In this study, two basal diets were fed, one low-fat and one high-fat. The low-fat diet contained cottonseed meal and cottonseed hulls and the high-fat diet contained whole cottonseed. This balanced fiber and protein to try and make the difference between the basal diets and just the fatty acids. Basal diets were supplemented with two different fat supplements that had different ratios of palmitic and oleic acids. The applied question at hand was “Does fat need to be supplemented to a high-fat basal diet?” (5:32)
In this study, two basal diets were fed, one low-fat and one high-fat. The low-fat diet contained cottonseed meal and cottonseed hulls and the high-fat diet contained whole cottonseed. This balanced fiber and protein to try and make the difference between the basal diets and just the fatty acids. Basal diets were supplemented with two different fat supplements that had different ratios of palmitic and oleic acids. The applied question at hand was “Does fat need to be supplemented to a high-fat basal diet?” (5:32)
The low-fat diet contained 1.93% fatty acids and the high-fat diet contained 3.15% fatty acids. Fatty acid supplements were fed at 1.5% of dry matter and replaced soyhulls. The palmitic acid supplement contained 80% palmitic acid and 10% oleic acid. The palmitic + oleic acid supplement contained 60% palmitic acid and 30% oleic acid. Thirty-six cows were used in a split-plot Latin square design, with half the cows on each basal diet. Under each split-plot, cows were allocated to a 3x3 Latin square, evaluating a control treatment (no fat supplement), palmitic acid supplement, and palmitic + oleic acid supplement. (8:46)
Bill, Adam, and Clay discuss the increase in milk components the industry has experienced recently due to the powerful combination of genetics and nutrition. Hoard’s Dairyman reported that 2024 was the first year that the U.S. had averaged over 4% milk fat going back to 1924 when records began. (13:01)
Both fat supplements increased milk yield in low-fat and high-fat basal diets, but the magnitude of the increase was larger in the low-fat diet. The high palmitic acid diet increased milk yield more in cows fed the low-fat basal diet than the palmitic + oleic supplement did. High-fat basal diet cows had similar milk yield responses to both fatty acid supplements. The panel discusses the industry emphasis on milk components and if/when a threshold in performance might happen given the advancement of genomics and nutrition. (15:51)
Clay asks Adam to remind the listeners about the relationship between fatty acids and crude fat or ether extract. Adam recommends moving away from ether extract and focusing solely on fatty acid content. Bill, Adam, and Clay talk about the variability in the fatty acid content of various feedstuffs. (25:33)
Bill asks if the feed efficiency improvement with the fat supplementation was due to more of a gross energy or digestible/metabolizable energy effect. Adam suggests it may be a little of both. The diet is more energy-dense, but we also know now that some of those specific fatty acids have specific effects. Improvements in NDF digestibility are consistently observed with palmitic acid supplementation. Oleic acid improves fatty acid absorption and has an impact on adipose tissue metabolism and insulin sensitivity. Bill and Adam go on to talk more philosophically about the best way to measure feed efficiency in dairy cows. (29:02)
If Adam could do this experiment over again, he would have pushed the basal fat levels a bit more and had both lower-producing and higher-producing cows in the experiment. This leads to a discussion of how the results might have differed if distiller grains or soybeans were used instead of cottonseed in the experiment. Listeners should be careful not to extrapolate the results from this experiment to other fat sources. (33:55)
Adam emphasizes that we shouldn’t be afraid of feeding high-fat diets, either basal or supplemental fatty acids, especially to high-producing cows. We should be very mindful about where those fatty acids are coming from. We could provide the same nutrients by feeding either cottonseed or distillers grains, but how those ingredients feed out could be very different. (38:38)
In summary, Clay agrees we should take a fresh look at how much fat we’re feeding cows in basal diets and underlines the importance of the source of supplemental fatty acids. Bill concurs and commends Adam’s group for basically making cottonseed without fat in the low-fat basal diet, which allowed for very clean interpretations of the fatty acid supplement results. Adam underlines that we can feed higher fat diets, but the fatty acid profile of all of those ingredients we might use is going to be key. In addition to fatty acids in diets and supplements, de novo synthesis of milk fat from acetate is the other half of the equation. Bringing those together might be a strategy to keep up with genetic improvements and drive higher milk fat yield. (47:43)
You can find this episode’s journal club paper from JDS Communications here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666910223001114
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Scott Sorrell (00:10):
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Real Science Exchange, the pubcast where leading scientists and industry professionals meet over a few drinks to discuss satellite ideas and trends in animal nutrition. Hi, I'm Scott Sorrell, gonna be your host here tonight at Real Science Exchange. And tonight we're taking a deeper dive into one of our favorite segments, and that would be the Journal Club. We're joined by Dr. Adam Locke from Michigan State University to discuss his paper titled Milk Production Responses of Dairy Cows to Fatty Acid Supplements with different ratios of Palmitic Oleic acids, and low and high fat basal diets. But before we get started, I'd like to make a few introductions. First Dr. Bill Weiss and, and Bill, at the risk of alienating the majority of our audience, I would like to compliment you on your scarlet shirt.
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:01):
It was not a random choice, so
Scott Sorrell (01:03):
And also would like to ask you what do you think? What, what'd you think of that game last Friday?
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:12):
They were playing extraordinarily good. It was a great game. Exciting. And the right team won. So it's a great game,
Scott Sorrell (01:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was in the stands very close to where that last fumble and runback took place, so I made it down to Dallas. So that was, that was quite a bit of fun. So, so thank you for our audience for the bit of patience there. You know, I know us Ohio State fans are insufferable and, and, and we've got a bad rap and it's, it's deserved
Dr. Adam Lock (01:54):
Around here. It's basketball season.
Scott Sorrell (01:56):
Well, that's true. All right, we celebrate basketball here as well at the Real Science Exchange. With that, why don't we go ahead and introduce Adam. Adam, you're one of our favorite guests. Thank you for joining us here. Any anything in your class tonight?
Dr. Adam Lock (02:11):
I, I, I do, Scott. Thank you. Well, I always have my never too far from a mug of tea here, so I always have my mug of tea, and I just returned from England. So I've got a new stash of tea, but something else I also bought back from England, and so I have a little bit of Bush Mills whiskey here from Northern Ireland. That was one of the last places. My dad and I visited on a, on a, on a work trip for me. He my late dad and we bought a couple bowls that you could only get at the distillery there, so that's kind of got a special meaning to me, so
Scott Sorrell (02:44):
Very nice. Ah, awesome. Any, any milk and that tea?
Dr. Adam Lock (02:48):
Oh, there's no other way to drink tea, So
Scott Sorrell (02:52):
I haven't picked up that habit yet, but I, I must say, being in the dairy industry, I should give it a try. Yeah. Bill, I kind of skipped over you. What's in your glass tonight?
Dr. Bill Weiss (03:01):
Well, I have a beer from Braxton Brewery called Spur American Lager. It's made right across the river in Covington, Kentucky. Very, very, very tasty.
Scott Sorrell (03:12):
All right. And, and I'm enjoying this is called, this is from a local brewery and it's called Log Tavern Brewery, and this one's called Hartford Hayes. So that's what I'm enjoying tonight. And the reason I've got it here, I, I had to, I'm hosting a party this coming Monday and to watch the Natty. And so I've got several growlers of, of some of the local beer on, on, on tap. Before we get started here, I also need to introduce our co-host. We got Dr. Clay Zimmerman back with us once again. Yep. Welcome Clay. Thanks,
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (03:53):
Scott. I was gonna say, you keep mentioning the Natty Bill, that's where you live, right?
Dr. Bill Weiss (03:59):
I actually kind of got that confused for a while.
Scott Sorrell (04:05):
Sorry about that. This is the, our, our first podcast recording of the year. So before we get started, guys, I, what I'd like to is raise our glass to an awesome 2025. Cheers. Cheers.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (04:17):
Cheers.
Scott Sorrell (04:26):
Balchem has invested decades perfecting the art of nutrient encapsulation, and now no. AminoShure XL is setting a new standard, delivering 35% more metabolizable lysine than leading competitors. With AminoShure xl, you can provide your cows with a more consistent and higher quality source of metabolizable lysine leading to improved and more dependable results. A recent meta-analysis found that feeding rumen protected lysine led to an increase in milk fat percentage and 4.4 more pounds of energy corrected milk. Feed new AminoShure XL to your cows and have confidence that you're using the most consistent, reliable, and cost-effective source of lysine on the market today. Learn more at balchem.com/xl. So Bill, you've picked another great paper. So why don't you just start off by diving right in. Give us an overview of the paper and why'd you pick it?
Dr. Bill Weiss (05:32):
Okay. Well, this is the shorter paper in JDS communication. So these are brief and to the point which I like. I'm getting more, I like, I like brevity more than long papers. I think it's an important topic. It's answering an important question. And again, these are limited in scope, but that doesn't mean they're not important because they answer a very specific question. And I used to get this question similar to this: what's the value of supplemental fat when there's bad, when the basal diet is also high fat? So Adam, I'd start with you in the question I always ask.
Dr. Adam Lock (06:13):
Yeah, yeah. Thank you Bill. And thanks the opportunity to talk about the paper. Well, I think as you know, this we've been working in this area now for probably a decade now around different fatty acids, supplemental fatty acids milk fat production. So this specific study is kind of an incremental step from some previous work. And we'd done two previous studies where we had looked at high and low fat basal diets and how they would interact with different fatty acid blends. In both the previous studies it was, we probably took the more practical approach of high and low fat diets where we either had whole cotton seed or soy holes, you know, and from a, from a purely, you know, I guess more, more basic sort of side of that, there's always, there was always the concern about was that also impacted room and fermentation and having some of the responses.
Dr. Adam Lock (07:14):
So could we truly call those just low and high fat basal diets? They're really whole cotton seed soy health. So in this study here now Alicia and I, I should mention Alicia Bales here was the first author on this. And you have seen a number of her PhD papers come out recently as well. And she led all of our high ole soybean work as well. This is one of her first papers. And in this one, we actually truly wanted to try and make the difference between those basal diets, the fatty acids. So we either used whole cotton seed or cotton seed mill and cotton seed Hals. So to try and balance the, I guess the fiber and protein side of, of those ingredients as well. So we had the low and the high fat basal diets, and then we utilized two different commercially available fat supplements that had different ratios of permitting, alec and oleic.
Dr. Adam Lock (08:10):
And we'd done a lot of work on those before with the idea that both of them should increase milk production. But depending on level of milk production, we would, you, you could see differences between those. But as, as you, as you alluded to the idea of if I have a high fat basal diet, do I even need supplemental fat? This kind of is, you know, the very applied question there. Or if I don't have access to some of those, am I better off putting in a supplemental fat? So that's kind of the how we got to this point here. Now,
Dr. Bill Weiss (08:46):
The fats you added at about, what, one, 1.8 or one? I think it's about 1.8%. And the bay, the, the difference between the high and low was, if I'm looking right now, was about 3, 2, 2 or two units or so. So with this, with the high fat was about two units higher in fatty acid than the control. So
Dr. Adam Lock (09:09):
Yeah, so it wasn't, you know, the high fat basal diet wasn't, you know, particularly high. But then when you added another one and a half percent supplemental fat on top of that, we got up to over four point a half percent fatty acids in the diet. In both the diets we added, our, our goal was to add one and a half percent supplemental fatty acids. So in the, in the treatment that was the, what we call the 60 30 blend of palmitic oleic, that was a calcium salt. So the actual amount we were adding is a little bit more than, than in, in the prill product, which was the 80 10 palmitic oleic acid.
Dr. Bill Weiss (09:47):
Yeah, I think it was not 9% whole cotton seed. So that's a fairly typical, it's not the highest level, but fairly
Dr. Adam Lock (09:53):
Typical. No, not very not. Yeah. And then we just, we just published a recent study doing a dose response of cotton seed and that the eight to that 16% range, we got some nice nice production responses, so we we're not too high. You know, in hindsight, could we have gone a bit higher? Maybe. But one of our, well, I guess one of my sort of goals here with, with all this work is to keep it commercially relevant or practically relevant. So,
Dr. Bill Weiss (10:23):
And we don't, we don't like to go into a lot of statistics, but the design, just the experimental design, not the model or anything like that, was a little bit different from what a lot of people use. Could you explain that? And again, for non statisticians?
Dr. Adam Lock (10:37):
Yeah. Well, I, I'm a non statistician, so that's an easy one for me. I, I was worried you were gonna ask me some statistical questions. Now I always surround myself with good people that are very good at statistics. Yeah, so this is the, this was the third time we'd run a study with this design. The first one first time we did it, it was with Jonas Desa for his first PhD. And actually Dr. Norman San Pierre helped us set it up someone you're all familiar with, of course. So it's a split plot Latin Square. So in this case, we had 32 cows no, 36 cows, sorry. And we, and we split them into two groups of 18, and that, that's where we had the split plot. So we either had 18 cows on the low fat diet, or 18 cows on the high fat diet.
Dr. Adam Lock (11:26):
And those cows never changed off those diets across the whole study. Under each of those split plots, we had a free by three Latin square. Okay. So we had our control, no supplemental fat, and then we had our, what we called our palmitic rich treatment, and then our palmitic and oleic acid blend. So each cow within that split plot saw all three of those treatments. These were 21 day periods, so very typical sort of Latin square dairy and nutrition period length. The idea there is that we can start to look at interactions between basal diet and the different treatments. And we've done that with this now and also when we've had a four by four Latin square. One of the benefits here is, you know, if you tried to run every cow through every treatment, we'd be getting up to a minimum of six periods here and then, you know, cows might be getting too far out in lactation. So what we often have done in some of these studies the factor that we're, we think but it might be the cleanest factor to look at here, low versus high fat. We made that as our main split plots. And then our other questions of interest whether it be different fatty acid profiles or factorial design we would put those in the Latin square
Dr. Bill Weiss (12:48):
And also reduces the, if there's an adaptation adjustment. They don't, they don't have to keep, they don't switch so much. And so I think that's a big, a big benefit of these things too. Yeah,
Dr. Adam Lock (12:58):
That's a very good point. Yeah.
Dr. Bill Weiss (13:01):
We'll go into the, the diets a little bit. Not too much. I had this one, one burning question here, and that is you guys in Michigan, like high moisture corn
Dr. Adam Lock (13:27):
Well,
Dr. Bill Weiss (13:28):
To be perfect. These were 30, 31% starch Yeah. With high moisture corns. Yeah,
Dr. Adam Lock (13:32):
We, I think we formulated a 30, and by the time we got all the ingredients back at the end, we were a little bit high. This was probably actually one of our last studies that we had high moisture corn in. You know, we had some storage issues at the dairy farm. So we've, since then, we've not been using high moisture corn. And ever since I came here, you know, a lot of these studies had a pretty even blend of dry cow, dry corn, high moisture corn, especially in the higher producing cows. I mean, these cows are up 50 kilos, so what, a hundred and say 110 pounds. Yeah. So, you know, pretty good producing cows. We, you know, I think the, we have good forage in, in these diets as well. You know, forage, NDF yeah, I guess it's not overly high, but there's some good buffering there in, in the protein packs we had we, we worked with a commercial company. They, they helped put our diets together. So I think this would be a fairly normal milk fat per where we would be seeing actually, compared to where we are now. This was, we did this study in, what, 2019? I think? 2020? 2020 I think it was. You know, our herds averaging a bit over four now, milk fat.
Dr. Bill Weiss (14:54):
It's what three between three seven and three nine. Again, with that much starch from high moisture corn, I was, I was impressed. I just, it was a very good milk fat.
Dr. Adam Lock (15:05):
We, we, we've been blessed here, I think for a long time now with some very good genetic cows here as well. And that's why we've been fortunate to be able to do a lot of these studies on very high producing cows as well.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (15:16):
I was gonna say, I think we need to adjust our thinking a little bit on where fat test should be, right? Like right there a month now that us milk supplies averaging a four to
Dr. Bill Weiss (15:27):
Yeah.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (15:27):
It's amazing how much had gone up.
Dr. Adam Lock (15:30):
I saw an article in hordes recently that 2024 was the first year that the US had averaged over 4% going all the way back to 1924 when record started. So
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (15:42):
Yeah,
Dr. Bill Weiss (15:44):
It's amazing what genetics and nutrition can do. So
Dr. Adam Lock (15:48):
Yeah, they certainly go hand in hand.
Dr. Bill Weiss (15:51):
Well, I guess we can jump into the production data or the data, and I guess first of all, you know, the first question I always ask is interactions. Was there any substantial interactions between basal fat and fatty acid supplementation?
Dr. Adam Lock (16:09):
Yeah, that's always a good, so, you know, when you design the study, you know, these, this type of study is designed to look at interactions. And so that's, you know, if we see an interaction, the, the main effects aren't, certainly, aren't as important at that point. You need to wanna start breaking it out and looking at those in interactions. And you know, that's the interesting part of some of these studies, to be honest, we didn't really see too many treatment, what I'd just call treatment by basal diet interactions. The only one that was really, you know, a trend for significance there or significant was for milk yield and milk lactose. And that, even that trend is a interesting one where the fat supplements both increased milk yielded in the low fat and the high fat diets, but the actual, the magnitude of that increase was more in the low fat diet than, than it was. So it wasn't an opposite type, you know, interaction is what that you often think of interactions. And then in the low fat diet, we actually, the high palmitic diet increased milk yield more than the palmitic and oleic treatment, whereas in the higher producing cows they, it gave similar responses.
Dr. Bill Weiss (17:23):
It wasn't, I, you know, if you would've asked me, I'd expected the, you know, if you're already feeding basil fat, higher fat, then you add fat, I'd expect a smaller marginal effect, and that's what you get. It wasn't as much, they weren't that much different. I mean, one by roughly calculating one was about a half a kilo. The, the high fat, when you added fat to the diet, you got about a half a kilo of milk with the low fat, you got about 8.8 kilos. So it wasn't a huge difference, but yeah, kind of what I would've expected.
Dr. Adam Lock (17:53):
And, and then when you, you know, if you take that out to sort of fat corrected, energy corrected milk, we don't actually see the interaction at that point. We see, see the main effects of those treatments. So you know, overall the responses, to be honest, to the fat treatments, because nothing ever works exactly how you expect. But the actual overall sort of kilograms or pounds increase weren't as great in this study as what we've seen in some previous studies. And, you know, some of that depends on your starting cows as well.
Dr. Bill Weiss (18:26):
So if you wanna just kind of, oh, go ahead, Clay. Sorry, go ahead.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (18:30):
Adam, I, I was curious, what was the days in milk of these cows at the start of the trial?
Dr. Adam Lock (18:36):
They were they're all post peak, mid, mid lactation cows. They were about a hundred and yeah, about 150 k, 50 days in milk.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (18:46):
Okay.
Dr. Adam Lock (18:47):
Yeah. You know, and the, that greater increase with the palmitic versus the parika leg and the low-fat cows does fit with some of the work we've done previously with production level and palmitic and ect, because those low fat cows, you know, had lower milk production than what the high fat cows did. Because that main effect of you know of that high low fat had some had some you could see that, that they were a bit lower in on those diets. So the lower producing cow we would perhaps expect from our previous work to respond better to the high parid. What was interesting here is that the palmitic and oleic in didn't, that there weren't differences between the two overall. But when we look back at our data, these cows all started around 50 kilos, and that was kind of a, a range of previously we've seen that both of these treatments have a similar production response.
Dr. Adam Lock (19:52):
I think if we had some very high producing cows, we would've seen a better response to the palmitic and oleic blend. If we'd had lower producing cows, the palmitic would've, would've performed better. And you know, maybe that's a case of hindsight on which cows we start with with, but also we're always somewhat limited by which cows we have available when we do these, these studies. And and this was the group we had available. It was a very high group good producing group. And, and, you know, both the supplements had a, had a response in there.
Dr. Bill Weiss (20:25):
And you, you got, you know, on, in that same article you mentioned earlier in hoards they also made kind of, they didn't exactly say this, I'm paraphrasing, but they said, you know, milk yield is almost becoming meaningless. Its component yields. And I think that's not too far from the truth. So, you know, your, your components went up. I mean, there's, you know, there's statistically increased fat with, with both the basal treatment and the fatty acid treatment and protein went up, protein yield went up with with the supplement thing. So is, what's your opinion on just not quite ignoring milk yield? Because it's still in there, but it's saying, it's basically no big deal if milk goes up as long as component yield goes up.
Dr. Adam Lock (21:14):
I, I would totally agree probably what 90, 95% of all markets here in, in the us are paid for on the pounds of fat and protein. The reality probably is if you could get more fat and protein and less fluid, the farmer would, would be better off from a shipping point of view. You know, I think yield of fat, yield of protein, and then that are, are, are our key. And then energy corrected milk is kind of a, is somewhat of a way to capture, you know the overall responses to those. But no, I would agree. I mean, I'm also hearing more now, you know, a lot of people, I think minor, minor institute was one of the first places I saw coin, that seven pound club to, you know, having your cows average seven pounds of fat and protein. But now I'm hearing more people that are looking to push that to eight pounds.
Dr. Adam Lock (22:05):
You know, I just saw some DHIA data from Michigan recently. 'cause Our farm manager wanted us to, to, to get to, to do somewhat better on this. But there are some herds here, and I know elsewhere well over a hundred pound average with like 4, 4, 4, 5 milk fat, you know, 3, 2, 3, 3 protein. And as you Mike Vander ha and I were talking about that recently, and you know, as, as you said, bill, it's the, this, the genetics and the nutrition, and we certainly couldn't be doing this with just one or the other. But that speed of those, those generation intervals with that genetic selection and that increase in focus on the components is certainly a huge driver. And probably to some extent as a nutritionist, we need to keep up with that advancements in some respects here. Now,
Scott Sorrell (22:53):
You know, you guys had kind of mentioned that earlier on. Is that changing the amount of fat that a cow can actually adapt to or assimilate, do you think?
Dr. Adam Lock (23:06):
Well, that, that's a, that's a good question. I, I kind of tongue in cheek say, sometimes the highest fat diet a a dairy cow probably ever sees is one that you throw out under fresh lush pasture. You know, they can be pretty high fat diets. I, I would say in general,
Dr. Adam Lock (23:25):
We feed probably two lower fatty acid based diets. And that a lot of it, as clay sort of said earlier is, is a kind of a holdup still now from the, the last 20 years where we were struggling with milk fat depression a lot, you know, when I, when I first moved over here over 20 years ago now, you know, 3, 5, 3 6 was a pretty good milk fat, right? So one of the only ways we could maybe manage it at that time was to come back on dietary fat, right? Especially on, you know, available fat in the room. And but now we're getting a much better understanding as, as Bill just said, feeding a 31% starch high moisture corn diet and still getting good milk fat. I think we can start to push that more and probably more and more from the basil diet, right? Not, not just from a supplemental fat source. You know, we have access now to, you know, o oil seeds that could help supply more basil fat in the diet or other sources that I think we can take more more utilize more in the future. But, you know, with these higher pro, higher production and higher component yields, Scott, we're, we need to be able to supply the building blocks and the nutrients that, that she needs to make all of that, right?
Scott Sorrell (24:40):
Yeah. So, absolutely, and, and I'm wondering where do we, do we ever hit a wall, right? These cows are, they're not slowing down, they're accelerating in terms, you know, what genomics has done and, and, and what they can do. How far can we go?
Dr. Adam Lock (24:55):
Well I, I always refer to a, a quote Dr. Baumer made up for, for a talk a number of years ago now, where basically I think the highest producers of today are gonna be the average producers of the future. So, you know, we know the sheer volume of or, or yield of milk components some of these record holders can make, or these very high herds can make. And you know, we're probably gonna continue going that way, right? We're now, we are also doing it much faster now than, than before as well, which is right. Yeah, I don't think there's no sign of slowing down right now, for sure.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (25:33):
Yeah. Adam, can you remind our listeners what's the relationship between fatty acid level and the diet and a crude fat or ether extract,
Dr. Adam Lock (25:45):
Ether extract? Well, I would my recommendation is that we, we stopped talking about ether extract and the most recent nascent that Dr. Weiss was involved in, you know, really promoted using the term fatty measuring fatty acids, that relationship across a diet, a typical diet, you know, I would normally take off at least one unit or fee for extract for fatty acids. Now, within individual feed ingredients, that is very different. If I look at cotton seed distillers grains, they're almost equal. But when you start looking at the forages, particularly the greener forages ether extract is basically anything that's soluble in ether. And those forages and grasses contain a lot of chlorophyll type pigments that are soluble in efa. So that could be some of those only maybe 50% of that ether extract would be the fatty acids. And I always, like Jim Drake used the term that's the nutritional currency of fat, is the fatty acids. So I don't even, I sometimes get asked to report e for extract on our papers, and I was like, no, you know it's the fatty acids that we have to focus on. And, you know, I think all, all commercial labs have ways of doing that now. And the nutrition models that I'm aware of all have fatty acids in, and Lu Alano has a really good chapter on that in the, in the recent nascent,
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (27:11):
So a basil, a ba, a basil diet where you're not adding any supplemental fat or oil seeds, I would say is 2% fatty acids pretty typical.
Dr. Adam Lock (27:26):
Yeah, two to two, two and a half, maybe up to 3%. You know, there is gonna be some variability in the fat content of EU forages, right? There's some studies showing that in interestingly, that's the one value we often just use book values for, for feed. So, you know, I think it's important that we get some, some measures there. But I think that would be a normal, so that would be, you know, maybe three to 4% e for extract.
Dr. Bill Weiss (27:52):
Some of these byproducts can be really distillers. There can be high corn, some, some corn grains can be 5% fat. So, and so it, it's a lot we say it's not that variable, but if it real, when you look at it as a proportion of the mean, it's, it's actually a lot more variable than people think. So,
Dr. Adam Lock (28:11):
And, and I think across all of those feeds, the total fatty acid content of those feeds is gonna be more variable than the actual fatty acid profile
Dr. Bill Weiss (28:20):
Ex Oh yeah. Especially forages, especially
Dr. Adam Lock (28:23):
Forage. Yeah. Yeah. The forages the profile isn't gonna change hugely with within a forage type, but the, the content could change more than that. Exactly. And I think we'd even see that in some of our oil seeds and other products with, with can't see, this is something we've been talking with Kevin INE and others with lately. The challenge we can't see is sometimes getting a, an accurate representative sample for wet chemistry of it. So you can see some variability there and there's probably some methodology improvements there. We could probably get into it
Dr. Bill Weiss (28:54):
Some. It's, it's a feed you hate to have to analyze. You just hate it for anything fat or anything. So
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (29:00):
Dr. Bill Weiss (29:02):
I wanna talk a little bit about energy. You got feed, feed efficiency increase with the high fat diets. Do you think this is just the fat, you know, more gross energy or do you think it's in digestibility metabolize ability or is it just a gross energy thing?
Dr. Adam Lock (29:22):
Well, I, I think the answer probably yes to both all of that
Dr. Bill Weiss (29:34):
Actually the better, it's a better way to say it. So,
Dr. Adam Lock (29:37):
Yeah. I, you know, with par, obviously compared to the control diet, we're feeding a more energy dense treatment, right? And, and some people have said to me before, a white, your, your diet have to be ISO energetic or ISO lipid. And probably every time we submit paper we get that. But as some of our studies here show, I think it's important that you have a nons supplemental fat control because the argument then would be if we had a control at the same fat level as well, which fatty acids would we use now? And you could pick and choose that almost to see which way your treatments went. So both those treatments, the palmitic TIC and oleic ones are more energy dense compared to the control within the set, those two that they have similar energy. So that's part of it.
Dr. Adam Lock (30:29):
But we also now know that some of those specific fatty acids have specific effects. So palmitic acids a good example. We consistently see improvements in NDF digestibility and we think it's rumor digestibility and actually Jeff Kins had a nice discussion in that, in his recent ISRP paper around how maybe palmitic acid may help improve fiber digestibility. And then with the oleic acid, we've shown that it improves fatty acid absorption and oleic acid pro Andreas Contreras is looking at this a lot more now. It has some effects on adipose tissue metabolism incidence sensitivity. So I think part of it is we're simply just giving them a bit more energy. But also it's, it's more biological effects of those individual fatty acids. So, you know, for example, when we fed palmitic acid in a early lactation cow a while ago, I think a nutrition model predicted like, let's say we got one extra m cow from the diet, but when we actually did gross digestible energy, it was like free three and a half because of improvements in fiber digestibility. And, and different, different aspects like that. So
Dr. Bill Weiss (31:48):
I have a more philosophical question on feed efficiency. Should, you know, most people it's kilos are either fat correct or energy corrected milk per kilo of DMI, should we do milk energy rather than kilos you'd say this fat has so much energy, the protein has so much energy that lactose has so much energy and say total milk energy divided by feed. Is that a better way? Because I've always, since the energy corrected milk equation doesn't work as well as people think on equalizing energy.
Dr. Adam Lock (32:24):
Yeah, and it also depends on what milk energy values you're using in that model. And I know amino would always ask that you put the actual equation there. So, you know, what, what was your actual values for Bill? I think there's no single one, you know, ideal way of measuring feed efficiency, I don't think, and I think there's a whole range here. I think the challenge with basic, let's say milk energy over dietary energy is, unless you're doing digestibility and digestible energy, we're, we're, we're guessing at a number for for, for, for the feed side of it there. And then the, the other aspect is my colleagues here are looking at, if you're truly looking at feed efficiency, we should perhaps factor in body weight changes as well. So, you know, I don't think there's one single way of doing that. I think energy corrected milk over feed intake is a, you know, a milk to feed ratio, is it, it is pretty good. And as long as readers of the papers know what that is and the limitations of it I think that's the, it, it, it's still a, a, a valid thing to look at. But as Scott said earlier on, you know, maybe in the future we're gonna do that based on pounds of fat and protein.
Dr. Bill Weiss (33:55):
I guess my, the, the last question I usually ask is, you know, no, no experiment is perfect. No matter how many you've run. So what, what would you change if, if you could go back knowing what you know now, what, what would you change about this experiment?
Dr. Adam Lock (34:11):
Yes. Well I, I perhaps would've, based on what we've done more recently with oil seeds, I would've maybe pushed that basal fat level a bit more. And then in an ideal world, I would've, I would've had cows that were high and low higher production and lower production. We, we, we did that in a different study as well. I think that basal fat level would probably be, would've been the main part of it. I'm comfortable with that days. It, we had 21 day periods. I think that's pretty good. You know, if the focus had been on body weight changes, you know, longer periods might have, might have been better. There's a saying in, I think it's more of a British saying, but horses for courses, right? That depending on what your primary interest are, it sets, really sets up how you, how you do the study.
Dr. Bill Weiss (35:14):
Do you think this brings another, if you use cotton seed, I really like how you balance holes and meal to the cotton seed, but let's say if you did distillers or soybeans, do you, do you think you'd have gotten similar results or,
Dr. Adam Lock (35:30):
So there's a lot of factors in that one, yeah. Distillers,
Dr. Adam Lock (35:37):
My analogy with distillers, I think is I could feed the same level of added fat from cotton seed or from distillers grains. But I think the cotton seed was a, we would've had a much greater risk of those lower milk fats of that high moisture, high starch diet just because of that speed that the fatty acids are available in the room. You know, the, the benefit of cotton seed there is the cow actually has to break that seed, and then there's that slow release there. So I think we would've, we would probably have seen a lot more interactions if we'd had distillers. But I think we would've had some milk fat depression issues with that at, at the levels that, that we were adding. Now of course I know distillers have become probably much less variable than it was a number of years ago.
Dr. Adam Lock (36:25):
But yeah, but you have to have a good handle on what the fat content of it is and, you know, you have to be watching that ferment ability of the diet a lot more now with with beans with, if we'd done conventional soybeans as opposed to here, I think again, we probably would've been higher risk because you would, we were able to use roasted and ground beans and that again, would be much more, I think, more rapidly available in the room than the cotton seed. What I would like to, if I was doing this study right today, someone wanted to help support this study today, I would do something like this with higher ole soybeans. You know, that that's a growing interest in, in many parts of the country here in the, especially in the mid Midwest and Northeastern.
Dr. Adam Lock (37:16):
And as you know, we've done quite a few studies with them now, but that's lower risk compared to conventional soybeans 'cause they're about 80% oleic as opposed to mostly linoleic. And as we're showing here in this paper here, there's some probably some good benefits specifically to oleic, but how these treatment, these fat supplements would interact with those high oleic beans would be interesting. Because on the one hand, maybe they could replace fat supplements to some extent, certain fat supplements of certain fatty acid profiles. But you may also get an ad of effect of having both in the diet. And then we might start be talking about much higher fat diets. But that, yeah, that, that would be what I'd like to do going forward with some of this.
Dr. Bill Weiss (38:03):
I guess a a take home would be that listeners should be careful in extrapolating this results to other basal fat sources rather
Dr. Adam Lock (38:12):
Than, I I think that's a great way of saying it. Yes, it's cotton seed is a much slower release of those fatty acids. Yeah, I think that's a, that's a great way of concluding on that one. Yeah.
Scott Sorrell (38:25):
So kind of a follow up to that bill. So you know, what, what are some further practical implications of this research, Adam?
Dr. Adam Lock (38:38):
Well, I think it, one take home is we shouldn't be shouldn't be afraid of feeding high fat diets. You know, whether that's coming from basil or supplemental or both. I think these cows can, especially these high producing cows, can, can handle those high fat contents of the diet. And as, as Bill just said, be aware of what's where those fatty acids are coming from. Right? we often hear that debate around is it nutrients or is it ingredients that are the most important? And I think I asked Dr. Weiss that question at Tri-State last year, and he, we both said, yes, that, you know, they're both important, right? Yeah. And, and that cotton seed distillers is a good example of that provision, we could provide the same nutrients, but how those ingredients feed out could be very different. I think that some other take homes here is that, you know, we are continually showing some benefits of those higher tic and pica leg blends to these higher producing cows.
Dr. Adam Lock (39:40):
And, and you know, I I I think that's probably the main take homes. There are a lot of opportunities going forward. I think you know, in any study like this, I think you know, it's one small step in trying to better understand some of this, right? You know, all of these different studies are are incremental little steps, right? And the one thing that's probably not as practical in this paper, as in some of our others with this same study design is here, it's a plus and a minus from a pure research point of view, comparing cotton seed versus cotton seed holes, and cotton seed mill really pinpoints just that it was the fatty acid effect, whereas in reality here, maybe we might look at cotton seed versus soy hops. Okay. and, and I think you can extrapolate what you see here to that same scenario.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (40:34):
A Adam, I, I'm curious, you know, with your sort of your take home there, what, so what do you consider a high fat diet
Dr. Adam Lock (40:44):
Well, I would, I would be up over five, I think, you know, six 6%,
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (40:53):
6% fatty acids.
Dr. Adam Lock (40:55):
Yeah, we could, I think we can, we can easily go at that level. The, the couple dose response studies we just published in, in journal of Dairy Science we went up to 24% whole cotton seed. Now we dropped some intake at that high level and we did the same with high oleic soybeans, so we can get some very high fat diets. You are gonna see some drop offs in digestibility. So there's some give and takes and some of that. But one, you know, one take home from this discussion here to me, for me as well, is that we shouldn't be, that's, we sometimes maybe feed too lower fat diets for these high producing cows.
Scott Sorrell (41:38):
Yeah. Yeah. Just take that just a step further, Adam, I was just kind of curious. So is, is most of that from you, you mentioned digestibility, so is that from a ru digestibility or a a, a biological maximum of how much a cow can really use
Dr. Adam Lock (41:56):
From, from a fatty acid standpoint, that's gonna be limited reductions in absorption in the small intestine. All, all these long chain fatty acids are being absorbed in the small intestine. The limitation at that point, I think is emulsification capacity. You know and that's why, for example though, if I fed the same similar level of cotton seed that's bringing some more unsaturated fatty acids versus another source that may come more straight with saturated fatty acids in, in, in a supplement even though most of that linoleic in the, in the cotton is gonna get bio hydrogenated to stir it, some of those unsaturates are getting through and we've shown, for example, even 20 grams of oleic acid. It's additional into the small intestine, we can see a five, six percentage unit improvement in absorption. So that's where another added advantage potentially is some of these oil seed. You know, if you feed a high fat diet, you know, we wanna try and maintain some of those, that, that level of absorption, you know, the goal is we get more of these nutrients into the cow itself. Right.
Scott Sorrell (43:10):
All right. Bill, anything else for us?
Dr. Bill Weiss (43:13):
Just one, one last one. I was in graduate school, which was a million years ago. Don Palmquist was a one of my professors, and he said, and he, he said this for years and years, a cow can be fed as much fat as she puts out in milk. She, she, he just said that forever. And I just did a calculation that with this data that's about six and a half percent fatty acids. And so, you know, he, he might be be right even at these very, very high level, much higher than what when he was making these statements much, much higher. So
Dr. Adam Lock (43:43):
Yeah, that, yeah, and I still hear that one a lot. And of course, Don was the, you know, the leader of pushing this whole fatty acid digestion metabolism in dairy cows for a long, long time there, Ohio State with yourself. The one interesting thing, and this is something we're getting more interested in now, is we shouldn't just focus in on the fatty acid side in the diet, on how she makes milk fat. This is probably a bigger take home as well, is a lot of those fatty acids in milk are coming from acetate in the rumen and am, but predominantly acetate. So I think those farms now are the most successful, having those high production and high compo milk fat probably are the ones that probably have the best forages as well. So that's not just, we don't wanna just focus on one side of that, you know these dietary fatty acids are only contributing to 16 carbons and higher in milk. It's the acetate and butyrate that's contributed in that short and medium chain fatty acid. So the ary gland can make milk fat multiple different ways. She's very flexible in doing that. But if we, so we need to think going forward is how do we supply precursors for both sides of that, you know, higher basal fat diets, but can we maybe get more acetate being produced in the room and is that through better quality forages or, you know, o other ways that we can get some of that there,
Scott Sorrell (45:20):
Adam, kind of an off the wall kind of a question. You had mentioned before that maybe one of the limits was intestinal digestibility due to not enough emulsifiers there. Have we have we looked at supplementing emulsifiers? Hmm.
Dr. Adam Lock (45:34):
That's a that's a good question. We, we've done some oleic acid, I works as an emulsifier. We've also got a couple studies published where we looked at some polysorbate, some different types of polysorbate as as, as emulsifier. Of course the cow's natural way of doing it is lisolephasin.
Scott Sorrell (45:55):
Yeah.
Dr. Adam Lock (45:56):=
Coming from pan pancreatic juices in the liver. And I would be interested in doing some work with some, you know, exogenous li Lein. We've looked at lisolephasin itself, and we haven't published this yet, but we didn't see any improvements, so maybe it is really the lisolephasin that's important there, but I think there's, there's ways we can do it that way. Laic acid I think could be, could be important there and probably some of the polyunsaturates could all help absorption in some of that ways. But oleic acid is certainly one. Then that's again where those oil seeds I think have some benefits over like stec and rich supplemental fats because they're both deliver steric ultimately after bio hydrogenation, but with the oil seeds, we're getting some more of those unsaturates come through as well.
Scott Sorrell (46:49):
Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, gentlemen if that's it I think the ladies did flicker the lights. That means it is last call. And with that, what I'd like to do is and, and Adam, you've already given us some good take home messages, but I'd like to give the others as well a, another bite at the Apple to give us kind of their take home messages or what are some of the key things that, that the audience had to take from this discussion? And, and Clay, if you don't mind would you start us off?
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Dr. Clay Zimmerman (47:43):
Yeah, I mean, I think we hit on a lot of this already. Really great discussion there. So yeah, I would, I would reiterate what Adam was saying there that you know, we should take a fresh look at how much, how much fat we're feeding these cows on a basil diet in the basil diet. And certainly the sources make a big difference here. And yeah, I, I I really enjoyed this, this conversation. A lot, lot of, lot of, a lot of good points in this study.
Scott Sorrell (48:20):
Yeah. All right. Thanks Clay. Bill great paper. Yeah. Outdid yourself once again. Great guest. Anything you'd like to add to that?
Dr. Bill Weiss (48:29):
Yeah, it's just repeating what Clay and, and Adam said is, you know, we have to look at total diets, not just supplementation. I think cows can be fed a lot more fat than what historically was considered excess. And lastly, I really like what I really liked about this study, even though on practicality it's not that important, but for scientific it is. And that's the use of, he basically ma made whole cotton seed without fat, and that just makes the interpretation so much cleaner that you. You've isolated it as a fat, and I really like that in this. It's, it's hard to do in some studies. And so I, I really think that's a good way to do this if you can do it.
Scott Sorrell (49:10):
Yeah. Thanks.
Dr. Adam Lock (49:12):
Appreciate that.
Scott Sorrell (49:13):
Adam, any final words?
Dr. Adam Lock (49:15):
Oh, I think we've touched on all of them. I guess my final word here I think is as, as Clay said, you know, we can be looking at we can feed higher fat diets, I think, but the fatty acid profile of any and all of those ingredients that we might be using is gonna be key. Okay. and again, what we just talked about, the fatty acid fight side of it is one side of the milk fat synthesis equation. So we need to keep both sides of that in check and Kevin Pine and others, and we've done one study, have been looking at, at the de novo side of it as well. And it's bringing those together is maybe how we can keep up with that genetic improvement and, and, and drive more milk fat yield.
Scott Sorrell (50:03):
Yeah. Good. Well, gentlemen, this was a good one. I want to thank you guys for joining us here at the pub once again appreciate your time, appreciate your expertise and to our loyal audience, thank you for joining us here. Once again, we hope you learned something. We hope you had some fun. We hope to see you next time here at the Real Science Exchange, where it's always happy hour and you're always among friends.
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