill. So actually, I mean, a little bit of background to this study, and I think that that may help us explain why we did some of that, but this study is actually a follow-up study. Oh, about a year and a half ago, we published a study, just looking at the simple inclusion of feather meal. And we, we titrated it up from 0% up to roughly 10% of the diet, just replacing some common feed bypass sources. And in that study, what we saw is that that perform, despite maybe feather meal being a kind of an unusual feed, we actually saw pretty impressive milk performance in this study. And it was, it was really quite striking to see how the cows, you know, they, they consume this stuff, and they milk well on it. There was one exception to that is what actually we saw was a reduction in milk protein.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (12:21):
And so that kind of left us, scratching our head saying, well, you know, why did we see a reduction in milk protein? And so obviously there’s been a little bit of work, especially out of Penn State with Alex Rustev, looking at amino acids. And so we decided to go back to kind of that base formulation and poke around on amino acids. And in this case we identified histidine and lysine. But so that, that's kind of the background. And then you think about our test product that we used here, you know, quite often. And you know, and I'm guilty of it, you know, feeding some byproducts quite often we'll select one by-product from the industry and then feed it in a lactation study. Well, the reality is that may or may not be indicative of what we're seeing in the real world. An addition to that is we often work with, you know, feed tables. You know, default values and our nutrition models, which for the most part we're working on mean chemical composition.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (13:35):
And so what we did is we, you know, got on the phone and we called several suppliers of feather meal and had it delivered. And as you can imagine that wasn't always easy. We were getting feather mail from like Texas and Maryland, you know, just different places in the world. I can't exactly remember these cases, but trying to get these feeds in, it was a, a little bit above and beyond, but I think one of the things that we got was we were able to get these in, mix them, and then get something that's pretty indicative of the feed tables. You know, average RUP of about 68%. And the digestibility of that is 65%. That's pretty close to what's listed in the NRC. The other thing, you know, I would mention is you know, feather meal can really vary, like all byproducts, in chemical composition. Bill you and I published the paper.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (14:37):
And again, this is probably just in the last couple years, looking at variation in, in feed composition and trying to use a statistical model that, that you and Peter Yoder developed to generate feed tables. I just looked at feather meal in the, in that, and it can really vary. Mean dry matter content of feather meal is 93%. If you look at the 10th and 90th percentile, 96 to 99, but if you look at crude protein, main crude protein of our paper for feather meal is 91, but the 10th and 90th percentile was 86 to 99. So big difference. Crude fat, that was a big one 8.9% is a mean 10th and 90th percentile 14.5 to 19.5. So we know that these byproducts vary and it was a way for us to, to kind of get an average feather meal. So that's a long answer to your question, but we thought it was important to, to kind of look at kind of the average of what's out there and our test.
Dr. Bill Weiss (15:44):
Yeah. I think that really important here is a lot of people read a paper on say feather meal, and they think that's going to be every feather meal in the world, and I can extrapolate these results to anything. And we know that's not the case. So this one does increase what we call the inference space in a way. My one issue with this though, is if you have a really bad one in a really good one though, those will cancel each other out, which is to me a very good first step to get a general thing. And then you might want to fine tune this to look at. Is there a differences in, in response to this specific feather meal, but that ending, I hadn't seen that before.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (16:22):
Paul did the, did the feather meals you used in this study, did they contain much blood meal?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (16:29):
Yeah. So that's, that's a good question. I mean, when you look at feather mail, it's my understanding that like all industries have developed and evolved over time and as a result, the byproducts have also evolved over time. One of the cases in the case of feather meal is the blood can be removed and sold separately. And you actually have caught me on that one. I can't remember the source of these ones. If they contained a blood in them. We actually did a follow-up study where we looked at those that did contain some blood and those that didn’t. But you know, as we're talking, I'll, I'll make me flip through here and answer that question, but you're right. That's an important, important factor on blood meal and it can greatly change the amino acid profile.
Dr. Bill Weiss (17:27):
You measured, again using standard techniques, the RUP and the digestible RUP. What kind of digestibility number did you get, and how would that compare, to say, some other common high bypass feedstuffs?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (17:47):
So we use the mobile bag technique in this study and I think we reported an RUP of 68 and then the digestibility of that bypass protein at 65%. I will just say, you know, that also varies across sources of blood meal in that follow-up study that I talked about, we actually measure a difference in digestibility of RUP as low as 53 and then as high as 73. As far as other bypass protein sources. I think it's important to say that maybe the digestibility of this RUP generally ranks on the lower part of the scale and that's you know, that's probably is one of the common criticisms that you hear in the industry is that the digestibility of feather meal is low. And so we were..as we, if we were seeing this at about 65, it's not, it's not it wouldn't be a surprise, or to expect other byproducts, such as distillers grains or blood male to be greater than 85%. So, yeah, we're about 20% lower than a lot of common bypass sources. That's an important thing maybe to set up as we talk about this.
Dr. Bill Weiss (19:13):
And I think, you know, when you're looking at feedstuffs, you need, when you're pricing these things- and Sesame does price things based on digestible RUP- I don't know what number they use, but if you were just to price this and RUP it would be overpriced compared to some of these much more digestibles. And it doesn't mean you can't feed it. It just means you have to pay on an appropriate price. And again, I think the market realizes this and it's used by it's one reason it's, it's cheaper on an RUP basis.
Dr. Bill Weiss (19:44):
Let’s just get into the meat of this now. And I’ll let you kind of... real let out a broad brush that we'll concentrate on production responses. So what, what were the kind of the big picture production responses of these four treatments? And I don't, I actually, I think I got caught off base here and forgot the treatments with everything. All the diets had 5% feather, and 17% crude protein. The control had nothing added. You had a treatment where you added an RP lysine, and I have the note here, I think it's 70 grams or something around that. Another treatment with the RP histamine, which I think… I know I have to scroll up… at 15 or 20 grams of RP histidine and something like that.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (20:29)
32. You were close! Only 50% off.
Dr. Bill Weiss (20:35)
And then the fourth diet had had the 70 grams of RP lysine and the 32 grams of RP histidine. The only technical aspect, or research technical research aspect, is it is a Latin square, which to remind people that’s where cow will be fed one of the diets for a period.
Dr. Bill Weiss (20:56):
Your periods were four weeks. They switch to another diet for four weeks and other diet and another diet. So every cow is fed every diet over during the duration of the experiment. So again, with the standard production, what kind of did you, do you see from these four treatments, Paul?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (21:14):
Yeah. So again, the kind of base or control is basically a little bit of histidine and none of these rumen protected amino acids. When we looked at the rumen protected amino acids individually, and the effects, what we didn't see is any positive responses by supplementing rumen protected lysine. So we never saw any responses in milk yield or honestly we kind of expected maybe we'd see a positive response in milk protein. Keep in mind in the first study that we did, we saw a reduction in milk protein. So we thought maybe if we add a little bit of lysine, we'll get a bounce. Maybe those diets were low in lysine. In this study, we did not observe that. However, what we did see in this study is when we did add rumen protected histidine milk production did go up. and so I think there’ll be a link for the listeners for, for this manuscript, but that's found in table six. And so what we did see is roughly in, in the one case is as much as a kilogram increase in milk yield. The percent milk protein didn't change with histamine, but with that added volume of milk, we saw a trend for increased milk protein yield as well.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (22:49):
Paul, the other thing that, that was maybe different about this study compared to a lot of the, the other histidine studies, the diet was not MP deficient, correct?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (23:01):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. We, listed in the table four actually. You know, we used the Dairy NRC 2001, and across the board, all diets were positive in what's expected to be MP requirement. Roughly about a 100 to 130 grams in access.
Dr. Bill Weiss (23:28):
It’s about 5%. So that's a pretty good safety margin. The models on lysine, you were also again using NRC, and I think it was Schwab's recommendation about even the control diet, so the diets without saying we're about right. They weren't that far off. So do you think that's why you didn't get see much or?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (23:52):
Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, you know, I think sometimes when… There's some wild studies out there, myself included, where you really drive down a particular amino acid and then add another one, whether it's through formulation or in rumen protected. And you, you may sometimes see a bounce in our case with the, with the case of, of lysine. Again, that's listed in table four based on Schwab's recommendations. We were only about two to four grams short on lysine and then for histidine about the same as well. So yeah, it's, it's possible, you know, we were right on the cusp of, of, of the requirements and that that's possible why we maybe didn't see the response that we'd be looking for,
Dr. Bill Weiss (24:45):
Kind of broaden this discussion a little bit. You know, you use jerseys. Almost all the data from Schwab and everybody is Holstein. Does this mean or lend some support that we can extrapolate Holstein data to Jerseys with respect to amino acids. That's too broad of a base to this study?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (25:02):
On, yeah, well, I think we should all, to answer that question, we should all take a swig of what's in our mug and maybe kick back from our desk and get a little more philosophical. I, I really like to hear everybody's opinion, but I see Scott's leading us. Thank you, Scott. We commonly do, because we do do most of our research on Jersey’s . So we commonly get the question, you know, are our results transposable to Holsteins. We've done a little bit of research with both, and I'm always surprised, whenever you go through on the energy side, whenever you go through the calculations and express everything as per unit of metabolic body weight, just how similar Jerseys and Holsteins are. You know, they look obviously different milk production, milk composition looks different. But on an energy basis, when you, when you distill things down to per unit of metabolic body weight, these critters are awfully similar.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (26:12):
And I, you know, I have to probably tip my hats to the geneticists that, that have brought things along, kind of in lock step together in these two breeds. So on the energy side, pretty confident to say these two breeds are pretty similar. On the protein we've probably done less work on that. My guess is my, again, I think the recommendations are pretty, but there's even less research out there on the, on the protein side. You know, there's maybe some reasons I know people think that rumination activity is a little greater for, for jerseys. And so perhaps there's some even differences in, in fiber digestibility and some of that may carry through. I'd be inclined to say we're pretty transposable. But again, you guys have had a chance to take a sip. What are your thoughts? That's my opinion. I don't know what the thoughts are this group,
Dr. Bill Weiss (27:20):
I think, on, on the energy, I agree with you. You know, there's been studies where they've compared digestibility up through the methane .There's- I haven't seen anywhere that they look at NE- measured NE- but I think they're probably pretty similar, at least for normal diets, maybe extremes they're not. And then on protein you thinking, why would they be different? And you think, okay, maybe microbial protein synthesis, but digestibility is pretty similar. So I'm going to say probably not a lot different, I don't think, and I'm not sure about this, but I I'm assuming the casein- percent casein- in the milk protein is probably similar between the two breeds. I'm not sure on that. Somebody can definitely correct me. So again, you start thinking, well, I don't know why they would be different. I'm not ready to say they're not different, but I can't come up with a reason to say there's significant differences.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman
Yeah. I would agree with that as well.
Dr. Bill Weiss
Short answer!
Scott Sorell
Take another sip there, Clay.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (28:32):
Well, he made it snappy. You're always telling me to make my writing snappy, but you shouldn't complain.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (28:38):
We do get those questions all the time in the field. It's a great question.
Dr. Bill Weiss (28:43):
And you know, jerseys are a growing portion of the dairy population, so it's, and there's, there is a tremendous limitation on Jersey based data, so… okay. Few other things here. I want to get into this energy, just a little bit. One thing I've found pretty interesting is lysine reduced methane production, the few people that have ever measured this with amino acid supplementation, a lot of some things just happened just to float. We all know it can happen. Why do you think this is real? And if, if it is why what's the mode of action, do you think?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (29:21):
Well, again, I'd be happy to hear your opinions. I know when this happened, and you know, one thing I haven't mentioned is the first author on this paper is Logan Morris. He's actually an OSU undergrad and then masters student. And then he came here to work on a, on a PhD. I still remember the day Logan came into my office to tell me about the results. And we went through a lot of this and a lot of it was expected, but then he told me about this methane thing. And he said adding rumen protected, lysine reduced methane. And I really scratched my head. And one of the things I did is I, I said, I don't have a good reason, but let's just work through the cowboy math on how much fat these animals would have been consuming of that product, which would obviously rumen protected lysine product had some fat on it.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (30:24):
I thought, you know, just the crazy idea. Maybe it had some effect on the rumen microorganisms that produce methane. And, you know, there's some research out there in the literature showing that, you know, as you do feed fat, methane production is reduced. And so he went through the cowboy math, and I think if I recall correctly, it was roughly 35 grams of added fat that those animals consumed. So I think in the paper we suggested, well, although they did consume a little bit of fat that could reduce methane, but we didn't actually think that that would be enough to show these kinds of differences. So that’s maybe a long way of me getting to the answer. We really don't know. It was kind of unexpected and I'm not sure if that's a real effect.
Dr. Bill Weiss (31:13):
I don't know. The fat would be the first thing I looked at, but there's no way 35 grams wouldn't do that. Yeah. It's important. If it's real, that's, energetically, that's an important ecologically or environmentally. It's important, but energetically it's not just statistically significant. It's also economically important. I just did some rough calculations. And your DE to ME efficiency was, was high. It was 88% average is, is 86. And that's not very much difference, but with the intakes you had, that's the energy of, of a kilogram or, or 2.2 pounds of milk. So it's not a trivial change. So definitely deserves some follow up. I have no explanation.
Scott Sorrell (31:59):
Is there any chances, some of the lysine escaped in the rumen, and then if so, is there any hypothesis that would lead you to believe that free lysine would have an impact on microbial populations or efficiencies or anything like that?
Dr. Bill Weiss (32:13):
Is obvious some of it's going to be degraded. You know, nothing's a hundred percent, I don't know my biochemistry enough to know lisine would do something. It might be toxic to certain bacteria, and that's the reason it changed.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (32:25):
So Bill are, are, you're suggesting if we reduce methane, enteric methane production, we should see an increase in milk production?
Dr. Bill Weiss (32:34):
Sure If it's enough, you know, everything is, is you got to calculate. And if they use that energy for milk, you know, energy can be used for lots of things. But if you just, if, if you reduce methane and don't change anything else, there's more, that means they're going to be more net energy available to that calf. And again, it could go to milk. If it's in early lactation, chances are it’ll be directed toward milk. Mid to late lactation, it'd be directed to body condition. But the energy first law of thermodynamics says that energy has to go someplace. And a lot of times the difference is pretty small. So, we probably could never measure it, even though it's there, but we just can't match rumen.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (33:15):
So, Paul, I think what, this is like a seven to 10% reduction and methane production?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (33:22):
Yeah. Roughly. So we, on average, about 450 liters per day on the 0 lysine. And then it went to about yeah, 410 liters per day. And then, yeah, as Bill mentioned, you know, that the ripple effect is, and as Bill mentioned, you know, you see some efficiencies then that, that start to come up on the ratio of ME to D E.
Dr. Bill Weiss (33:53):
Yeah, I guess looking at this paper that with lysine, your efficiencies were 88 and a half percent without lysine 87.6%. That's not a big difference, but when they're eating so much energy, it is multiplied by a big number. So I think we're kind of coming to the end. So what I'd like to end with here is one is I'll ask the author, there's put him on the spot is, you know, no, no experiment is perfect unless I conducted it. So what, what would you change with this, this experiment, if you could try and redo it and money was not an object, which it all is here.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (34:32):
I like the question. So one of the things that we did observe, we haven't actually discussed it, but there is the rumen protected lysine, actually a decrease three methyl histamine. And one of the things that we wondered about is if that's an indication of some of that lysine actually going to the muscle. So maybe some of this lysine isn’t being used for milk protein synthesis. As I mentioned, we didn't see it, maybe that went to maybe that went over to, you know basically holding that, that muscle there. And Bill, I know you and I were talking recently about even like retained nitrogen. So we actually saw the lysine resulted in a, in a reduction in three methyl histamine, and they retained a little more nitrogen was so maybe there's some benefit from lysine there. So, you know, my, my stopping there- thinking, well, what could I do differently?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (35:40):
You know, it would really be interesting too, to do a randomized complete block study. This was a crossover design. So animals were switching treatments every 28 days. It's really hard to get a good estimate or observation on body stores. And so it would be really cool to feed more animals over a longer period of time. For instance, in a randomized complete block, looking at 12 week periods, maybe longer to see how body condition score could change. And then, you know, if you could look at methods, looking at the composition of that of those changes in body condition. So fat and protein would be something I'd be really interested in, especially given some of these observations we saw.
Dr. Bill Weiss (36:35):
I think, you know, we, we often look at energy partitioning. Milk to body, but we don't often do that with protein. You know we…these aren't fresh cows, but fresh cows mobilize a ton of protein. And we always thought, you know, by seven to eight weeks, they’re done. They’ve replenished stores, but we don't really know this is happening. You know, that's, long-term, that has to be good for the cow, give a credit to lysine if it, if this does happen. Hey, and then the last question on this paper is what would be the next experiment you would do with, with what you've learned with this one? What would be step two on this?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (37:14):
I mean, we actually did do a step two in this one, and then that was published. Mainly step three, but the step two study, actually Kyle McLean and that paper recently come out, it came out in the Journal of Dairy Science. You know, one of the things we were interested in is it was mentioned earlier in the podcast that feather meal may or may not contain blood. And so what we wanted to do is say, well, okay, let's, let’s look at the effects of histamine on feather meal with and without blood. And let's see if we can see, you know, a positive response. The assumption is the feather meal containing blood would contain the most lysine. And then if we added histidine into that, then we should see kind of an added bounce, both on lysine and then the histidine.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (38:14):
And so that was our next study and what we actually observed, I know you probably, you wanted to ask a question where I didn't have an answer, but I think I at least got an answer here. What we actually observed is like, there is a lot of variation in this blood meal, and what we observed is the feather meal without blood was actually digestible. And we actually saw more responses with the feather meal without blood. And so that I think, you know, goes back to some of the variation that we see in these byproducts and why they're important. And when we're formulating amino acids, you know, we're just trying to jiggle a few grams here or there. The reality is the digestibility of some of our base ingredients, especially byproducts, may vary a lot more than what we're trying to jiggle with the amino acids. And so maybe it's unfair to me to say, well, we've already published the follow up study, but we did. And we saw some really cool things in that follow-up study that, that I think answer some of the questions that we saw in this one
Dr. Bill Weiss (39:22):
That just brought up one question for me too. Have you looked at the variation in the amino acid composition of feather?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (39:30):
Yeah, that's a really good question. And I would say, unfortunately we haven't. We have done a little bit of work actually. Cassidy Buse, one of my graduate students has looked at the variation in digestibility of our RUP. And then of course, crude protein, you and I have done that work. That would be the next step is actually looking at how amino acid may vary. And certainly when you look at these products with, and without blood, there's some big differences. We haven't done it. Most of that is due to the cost of amino acid analysis. And we've kind of we’ve kind of just broken off the points where, you know, fairly easy to measure a crude protein being one of them.
Dr. Bill Weiss (40:15):
Yeah. Just thinking, you know, when we get down to these. Amino acids, aren't quite micronutrients, but they're close. And with a variation, when we were talking a few grams, that variation could go from very deficient to Exodus, by a ton. And we see that, so are we going to switch gears completely here on this next paper has nothing to do with amino acids. But I picked it, this, it has to do with the effect of type of covering of corn silo. The one treatment was the standard plastic, often used. And then the other one was at one of these oxygen barrier films. And they took a corn silage chopped at 39% dry matter. So it's on the dry side, and it was alternate load. So the hybrid, the corn was chopped. The same day, went into two different silos, identical silos. One was covered with the standard plastic and tires.
Dr. Bill Weiss (41:11):
The other one had this, I’m just going to call it the, the barrier film over it. It went down the sides and then it was covered. You used gravel bags rather than tire. So there's a lot of, a lot of differences, but we're just going to say barrier system versus conventional. And then they, they did the standard measurements for silage quality that's been published previously. And so we're not going to go into a lot of that, but then they also fed this, which to my knowledge has not been done previously. It was fed to heifers, and they did this. I think one is, is probably that's an animal they had available, but they can also feed very, very high silage diets. The diets were 80% corn silages. The heifers were about 570 pounds and they fed it for, I believe 60 days. Two months.
Dr. Bill Weiss (42:04):
And the results are, I'm just going to give a quick overview of their results and we'll bring others into the discussion. As again, it did what we expected at high, the oxygen barrier, higher lactic, lower pH, lower temperatures, better stability. So all that's pretty much standard stuff- it's been shown to greatly improve fermentation with the barriers. They measure dry matter loss, and you do this by burying bags in the silage, and you'd take them out and weigh it and analyze it. And again, that's been done, and they reduced, their losses were reduced, especially in the top. I think they, as you, the top six inches and then the entire silage. They cut losses, the top six inches in half from 8% down to 4. Losses within the mass deeper than the mass weren't, weren't different. So again, all of this was pretty much expected, but then what they did was when they fed this, as they're feeding, they took out I think, six or eight inches a day.
Dr. Bill Weiss (43:10):
So pretty good feed out rates. And they, before they fed it, they appraised, they said, okay, this silage, they called it in edible. And it was moldy, rotten, hot. And the rest was what they call edible and they weighed those two fractions, but then they blended it back together. So they fed what was called inedible. And the inedible silage was 4% of this, of the silage with the standard covering 4%. And with the barrier, it was less than 1%. So, you know, if the dry matter losses weren't that much better with the barrier, but if you look at what the inedible or the edible stuff was, was a whole lot better. But again, they fed, fed this, they blended it back together in the same thing, and they fed it to these heifers. Then they… what they found when they fed it is that the heifers fed the, the barrier silages 82 pounds more dry matter a day, which you know, is that's a very significant increase. And they grew at almost a third of a pound faster per day, over this 60-day period. Feed efficiency was the same. I guess the bottom line question for the group here is, is with the better ADG, and reduce silage losses is the barrier films more expensive there? No question on that, is it worth it? Do you think this would be enough to, to justify the cost? Or what would you consider when you're doing an economic analysis of it all, what else should be considered?
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (44:51):
Yeah. So, so how would that translate to lactating cow then?
Dr. Bill Weiss (44:56):
It's a good question. What do you think, do you think that'd be greater effect or lesser effect?
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (45:01):
Those heifers that were fed the the oxygen barrier corn silage. So they, they ate more meals per day, right. And they, and they're eating, but also their eating rate was faster, which was interesting. So I would think that would have a lot of implications, especially, and in transition counts or in overcrowding situations.
Dr. Bill Weiss (45:28):
And you know, that the intake gain was 10%. They ate 10% more than the controls. And just think if we could increase the lactating callback intake by probably one, because we're not going to feed 80% silage diet, but you got half that- just think of what milk that was. And this was only 4% junk silage in this stuff compared to about 1% junk silage. So just think just that little bit of stuff that should be scraped away and thrown away at this, this large of an effect. And to me, that was extremely surprising.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (46:02):
I mean, when you think about nutritionists in the field, oh, I don't know. I don't know how many of them are taking when you talk about representative samples of what is animals are actually eating, or are they digging to, you know, unspoiled feed, what are they sending in? But, you know, even if they were sending representative samples of what's in the forage mass, I would say the things that they're measuring routinely for forage quality, aren't the things that are indicative of forage quality in this study, which is in table one, looking at yeast, lactic, acids, spores, even ammonia, and the VFA. So, these are differences that don't even show up on the forage tests. The other thing that I find interesting is the, the digestibility between these two forages were….there was no difference in digestibility, maybe a little bit on crude protein, but it's mainly just a trend, but no differences really in digestibility.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (47:06):
So this is a big part of this, I think is just palatability, right? Behavior, you know, that intersection between nutrition and behavior. And especially if you think about you know, picky animals, animals that were really sensitive, tried to get feed intake, as Clay mentioned, transition cows. I definitely think, you know, going through the economics of it is critically important. And so yeah, looking at differences in expected dry matter intake. And then, you know, some of these other things that maybe aren't here, mycotoxins, you know, that's not something that we can measure, but is there a cost to that? Yeah, absolutely. Again, harder to measure. So I definitely think there's a case to be made to evaluate the economics of this. And I think in lactating cows, there could be some huge advantages.
Dr. Bill Weiss (48:00):
I just think from me going out once in a while, you know, a lot of, a lot of producers will scrape away the junk, put in a pile and give the good side to just a lactating cows, but then they turn around and say, oh, these are just heifers and give them this crap. And this just shows how sensitive, again, animals that don't need a lot- how sensitive, or how important is this, or how detrimental this young stuff really convenient to me just justifies. Even if you, you don't want to use the barrier film, it just really justifies throwing away that crap is just not the price. A little bit of feed dollars you're saving is, is clearly not economical.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (48:44):
Bill, it reminds me of a was a paper, I don't know, it was probably published 10 or 12 years ago out of Keith Balsam's.. where, where, where they intentionally created spoilage and fed it to beef steers with dramatic results.
Dr. Bill Weiss (48:59):
Oh, it was huge. I remember that study and I was going to look up the details. I know the highest level they fed was 16% junk silage with the remainder of good silage. And I think, but I think the lowest, they were like six or seven. So, and this is even lower just showing how sensitive these animals are to stuff that we know we shouldn't be feeding. They did this with beef animals several years.
Scott Sorrell (49:22):
Someone remind me: from an analytical perspective where the edible portions of both piles deemed the same from a nutritional perspective.
Dr. Bill Weiss (49:30):
Yeah. If I remember correctly, they didn't really analyze either /both of them that they analyzed the top six inches, which probably made up the majority of the inedible, and the rest and on the standard nutrients, not the stuff Paul was talking about, but protein, fiber, et cetera, those were pretty similar. So it's got to be more than, than that. Just that it's just, it is not clearly not just the standard nutrients. I think with the feeding behavior data, it is a palatability issue. I use that word a lot, and a lot of times we shouldn't use it, but in this case, just because they changed the way they eat, they did, they took a long time for them to eat it. So I think these heifers were thinking God maybe something better will show up if I don't eat this stuff, but…
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (50:15):
There was a difference in aerobic stability to which you’d expect.
Dr. Bill Weiss (50:20):
And I think that the film is clearly made better silage, but even if you don't want to spend that money, throw away the junk, it's just not even to heifers and clearly dry cows. I think it would be a catastrophe, but it's just not worth it. Silage is not that valuable. Any, anything else on this paper?
Dr. Paul Kononoff (50:41):
No. I mean, I think just broadly speaking just shows you the value of, of good making good quality forage. I mean, I I've been to feedlots where they don't even cover silage. There is an investment in getting it there and you're not, you know, you're going to negatively affect feed intakes in a big way. And you can imagine if this stuff wasn't even covered what the quality would look like.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (51:08):
And of course, Bill the only the spoilers are throwing away. It's only what they can see visually. It's spoiled below that.
Dr. Bill Weiss (51:15):
That. Exactly. I know Keith's done. There has been people where they looked at silage, the silage quality measures and different inches from the top and it, it goes down sometimes it's 18 to 24 inches of still inferior silage. So it, it can be go bad, a long way and look okay.
Scott Sorrell (51:37):
Well gentlemen, I think that's going to take us to our last call. And with that, what I'd like to do is ask all three of you to come up with two key takeaways from today's discussion and I'll let Clay kick it off.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (51:51):
Well, so yeah, I think, I think on the first paper on the amino acid side certainly the, you know, the, the importance of amino acid supplementation of these early lactation cows. The histidine findings were pretty interesting in this study. Of course, there is no commercially available RP histidine right now, really, you know, at that point, you know, where do you turn it? It it'd be, it'd be to a high-quality blood product at that point, really, you know, as far as looking, looking, looking at a histamine source there. So that that would be a takeaway to me, it actually amazes me. If you look through the literature where we supplement in histidine, we, we almost always see a positive response, a production response with his study. So I, I find that very interesting, the silage barrier paper, again, just a really great example, again, as Paul alluded to of, you know, putting up high quality forage and, how it could negatively affect performance if you, if you don't take care to preserve it properly.
Dr. Paul Kononoff (53:08):
Okay. So yeah, as, as far as takeaway points on my side of things, you know, just, you know, when feed byproducts, I think there's tremendous opportunities to reduce feed costs by feeding byproducts. But I do think in a when possible, think that our studies demonstrate the importance of knowing chemical composition. Especially when you're doing the fine tuning of amino acid balancing. So you know byproducts have their value in reducing feed costs, but it's still important to know feed composition. The other one, we didn't really talk about it, but I'll just say the dangers of using ratios. If you look at feed efficiencies in that silage paper, feed efficiency was the same and not statistically different. However, that doesn't mean that there's no difference. There was tremendous differences in feed intake and average daily gain. And so I'd maybe say a takeaway is, you know, be wary of ratios and indexes because they may not be telling the whole story.
Scott Sorrell (54:18):
All right. Thank you, bill. Any final words from you? Yeah,
Dr. Bill Weiss (54:22):
I'll start with the last paper and this is a bit more philosophical and that is, you know, that was a very, very simple experiment, but it has tremendous application. Experiments don't have to be real complicated still to help the industry a lot. The first paper, I think, emphasizes the importance of, of integrating energy and protein. There's too many amino acid papers: all they do is look at protein measures and there's too many energy type papers that all you look at is energy things. And these things are tightly, tightly interrelated. And I think especially, I'm more interested in energy and I think protein and type of protein, probably amino acids is going to have a huge effect or at least a significant effect on energy in these, in these diets. And that's something we've almost totally ignored. And so that methane thing Paul found, it may not be real, but there is data suggesting protein or showing protein clearly affects net energy values of diets. And so this, this is worth more and more research. Excellent.
Scott Sorrell (55:34):
Well, gentlemen, this has been a lot of fun and I want to thank you for participating and helping us kick off this new journal club. Really looking forward to having it as a, a new part of our podcast offerings. And I look forward to the next one when we get together here in about another month, I'd also like to thank our loyal listeners for stopping by once again, to spend some time with us here at the real science exchange. We're always looking to bring new insights into the science that is shaping our industry. If you have any ideas or topics or guests that you'd like to recommend, please reach out to us via email at anh.marketing@balchem.com. We're also looking to add a student audience to our next journal club podcast. If you're a student and would be interested in participating, please us an email again at anh.marketing@balchem.com
Scott Sorrell (56:29):
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