In times of limited forage, dairy producers may need to feed diets lower in forage than is typical but would like to maintain milk production. In this study, two diets similar in neutral detergent fiber (NDF), starch, and crude protein with different amounts of forage were fed to 32 mid-lactation Holstein cows in a crossover design. The control diet (CON) contained high forage (55.5% of diet dry matter) with no supplemental fatty acids or amino acids. The low-forage diet (LF) contained 36.6% forage along with supplemental fat and rumen-protected methionine and lysine. As forage was removed from the LF diet, it was replaced with byproducts and high-moisture corn was replaced with dry corn.
In times of limited forage, dairy producers may need to feed diets lower in forage than is typical but would like to maintain milk production. In this study, two diets similar in neutral detergent fiber (NDF), starch, and crude protein with different amounts of forage were fed to 32 mid-lactation Holstein cows in a crossover design. The control diet (CON) contained high forage (55.5% of diet dry matter) with no supplemental fatty acids or amino acids. The low-forage diet (LF) contained 36.6% forage along with supplemental fat and rumen-protected methionine and lysine. As forage was removed from the LF diet, it was replaced with byproducts and high-moisture corn was replaced with dry corn. (4:42)
Dr. Lock added fat and amino acid supplements to the LF diet to not lose milk production. The fat supplement was a palmitic-acid-rich prill. Dr. Lock does not think the response would have been the same if a different fat supplement had been used. The LF diet was higher in fat and palmitic acid, but most other fatty acids were fairly similar between the two diets. (16:25)
Milk yields were similar between the two diets. Cows on the LF diet consumed about 1 kg more dry matter each day than CON-fed cows. Cows fed the LF diet also had higher milk fat and milk protein yields and content which led to an approximately 2 kg increase in energy-corrected milk compared to cows fed the CON diet. Dr. Lock believes the fat and amino acid supplementation were a key part of achieving these results, and they would not have seen the same response if those supplements had not been added to the LF diet. The LF diet spared around 5.5-6 kg of forage per day, and cows gained body condition. (22:03)
Dr. Weiss asks Dr. Lock to speculate if low-forage diets fed for longer periods would have negative health impacts. Dr. Lock feels that usually production would be negatively impacted by cow health issues, which was not the case here. However, if high-moisture corn had been used in the LF diet, he predicts they would have seen negative impacts. (27:18)
What about low-forage diets for early lactation cows? Dr. Lock suggests looking at diets in other parts of the world where forage is limited and see how dairy producers manage diets in those instances. He speculates that lower forage could be successfully implemented in early lactation cows after the fresh period. (31:09)
Dr. Weiss and Dr. Lock discuss the apparent improved digestibility of the LF diet given the increased production. While byproduct ingredients are often more fermentable in vitro, the results don’t always translate in vivo. Palmitic acid supplementation has been shown to improve fiber digestibility, so that may have happened in this experiment. (32:12)
On the protein side, we’ve moved away from talking about crude protein in the diet and toward amino acid concentrations. Dr. Lock would like to see the same trend in the industry for fat in the diet. A good leap was made recently from ether extract to total fatty acids, and he hopes to see individual fatty acids as the next step in that evolution. He recommends two questions be asked when considering a new fatty acid supplement. What is the fatty acid profile? What is the total fat content? The appropriate fatty acid profile is going to depend on the basal diet and what type of cow is being fed. Dr. Lock’s preference is a palmitic: oleic acid blend around 70:20 or 60:30 early in lactation, with a higher palmitic blend later in lactation. He expects the current work with different oilseeds to provide some good recommendations for feed ingredients to incorporate to increase dietary fat. (35:53)
As genetics continue to improve and nutrient requirements of cows continue to increase, is it conceivable that someday we are going to purposefully decrease fiber in the diet? While that may be the case, Dr. Lock reminds listeners that about half of milk fat comes from acetate and butyrate produced in the rumen, so fiber is still going to be critical. While we may lower the forage in a diet, forage quality is going to remain very important. (39:45)
The panel wraps up with their take-home messages from this paper. Clay looks forward to more research with a factorial design to further evaluate low-forage diets. Dr. Weiss reminds listeners there’s no one recipe for diets to achieve high yields of milk components. Lastly, Dr. Lock is excited about the future of research in this area and refining diet formulation in the area of fat supplementation. (43:21)
You can find this episode’s journal club paper from JDS Communications here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666910223001084
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Scott Sorrell (00:10):
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Real Science Exchange, the podcast 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 Rell. I'm gonna be your host here tonight at the Real Science Exchange. We're gonna take a deep dive into Yes, again, one of my favorite segments, which is the Journal Club with Dr. Bill Weiss. Tonight we're gonna be reviewing a paper written by Dr. Adam Locke from Michigan State University. And that paper was titled, potential Low forage Diets To Maintain Milk Production in Forage Limited Situations. But before we get started, wanna introduce our emeritus professor, Dr. Bill Weiss. Bill, thanks for joining us again here at the Real Science Exchange.
Dr. Bill Weiss (00:56):
Good to be back. Nice to see you again.
Scott Sorrell (00:59):
Bill, you're always good at bringing the new beer for us to, to to sample. What do you, what do you got in store for us tonight?
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:05):
This is a Christmas present. It's blonde honey blonde ale from Central Waters Brewing Company in Wisconsin. First time I've ever had it, it's quite tasty.
Scott Sorrell (01:15):
Is it good? Have you met many that you, that that weren't very tasty?
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:18):
Well, there's a few. There's one, one from Australia that comes to mind, but we won't
Scott Sorrell (01:26):
So, bill why don't you introduce the guest that you brought with you with you tonight?
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:31):
I'm the, the author of the corresponding author papers Dr. Adam Locke from Michigan State. He's from the, the Wright School up North
Scott Sorrell (01:57):
Very well. Well, welcome back, Adam. Glad to have you here. Thank you. Now in, in pre-show prep, we were talking about whiskeys and one of your favorites is I believe Bush Mill. You wanted to tell us a little bit about that and, and what's special about Bush Mill whiskey?
Dr. Adam Lock (02:14):
Well, it's, it's mostly a special to, to myself. It was the last it was a distillery. My dad and I visited a few years before he passed away. And whenever I see a bottle of it now, if I return back to ho over here, I like to, like to try some of it. It's, it's an Irish whiskey, so it's triple distilled. So it's very smooth. Yeah. Excellent. It has good meaning to me.
Scott Sorrell (02:38):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I've not had any, but you, you can count that. I'm gonna try to find one. So appreciate that. We also have with us our co-host once again Dr. Clay Zimmerman. Clay, welcome.
Dr. Bill Weiss (02:55):
Thank You, Scott.
Scott Sorrell (02:56):
Yeah. What are you drinking tonight? Well, tonight I'm enjoying again from our local brewery. This one is called a Yeti Experimental Sour. So it's a sour beer. I, I kinda like those. I had one the very first time. Bill, you, you're having a, a beer from Wisconsin. The very first sour I ever had was in Wisconsin. I believe it was Madison. So that's what I'm having tonight. So, as we get started, before we start our conversation, gentlemen, I'd like to raise a, a glass to, to a great panel here tonight. Great scientist and to a great discussion ahead. Cheers.
Dr. Adam Lock (03:29):
Cheers.
Dr. Bill Weiss (03:30):
Cheers.
Moderator (03:39):
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Scott Sorrell (04:42):
So, bill, why don't you get us started. Walk us into the paper that, that, that you select for us tonight. Okay.
Dr. Bill Weiss (04:49):
Before I get into that, Adam, you know, this was a graduate student. We all depend so much on them. So why don't you give us a little bit of information on the student who, who did this, what they're doing now, and, and et cetera.
Dr. Adam Lock (05:01):
Yeah, thanks, bill. All of these research that any of us that all rely, you know, is done by the, the great grad students we have. So this is Arian and Rero. This one of her master's projects with me first got to meet her as an undergrad. She spent a couple years in our lab as an undergrad. She's originally from Florida. After she finished her master's, she's now doing a PhD at the University of Wisconsin. We
Dr. Bill Weiss (05:38):
Okay. We'll get into the paper here. This is a topic that when I was working at Ohio State, we'd have droughts about every five or six years, severe droughts. We'd have limited forage supply. So this would be a question that I got a lot is what, what do we do when forage is limited? So why don't you start again with, I always ask, what's the hypothesis? Why, why'd you do the experiment? What's the hypothesis?
Dr. Adam Lock (06:07):
That's it. Great. Appreciate that. To start that discussion, give a shout out for the last 10 years now MSU and the, the state government have had this Michigan Alliance for Animal Agriculture that's a commodity supported university and state supported that is allowing us to do some of these applied research questions that might not specifically be applicable to one, you know, indu one company or another, but are important to the, to the industry. This study wasn't originally when we first got this Michigan Alliance round and white project to look at this area here. It wasn't specifically on low forage, but it, that 20 18, 20 19 growing season we had really bad forage yield forage quality here. And that was the big question. And so we were able to slightly switch around this study to focus it just on, on low forage diets.
Dr. Adam Lock (07:04):
So the concept there being, like you're saying it, it's years of forage shortages, maybe from, from drought or maybe more common now growing farm size. That one's certainly applicable to us here now with our, with the new dairy facility go about halfway being built now, and we're going from like 200 to 600 milking cows. So, you know, we're having a lot of these questions now about the forage needs for those cows. So so we wanted to design a study which was very practical. And it simply address, could we feed a low forage diet and get at least as good milk components or maybe even better. So this was not a typical study where maybe we just change one ingredient or one nutrient. This was more of a, I call it a conceptual type study. And what we thought might be helpful if we had to feed a very low forage diet, that what would be helpful to allow us to get as good a milk production as a, a fairly typical Midwest or Michigan diet.
Dr. Bill Weiss (08:11):
And the, the treatments we, we won't go into all the details, but the mm-hmm. The, what I'm gonna call the typical diet was 56% forage. The low forage was 37, so it's pretty low. And corn silage alfalfa was the, the forages. Did you, was there any reason for those two numbers or is that you just wanted to, the typical one is typical, but why, why you came up with 37 or
Dr. Adam Lock (08:37):
We, we wanted to go, we were formulating those diets based off forage NDF and we actually formulated the diets to about 11.5% forage NDF, and we ended up a little bit higher than that. You know, based in that Arian, Ariana did a lot of looking at the literature a study by yourself was what one of those that we utilized in this paper. A lot of the times when people looked at high and low forage, they were also changing starch or depending on how different ways people were looking at it. I guess something different in this study, because we were really, our goal was how can we maintain milk production? We kept starch, total starch content, total crew protein content of the diets the same. So we, yeah, we were aiming for about 11.5% forage, NDF. You know, course when we do a lot of this research, sometimes we may push it a bit below what commercially people might do. I know when we first showed this diet to a couple people, they're like, those cows that's too low a forage. And we're like, they probably go lower in California and some other places. Right. So there's lots of ways we can feed the cows. So very conceptual applicable here to Michigan Midwest here on, with the type of diets and feeding ingredients we have available.
Dr. Bill Weiss (10:01):
Just for the, the listeners, the diets were, I'm rounded things off here, but 19.2 versus about 12.7 for N df. So it might not be as low as you want, but it's still low.
Dr. Adam Lock (10:13):
Still low. And
Dr. Bill Weiss (10:14):
And of course,
Dr. Adam Lock (10:15):
Go ahead. Sorry. I was gonna say the big difference between, another big difference between the treatments were that we, in that low forage diet, we did add some palmitic acid and rich supplement and we supplemented some better quality proteins, some different quality protein sources. We had some blood mail and then some synthetic methionine and, and lysine in that diet as well. Again, our goal wasn't just to look at the effects of fat supplementation or amino acid. It was putting it within that context of low forage diet. One of the take homes from this is would be follow up work would be, I think, you know, how useful or how needed would be some of those supplemental sources if you were going to go to that low forage diet, you know, from a consistent standpoint. So I guess I think any good paper leaves more more research questions, right.
Dr. Bill Weiss (11:12):
Security, job security, yes. And as you pulled forage out, you put in byproducts, which is typical beef pulp. You have corn, gluten, I don't know if that's gluten feed or meal soy hauls and cotton seed. All those went up in the low forage diet. So that's a typical replacement. Mm-Hmm
Dr. Adam Lock (11:54):
Yeah. But, but the, and I I agree the literature would show that the big difference we did do here again, is we took out all of the high moisture corn Yeah. Outta that low forage diet. And were made up that with dry corn in the conventional one, we had about one third to two thirds dried to high moisture corn. Which isn't untypical in higher producing cows here, here in Michigan. But so starch, total starch is the same, but
Dr. Bill Weiss (12:24):
Room for milk
Dr. Adam Lock (12:25):
Of that starch is very different. And of course we did that from a concern with milk fat depression risk are a primary one there.
Dr. Bill Weiss (12:32):
That was my first question I had written down. Oh, sorry. If you'd have let left high moisture in, do you think you'd have, it'd have been as successful in maintaining milk fat as it was?
Dr. Adam Lock (12:43):
No.
Dr. Bill Weiss (12:44):
Okay. Right answer, right answer.
Dr. Adam Lock (12:46):
Yeah.
Clay Zimmerman (12:48):
Adam, I'm saying, I'm saying this tongue in cheek, but the starch level is quite low for a Michigan diet
Dr. Adam Lock (12:56):
They are, yes. I mean high twenties, thirties, and 31 now is, is an uncommon with some of our, of course we have very high producing cows here in Michigan as well. Right. And I think we continue to maybe this is a brag for this our dairy producers in Michigan, but I think we continue to top the charts for milk production per cow, I think across the country here. But yeah, so sometimes I, I, I think we feed too much starch sometimes, and there's maybe some opportunities around some other sources to help maybe drive milk fat. But as Bill said, the big thing here was we switched those starch sauce. We needed a much less fermentable diet when we had much less forage fiber in that diet. So
Dr. Bill Weiss (13:48):
Did the, I guess you added the, you said NDFs the same proteins, the same starch is the same but you added fat, I think it was one po, 1.8% fat. So the question always is what came out. So
Dr. Adam Lock (14:05):
Yeah, so it was about, I think we, our goal, we did one point we aimed for 1.5% supplemental fatty acids, and I think we were about 1.4. We pulled soy out soy holes out for that fat supplement. But,
Dr. Bill Weiss (14:19):
But what nutrient would've come? 'cause I said total ND the, the major nutrients are all the same. So what, what came out? Would it
Dr. Adam Lock (14:27):
Been, well, I, I guess it's probably a a little bit of everything that we pulled out soho. So if anything, some fermentable NDF would've been the main nutrient that we were reducing by taking out that. But then we are adding in more soy well, I guess, let me back up on that. I think that's impossible for me to say because we made so many dietary changes here. I don't think we were just changing one nutrient and that could be a criticism of the paper or it's a reason why we did it. So we, we, yeah, I, i I, I need to correct myself. We didn't just pull out soy holes in this study. I get confused with some of our other studies. This one, it was a whole kitchen sink, I guess, approach. So, bunch of ingredients. Yeah, I can't, yes.
Dr. Bill Weiss (15:27):
You know, with the, lets forge, you had to pull some ash out 'cause the mineral supplementation is the same. Okay. So some ash had to go out okay with the, that. And then, I don't know, on all these other, like organic acids would be low, lower in the, in the low forge diet 'cause you're yanking silage out. So I think of things that we don't typically measure would actually, typically measure, but those would be the things.
Dr. Adam Lock (15:53):
Yeah. I, I see what you, I see what you're saying there now. And it's just a round, 'cause some of it's a rounding effect with some of those, because it's only 1.4%. So that could be a, a couple point units across some of those nutrients. So
Dr. Bill Weiss (16:09):
I, when I read this, I would, I understood the fat adding. The one question is why do you choose to add amino acids to, to that diet and not the typical diet and, you know, added amino acids now becoming more and more typical.
Dr. Adam Lock (16:25):
Yeah. We, we fought long and hard about how we were gonna do this. And we spoke with some nutritionists that we spend a lot of time talking around all of our different diets with. I think the idea there was what did we think we needed to do to not lose milk production on a very low forage diet? And one of the, the, the feedbacks there were we, if we were modeling that maybe we wanted some more higher, some better higher quality protein coming into that diet. Of course you, you could argue, well, you should have balanced, balanced that in the o other treatment. But again, that wasn't our focus. I, I, I would like to do this study as a factorial design in the future with four treatments and then, you know, and then we could maybe look specifically at the added po acid and the ine and lysine parts of that. So so, you know, sorry.
Clay Zimmerman (17:33):
So a Adam, did you think you would lose milk yield on the lower forest diet? Or you, were you more concerned about fat, the fat yield?
Dr. Adam Lock (17:42):
I feel, I think if you ask most people, they thought we would probably lose milk, yield our milk fat. Right. And probably lose, lose everything on a, you know, 12% forage NDF diet. Right. and, and of course as we're all fully aware, most of most of our milk markets, it's yield of fat, yield of protein. Right. So that's kind of why we focused in maybe on the you know, the fatty acid side and the amino acid side, given that we're also changing that ru and ferment ability of the starch, it was a much less ru and fermentable starch that maybe there, that's where maybe the, some of those supplemental amino acids are we're helping there.
Clay Zimmerman (18:25):
What was, I, I'm curious, what was the what form was the beet pulp in that you added? 'cause You, you added quite quite a bit of beet pulp to the diet, I believe.
Dr. Adam Lock (18:37):
Oh, if I remember rightly. I think this was pellets. Yeah. Okay. Typically we've had pellets come in. Yeah.
Clay Zimmerman (18:46):
Okay. Thanks.
Dr. Adam Lock (18:48):
Because we ran this study before COVID and, and you know, and hard to remember anything before that now. Right. So
Clay Zimmerman (18:55):
That's right.
Dr. Adam Lock (18:56):
Yeah. Everything's before or after. But this study finished actually in January, 2020, if I recall. So,
Dr. Bill Weiss (19:04):
Well, it just was published last year. I wanted to say we, we picked more recent papers.
Dr. Adam Lock (19:07):
Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, thanks for, thanks for highlighting how slow I was getting out. Yeah.
Dr. Bill Weiss (19:12):
I did
Dr. Adam Lock (19:33):
That, that was part of it, I think. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Bill Weiss (19:36):
That makes more sense to me now.
Dr. Adam Lock (19:38):
Yeah. You know, the goal was to maintain or maybe potentially even increase. Right. So, but the, the, the primary focus was that could we save on forage use?
Dr. Bill Weiss (19:51):
Yeah.
Dr. Adam Lock (19:51):
You know, from, and it could be one of five or six reasons why you might need to do that at some point. Yeah.
Dr. Bill Weiss (19:56):
And again, just for the listeners, these were mid lactation cows. Holstein cows averaging, I had that and I've lost it.
Dr. Adam Lock (20:06):
Whereabouts?
Dr. Bill Weiss (20:06):
Averaging about a hundred pounds, give or take. So good. Decent production. Pretty
Dr. Adam Lock (20:12):
Good. Pretty good grief of cows. So
Dr. Bill Weiss (20:15):
Why don't you, again, we talked about the treatments. It was basically taking out forage, putting in byproducts, but maintaining macronutrient concentrations. What about the fatty acid profiles of these diets?
Dr. Adam Lock (20:30):
That, that's a good question.
Dr. Bill Weiss (20:30):
You did, you did add, add supplemental fat to these diets, and you might
Dr. Adam Lock (20:35):
Yeah, and I, yeah, I, I, I like to talk about the actual supplemental fatty acid. That's kind of where I, you know, that's, that, that's the, that's, that's what I like to do. I think it's important to state that it was a palmitic rich prill, like an 80% palmitic enriched, and I don't think we would've seen the same response if we had chosen maybe some other supplements. We were very specific that if we were wanting to maintain this on the milk fat side you know, based on the body of work we've done and others have done paric acid was the, was the approach to take with the supplemental fat there. So, you know, we significant, we obviously increased total fat content of the diet, and that is primarily by increasing paric acid content of the diet to, to help drive milk fat. The other fatty acids stayed pretty, pretty similar in the diet in terms of oleic, linoleic, linoleic, you know, really we're talking about six fatty acids when we talk about fatty acids in, in dairy cow diets, unless it's a very unique situation. So we really focused in on pric acid there.
Dr. Bill Weiss (21:44):
So the, again, just for the listers, you had by byproducts, you added supplemental fat. The, the control diet or the typical diet did not include supplemental fat, and then you added supplemental lysine and methionine to the Yes. The low forged diet.
Dr. Adam Lock (22:00):
Yes. Yes.
Dr. Bill Weiss (22:03):
If we get to the, well, what, what did you expect before we get to what you found, what did you expect on production measures?
Dr. Adam Lock (22:13):
My hope, I guess, was that we would not lose production mm-hmm
Dr. Bill Weiss (22:17):
So maintain fat and pro protein yield. Yeah. What about intake? What did you expect an intake in?
Dr. Adam Lock (22:24):
Well, typically there's kind of a mixed bag with, with like lower forage diets and intake. You know, certainly with higher byproduct diets, I think we often see higher intakes, right. From a more fermentable NDF source. I certainly didn't think we'd lose intake. I thought potentially we would gain a bit of intake, which would hopefully help somewhat with the main in maintaining that production item. And we did see a, obviously we got that just under two, about a kilo of higher intake dry matter intake in these cows,
Dr. Bill Weiss (23:01):
Which is pretty much what I would've expected. That's about the typical when you take forge out. And so but then typically we, we don't see more, more component yields. We see higher intakes equal components and lower feed efficiency. And that's, I've always said, that's just the cost of not feeding forge. But you've, you found sometimes higher, higher protein yields and higher fat yields.
Dr. Adam Lock (23:26):
Yeah. We increased fat and protein yields. So that led to significant improvements in fat corrected and energy corrected milk. Energy corrected milk was almost two kilos more
Dr. Bill Weiss (23:38):
Substantial
Dr. Adam Lock (23:40):
On that low fat. So we, we, maybe we exceeded our goal of maintaining now of course, you could argue, well, they put fat, su fat and better amino acids some supplemental amino acids in, and yes, we did. Would that have happened if we hadn't had those and just, it just been a byproduct driven approach? Probably wouldn't have happened the same. Right. At best, we might have almost caught up with where we were. But again, we really did this study from a, well, I think all our studies are industry driven, need driven. This one wasn't really driven to answer a specific change in nutrient question. It was a can, can we do this? Can that approach and, and we could be criticized for that, or you could be
Dr. Bill Weiss (25:08):
I, I interpret this not so much. I don't, when I read this, I didn't compare it so much to the control. I said, it just shows that you can get really good component yields with, with low forged diets, and this is what you have to do. Yeah. It's not saying it's better than, because again, you, it may be the fat, it might be the amino acids. It's just you can do it. You can get good yields with these low forged diets, and you have to make,
Dr. Adam Lock (25:34):
I think that's an excellent way of looking at it. I, yeah, I think I need to start sort of talking it more about it that way, because we get caught in that comparing, you know, compared with this, you know. But like you said, it's if I remember rightly, as we write in here, we, we saved or spared about five and a half, six kilos. It was a forage dry matter per cow per day. And I think these are, these are 28 day periods as well. So a bit longer than our typical treatment periods in the work we do. And with that, we wanted to get a better more information on changes in body weight mm-hmm
Dr. Bill Weiss (26:42):
Two
Dr. Adam Lock (26:42):
Half as much again. Yeah. so I think we're confident that, you know, in, in this high, pretty high producing cow, we could as you said, get some good production. We, these cows aren't losing get body weight. They, again, actually more body weight maybe that says that maybe there's an opportunity to get even more milk if we can avoid that additional body weight gain there. And of course, maybe later lactation, maybe that might not be so good. We don't, we wanna avoid excessive body weight gain.
Dr. Bill Weiss (27:18):
Do you, do you think the, just one I'll let you in a minute, clay, just finish up. Do you think these were mid lactation cows, do you think, and this, I don't know if there's an answer, but on these low forged diets, cow health is always a fundamental issue. Do you think 28 days is enough for it to express any potential health issues? Or it won't, won't do any hoof problems. You won't be able to see that, but other, other issues?
Dr. Adam Lock (27:47):
Well, that's a good question. I mean, from a, a room and health point of view, I think, you know, that's plenty of time to mm-hmm
Clay Zimmerman (28:59):
So it, it is interesting that I would say job well done in hindsight on this one, because you got a one kilo increasing dry matter intake on the lower, lower forged diet, but you got roughly a, a, a a two kilo increase in energy corrected milk, which is close to what you would expect with from that increase in dry matter intake. Right. I am curious, one thing I was curious about, you got a decrease in lactose percentage on that lower forage diet. Can you speculate on that?
Dr. Adam Lock (29:41):
Well, I'll be perfectly l on that. Lactose yield didn't change. So I, again, I don't really worry too much about content. She, she made the same amount of lactose basically, so I, I don't mm-hmm
Dr. Bill Weiss (30:54):
What about early lactation cows? I don't know the days that we just say mid lactation is probably in there, but how low can we go in early lactation?
Dr. Adam Lock (31:04):
Cool. Well, I think I would, I don't have a number off the top of my head, but I would like to look at some of the diets fed in parts of the US in other, other parts of the world where they don't rely so much on forage. We could probably go down the one caveat, I think we could probably go down to this sort of level, apart from in that real fresh period, that first couple weeks, you know obviously I've spent a lot of time with Mike Allen and around some of his, the hepatic oxidation and, and that importance of gut feel in that very early lactation period, that, that would certainly be a time where I don't think we'd want to go too low mm-hmm
Dr. Bill Weiss (31:57):
I did some calculation rough calculations here. These are, you know, back of the envelope, but the, the low forage diets put out about three, three to four mega cows more in net energy a day, both in milk components and body weight change. They ate a kilo more. So the, the energy concentration of these diets had to be quite a bit higher in the low forged diet, even though the nutrients, again, are, the major nutrients are all the same. So some of it's fat, some of it's higher gross energy. But do you think even with this, this very low forged diet fiber digestible, it could have been increased and you're putting in meat pulps, you know, highly digestible. Mm-Hmm
Dr. Adam Lock (32:42):
That's a good question. Like you said, the fact that fatty acids were the only real major nutrient that was increased there I think obviously if we'd total NDF digestibility would've gone up, you know, based on the literature with all those byproducts in the diet. Right. I, I do, based on what we've seen, I think there's a pretty linear improvement in NDF digest, total tract NDF digestibility with increasing palmitic acid intake. So I have no reason to think that having the TIC in there probably helped NDF digestibility. Of course, like as you said, we can't compare between the two really so much. And that's where our follow-up study would be helpful. Right. Maybe we just had low forage diets and then we, you know, with and without tic or some of the amino acids that that would be some helpful follow up studies to if, if there was a lot of drive to towards, to these low forage diets.
Dr. Bill Weiss (33:48):
Yeah. 'cause Again, with just byproduct replacement, very often fiber digestibility goes down with low forged diets. It actually, even in vitro, they're more fermentable, but in vivo, I think just, they just scoot through so fast. But
Dr. Adam Lock (34:03):
Of course. Yeah.
Dr. Bill Weiss (34:04):
But you know, in this, just doing the math, some, the digestibility diet had to go up a fair amount and more, more than just the fat. So this palmitic might be fixing this depressed, I don't wanna say depressed, but lower fiber digestibility. Yeah.
Dr. Adam Lock (34:19):
And, and that's a, but that there, there's some in, in vitro studies published recently around PALMITIC and NDF digestibility that would indicate that it's a rumen effect. And then Jeff Kins in his recent ISRP review in j in JDS has a nice section in there on how fatty acids or specific fatty acids may improve NDF digestibility. And we've looked at that TIC versus no added fat, also palmitic palmitic supplement versus esoteric saturated mix type supplement. And it, it is specific to the palmitic acid. Ma it probably improving, you know, those major fiber digesters probably helping those, those guys, those, those better growth of those, better efficiency of those. But it, we, certain, again, that's a, a targeted reason why we chose the fatty acid supplement we did was milk fat fiber digestibility.
Dr. Bill Weiss (35:23):
So this might not, if you just put fat in, you know, any off the shelf fatty acid, you might have not, you might have still found decent production, but the feed efficiency might have gone down as we typically expect with these low forwarded diets. So,
Dr. Adam Lock (35:38):
Yeah. No, I agree. My, my my, my desire over the next few years I think would be how we've moved more and more away from just talking about crude protein in the diet to amino acids. We need to get there with the fat Yeah. Side of it. You know, we've made a good good leap recently, I think more from e for extract to total fatty acids. And the Nassim model, the Nassim review that Dr. Armano did and yourself worked on done a really good job talking why we need to talk about fatty acids, not e for extract. Next step is, well, which fatty acids, you know, I get, I get calls or questions all the time about there's, you know, this new product out on the market that, well, I tell nutritionists on the fatty acid supplement side, two first questions. If someone's trying to sell you something new, what's the fatty acid profile and the total fat content of that product that's gonna, that's gonna drive what responses you're gonna get to it? And the total fat content really is only so you could comparing apples to apples, like a 90% versus a 60% product. Right. How much would you have to feed the both of those, but the fatty acid profile, and I hope we've, we've made some advances in that the last decade around tic steer oleic acids particularly,
Dr. Bill Weiss (36:56):
Well, you know, one of the limitations, all the lab can, a lab measure it commercial lab, and now they can do these fatty acids. So we mm-hmm
Dr. Adam Lock (37:13):
Yeah. And this you know, NIR calibrations are very good. So it's not, doesn't even have to be wet chemistry. The wet chemistry for fatty acid analysis is gastro. That's a slow, long, long process. But the, the calibrations now we've been involved in some of those are, are, are as good for that as I think for other aspects of, of feed analysis.
Scott Sorrell (37:36):
So Adam, you said that you, you, you asked him what is the fatty acid profile, what fatty acid profile do you want to see? And is it dependent upon the basal diet?
Dr. Adam Lock (37:47):
That's a good question. And I guess the, the good scientific answer is it depends, yeah.
Dr. Bill Weiss (37:55):
That's the extension answer
Scott Sorrell (37:57):
One.
Dr. Adam Lock (37:58):
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I'll try and go a bit more it all, I think it's gonna, it depends on the basal diet Yeah. To some extent. And the total fat content in the basal diet. We have another paper actually in this same issue of JDS communications that we've talked about that looked at high and low fat diets and the responses to different fat pro supplements. That's a, a good place to look for that. Probably more important than basal fat content in my mind would be, which type of cow are you feeding? You know, is it a fresh cow, a peak cow, or a mid to late lactation cow? We have good data for fresh and very high producing cows. I'd like a, you know, a palmitic and oleic blend around that 70 20, 60 30 of the two. And as we go through lactation, I'd take a higher palmitic one of course, then you get into some discussions about that there's only one fat coming on the farm. Right. And some different opportunities now with some of the newer work with different oil seeds that's gonna come into play there, especially with some of the work with high oleic soybeans that can probably replace, not I I'd say not all types of commercial fat supplements, but certainly can replace some that supply similar fatty acids.
Scott Sorrell (39:18):
Yeah. Thanks. What else you got for us, bill?
Dr. Bill Weiss (39:24):
I'm out, I'm at the end of my questions, so I've got 'em all answered. So
Scott Sorrell (39:30):
I, I had kind of an off the wall question, and you know, is, is it conceivable as, as the genetics continue to increase the, the nutrient requirements of the cow continues to increase, the concentration of the diet continues to get more concentrated, is it conceivable that to, to achieve that at some point, at someday we're going to purposely reduce the amount of fiber in the diet? Right? Your hypothesis was, we, we don't have enough and that's the reason why we need to consider this. Did you ever see that happening?
Dr. Adam Lock (40:06):
That's an interesting way of looking at that. I mean, as these cows get higher and higher production, or most importantly, increasing, you know, pounds of fat and protein, we're gonna have to, we have to supply the, the nutrients and the building blocks for them to make that fat and protein. Some of that may re result in some lower of the fiber part of it. But the other thing to think about there is we've talked about tic acid and it's important to milk fat. You know, we had higher levels of cotton seed in the diet, and they were reasons that, that there were good reasons around milk fat to do that. But let's not forget that approximately half of milk fat is coming from acetate and butyrate produced in the rumen. Mm,
Dr. Adam Lock (40:55):
Good point. Which is mostly coming from fiber digestion, right? Yeah. So and that's, you could argue that's the, the, the least expensive source of milk fat, the acids to some extent, right? But the mammary gland needs both. And we've been doing some work lately, look, looking at, you know, if we supply different proportions of each of, you know, those substrates, how does the mammary gland respond to that? It's very flexible, you know, ultimately that mammary gland has to make a fluid milk fat body temperature. And that's where some of those short chain fatty acids in de novo produced coming from acetate andrate are key. You know, converting steer to a lake is key there in the mammary gland as well. So that we never want to lose sight of that importance of the acetate and butyrate coming out the rumen. The mammary gland isn't gonna make milk fat just with preformed fatty acids. Right. So, and I think to me, probably the better way to address that, Scott, is maybe we can, we certainly go down to lower forage diets, right? Lower fiber diets. We probably want higher, better quality
Scott Sorrell (42:07):
Yeah.
Dr. Adam Lock (42:08):
To get more assay and, but trade coming into the system
Scott Sorrell (42:11):
Makes perfect sense. Yeah.
Clay Zimmerman (42:13):
And we've been doing that, right? We, we, we do limit indigestible fibers that that's, that's a limitation. Yep.
Scott Sorrell (42:21):
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. Gentlemen, this has been a great conversation. I've, I've enjoyed it. What I'd like to do now with last call, clay, is start with you provide us just kind of a few take home messages from the, for the audience.
Moderator (42:40):
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Clay Zimmerman (43:06):
Well, I've enjoyed this talk or the discussion on this one. I, I would say, Adam, this is a study in need of more treatments. You already mentioned that earlier. Yeah, right. About repeating this. So it's I it's a very interesting paper. When I first read it, I'm like, there's some treatments missing here,
Dr. Adam Lock (44:05):
Appreciate it.
Scott Sorrell (44:07):
Yeah. Thanks Clay. Bill, another good paper. What's some key takeaways for us?
Dr. Bill Weiss (44:13):
I think this just reemphasizing that there's a lot of ways to feed cows and for these diets are extremely different, production, essentially the same, maybe even a little bit better for lots of reasons. But it just emphasizes that there is no one recipe. There's lots of ways to get very high component yields, and some are, and I think some are not so typical. I mean, yeah,
Dr. Adam Lock (44:40):
I appreciate that and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this. And, and you hit on a good point there, clay, finally, that, you know, one of the challenges, you know, we are doing some of this type of applied research is that we have to balance up what would be ideal to do from a treatment wise versus what's what could be done maybe from a cow availability or, or, or, you know, cost of running it at the experiment. You know, in an ideal world, world, we probably would've had at least four treatments, right? And then someone would say, well, you didn't, you need to look at this now. But in this case, we had to balance what we, what we had available and what we could do versus the question we wanted to do. And it was a, a pretty quick turnaround need for our local industry at that point with that, with that low forage year.
Dr. Adam Lock (45:30):
I, I think we've covered a lot of it. I think this is a, for me, is an exciting area. This, you know, going from e for extract fat now to fatty acids, right? And how can we apply some of that, know that information into other aspects of, of, of the diet, right? We've often talked about energy and amino acid, energy and protein, right? And or energy and amino acids. And, you know, I always wonder what energy means per se, but, you know, fatty acids, you know, carbohydrate NDF and stuff. So there's a lot more work that can go in into this area if there's the de the desire and drive to, to, to look into this more. But I like what Bill said earlier on, rather than comparing the two treatments from a practical point of view, it's, yes, we can get high good milk components from a very low forage diet here in the Midwest, right?
Scott Sorrell (46:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that, gentlemen. I said it once before, this has been a real treat. I'll say it again. This has been a real treat. You know, this is the favorite part of my job, right? Getting to sit around and talk about science with some of the top scientists in the world and have a few drinks. So I, I really appreciate the opportunity to, to do that with you guys and here, here at the Real Science Exchange Pub. So I want to thank you for, for all that you do and to our loyal audience. Once again, we, we, we thank you and well, we hope you learn something. We hope you had some fun, and 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.
Moderator (47:02):
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