This Real Science Exchange podcast episode was recorded during a webinar from Balchem’s Real Science Lecture Series. You can find it at balchem.com/realscience.
This Real Science Exchange podcast episode was recorded during a webinar from Balchem’s Real Science Lecture Series. You can find it at balchem.com/realscience.
How can we increase milk protein and capture that income opportunity? Dr. Van Amburgh describes the seasonal drop in milk protein observed in the summer months. Heat stress may play a role in altering insulin sensitivity and how the cow partitions nutrients. What can we do to avoid that seasonal decline in milk protein? (0:01)
Simple things like cooling, fans, and sprinklers can reduce heat stress and increase cow comfort. Dr. Van Amburgh recommends promoting dry matter intake and lying time, with feed available 21-22 hours per day and more than 12 hours of lying time per day. (5:27)
Dr. Van Amburgh discusses basic formulation considerations for amino acid balancing including current feed chemical analyses that include NDF digestibility, characterizing the cows appropriately by using accurate body weights, understanding DMI and making sure actual milk lines up with ME and MP allowable milk, assessing body condition changes, and understanding the first limiting nutrient of milk production. Areas where mistakes are often made include using much lighter body weights than actual to formulate rations, not using actual DMI, and using feed library values instead of actual feed chemistry. (8:00)
Milk protein percentage and dietary energy are closely aligned. This is often attributed to ruminal fermentation and microbial yield. Sugars, starches, and digestible fiber sources drive microbial yield. While protein and energy metabolism are considered to be separate, that is an artificial divide and they should be considered together. Once adequate energy for protein synthesis is available, providing more dietary protein or amino acids can increase protein synthesis further. Dr. Van Amburgh provides some ranges of target fermentable non-structural carbohydrates, starch, sugar and soluble fiber appropriate for early peak and mid-lactation cows. He speaks about the benefits of adding sugars to the diet instead of trying to continue to increase starch. (11:15)
Dr. Van Amburgh details an experiment using more byproduct feeds in a lactation diet to successfully increase intake and subsequently, milk protein content. (24:04)
Milk protein increases with higher DCAD in diets, independent of protein level. Increasing DCAD can also lead to increased DMI, probably through better fiber digestion. The mechanism is not completely understood, but perhaps some rumen microbes have a higher requirement for potassium. In another study, feeding higher DCAD resulted in an 11% increase in milk protein yield and a 26% increase in milk fat yield. (32:39)
Feeding fatty acids may also improve milk protein via insulin signaling pathways. A 5.6% increase in milk protein was observed when the ratio of palmitic acid to oleic acid was around 1.5:1. (36:21)
Dr. Van Amburgh encourages the audience to pay close attention to digestibility of dietary ingredients and shares an analysis of ten different sources of feather meal that varied in digestibility from around 50% up to 75%. (40:10)
Dr. Van Amburgh details an experiment targeting optimum methionine and lysine levels for improved milk protein. In an example with 60 Mcals of ME in the diet, the targets were 71 grams of methionine and 193 grams of lysine. (42:00)
Questions from the webinar audience were addressed. They included information about the best type of sugars to add to diets, if protozoa are preferentially retained in the rumen, BMR vs conventional corn silage, amino acid supply when dietary crude protein is around 14-15%, using metabolizable energy instead of net energy, variability of animal protein blends, and methionine to lysine ratios. (48:23)
To end this podcast, Dr. Jose Santos steps in to invite everyone to the Florida Ruminant Nutrition Symposium in Gainesville held February 24-26.
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Moderator (00:00:00):
The following podcast is taken from a webinar presented by Dr. Mike Van Amburgh from Cornell University, titled, “Three Strategies to Implement Today That Increase Milk Protein on Customer Profits”. To view the full webinar and access the slides referenced during this podcast, visit balchem.com/realscience and use the search bar to jump down to this webinar presented on August 11th, 2020.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:00:26):
I'm gonna talk about fermentable carbohydrates, forage versus byproducts, and dry matter intake. We're gonna talk a little bit about dec a, a little bit about fatty acids, and obviously we're gonna come back to rumor protected amino acids and, and will be done and open for questions.
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Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:01:51):
It all starts with the cow. She's the one that arbitrates everything that we do. She's our judge and jury. You know, so if we make her happy, whatever that means to everybody, if we make her happy then hopefully she'll make she'll make us happy, right? And there's always really simple things, right? And I, you know, this sounds really funny to say this, but hey, can we cool 'em? Got fans, got sprinklers? Can we do anything to reduce heat stress? How do we increase cow comfort? I think the key to that whole thing, because if we can do that, that's just promoting dry matter intake and lying time. You know, and I, I've been doing some work with a few groups here the last six to eight months focused on some technologies out there, and the technologies are awesome. But what we're finding is between, and I, I, I, I put the feed availability up here because I've been surprised how many times when we've walked the herd at midnight to three in the morning, those cows are out of feed, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:02:57):
So, I know that sounds really oversimplified, but I've been more surprised than not at the number of farms that are running out of feed 10, 11 o'clock at night, not seeing fresh feed until five, six o'clock in the morning. And I don't care what technology you use or what your objectives are, I know those are really simple things but it's been more prevalent here lately than I would've expected. So, you know, make sure there is speed availability 21 to 22 hours a day at least. And then we have to work towards at least 12 hours of long time per day, right? And some of that comes back to overcrowding in the Northeast. We're, we're, we like to make use of our barns. We want to keep as many cows in there to out that fixed cost. But sometimes, you know, the covid thing taught us that maybe that's not so good.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:03:49):
Because we started to call a bunch of cows and milk protein component yield went up, right? And we were shipping as much milk with less cows as we would more. And again, that directly reflects on margin. But this has been, you know, I think this is a key part of this whole discussion about how do I capture more value and how do I increase my margin and how do I pick up more protein? Well, cows that can lie down and get plenty of feed all the time are generally going to be, are, are higher yield in cows, right? It all seems really obvious, but we seem conflicted about that at times, right? Really simple things. Again, some of this is gonna come back to amino acid balancing, but I always start here. 'cause This has been again, this has been things that sometimes surprise me.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:04:40):
Do we have current feed chemistry? And do we understand any of digestibility? You'll understand the implications of that here in just a couple minutes. Have we characterize the cows appropriately? I'm gonna, I'm gonna come back to that with a couple slides, but I still see a bunch of people who are feeding cows that don't exist, right? Or cows that aren't in the herd. I still see people with, you know, 1,350 pound cows in their, in their software. When I don't know of any cow other than maybe a big jersey that weighs 1350. It sure as heck isn't a Holstein. Do you understand dry matter intake? And do we have actual milk lining up with me and MP allowable milk? Again, really simple things. Are we, are we just paying attention to which way the cows are going up, down?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:05:30):
We don't have body weights. That's a real problem sometimes, because sometimes energy efficiency is better than we think it is, and we're only looking at milk. And then again, in the end, do we know what's first limiting, right? Is it, is it feed? Is it blind time? Are there limiting amino acids? Do we just not have enough energy? Right? What is it? Here's, here's things that drive me crazy. I was gonna change the title list in, in the interest of time, I didn't get it done. I see a lot of cows that weigh 1650 to 1800, but we're using 1350 to 1450 to formulate. And we're not using the actual dry matter intakes, and we're using feed library values. And that makes it really hard to get everything to coalesce. So when we were talking about balancing for grams of things, if we're two or 300 pounds off on body weight, it makes it hard to get to a gram level and be really precise about it.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:06:25):
And I, this is again, this is a bit of a problem. You can see that here. Here's a diet where the cows are at 15, 80, about 1600 pounds, a mature size of just over 1750. And you can see that the, the diet says, yeah, we're actually a little, just a little bit deficient on mp, but that 38 gram deficiency on mp, although that looks really subtle, what that tells me is that there's an opportunity to bring in some amino acids, right? And that we could balance that just a little bit more effectively with amino acids. Maybe methionine iss gonna be deficient, and that would help us understand you know, or that would help us, give us the opportunity for more milk protein. If that cow is modeled at 1350, which is something I still seeing a lot of. You don't see those deficiencies, right? You're not modeling the same cow. You don't understand that she may be a few grams short on methionine or lysine at that point. So, again, you lose the opportunity because she's just, she just doesn't model out the same way. And you're missing, you're missing the opportunity to actually refine the diet. Okay?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:07:37):
So let's get right into the protein thing. You know, this is an old slide, but this was really the first, one of the first things, first reports to say, Hey, you know what? Milk protein percentage in dietary energy are really closely aligned with each other, right? And then we get into the whole concept of sugars and starches, adjustable fiber and microbial ye yield and perforate and things like that. And then in, in 2007, Gerald Loeb wrote a really interesting paper about horizontal interactions. And, and he, he made a point here that I think is really important. He said, although we consider protein and energy metabolism as separate, we realize that's not real. It's artificial. So we need to con we need to consider them together. I'm gonna come back to this right at the very end. So, so we gotta realize that energy and protein go together here.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:08:32):
So if we want more milk protein, the real, the real important thing is we gotta get more energy into the cows, right? But sometimes it's really hard, right? We can't change that tomorrow. So we're gonna talk about things that maybe we can change tomorrow. This is a longer term change to say, okay, I'm, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get more Emmy intake into them. How do I get more Emmy intake into them and drive that protein synthesis through insulin and prop, right? Because it's important to remember that milk protein is an energy driven event. It relies on the adequate supply of am amino acids, but it's really driven by propionate production in the rumen, you know, that converts to glucose, that stimulates insulin, and the whole thing just cascades, right? And and you know, there's IGF one in there too. And it's also important to realize that, that as energy goes up, the first promoter for milk protein synthesis or the first promoter for IGF one secretion is energy.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:09:37):
But the second promoter is protein. So after energy's met, and IGF one is being regulated based on homeotic signaling, well then protein will actually help amino acids will, will enhance that response. And, you know, and then we get into the whole thing related to mTOR, which we're not gonna talk about that today, other than that time I mentioned it, right? But you can see that here real quick. These are calves. It's the cleanest data that we have. You got two levels of intake. The red line is plasma, IGF, they're all consuming the same amount of energy. And you can see that from 14 to 26% crude protein on the high energy calves, the higher intake calves that IGF one is higher than the lower intake circulating IGF one is. But then as you titrate in more protein, it increases. So it's, so the liver's recognizing those amino acids and saying, Hey, you can make more protein.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:10:38):
I'm gonna give you the signaling process to make more protein. 'cause You've got the building blocks here, right? And same thing happens in the dairy cow. It's much more sophisticated. And we have a hard time making these very simple manipulations in a lactating cow. But we know the same mechanism is in play, right? And we know through lots of older data that as we increase insulin and glucose with or without protein, we can increase protein synthesis, right? And I think we wanna increase, we really want to increase you know, milk protein synthesis and increase our milk protein output. We have to increase our microbial yield, right? And when we look at this, this is an old slide. We all kind of know this, this is what we're trying to do, or we're primarily trying to feed the rumen. We have to think about, alright, where are protein sources for those bugs?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:11:32):
We gotta make sure the rumen nitrogen balance is acceptable. I added some things to this. You can see here, I've got this endogenous protein on here. Now, back in the day when Russell and sniffing and noic and all those guys were doing this, they didn't understand the context of endogenous protein beyond a, a maintenance requirement. And now we know that bacterial will use, and protozoa to that degree, will use as much endogenous protein as they use recycled urea. So it's a very important component of microbial growth. But then we gotta make sure we've got plenty of carbohydrates, right? So now we get into how many carbohydrates do we have? How fermentable are they in the room? And, and how do we ensure that they're there right in, in the form that the bugs are gonna make best use of, I pull this slide out of something or pull this data outta something that Charlie Smith and a couple other guys have put together many, many years ago now modified it just a little bit.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:12:30):
But I think it I think it's important that we think about this when we're trying to increase milk protein yield because we're trying to increase milk or microbial protein yield, right? So when we look at early peak and mid lactation cows, now, how much fermentable non-structural carbohydrate do we want? Or how much fermentable or carbohydrate do we want? You know, and we're in that 40, you know, 40 to 43% of dry matter range. And then we think about, well, what's from the starch? Right? Well, you know, early cows, and this is fermentable starch, right? So we're talking about how much actually ferments in the rumen, and you say 18 point a half to 20. Well, you're really talking about ranges of like 82 to 92% fermented in the rumen. One of the other reasons I wanted to bring this up because whenever we're trying to do amino acid studies, we're always trying to run our sugars as high as we can and maybe not push.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:13:33):
One of the things that we've started to do is maybe not push our starch up so much and bring in some more fermentable sugar. A lot of the sugar will go to butyrate and not as much propionate. And I know that seems counterintuitive but it's also part of an in, you know, if we go back to the hot theory, we're also trying to regulate around the hepatic oxidation theory. So we want some propionate, but we want some microbial yield. And one of the things we know the sugar does very effectively is produce bacteria and protozoa. And I, I think that's the other thing to bring up here in all of our current field models. We don't have protozoa in those field-based models, but protozoa can be 20% of the microbial yield, right? So it's it's a very important source of protein for these cows.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:14:24):
And, and as we kick up the sugar, we're going to see more protozoa being, being generated. That's not so much a negative. It's not as much of a negative, I think, as we used to think it was 20, 25 years ago or better. So, you know, so, you know, and then you get into the soluble fiber and that, that gets you into the five to 6% range, at least could be higher than that if you're feeding a bunch of beef pulp citrus, pulp almond halls and, and things like that. And, you know, the western us and the southern part of the, the country has that capability much more than we do in the northeast, you know, so for high cows, we're looking at 86 to 90% ruminal star digestion. Might like it a little bit higher than that, but doesn't have to be that high.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:15:12):
And again, I, I go back to some stuff that will Hoover did years and years and years ago. Now everybody's forgotten about Will Hoover, except for some of us old farts. I guess I'm getting to be one of those guys. But, but Hoover had data very clear data that showed, Hey, you get even with our tmr with our starch, we get in that five to 7% range on sugar. We see improved microbial yield. We also see improved fiber digestion. And I, I've used that quite a bit when I see NDF that is pretty slow to digest. And I see things that are just, I see diets that look a little sluggish, a little bit of sugar goes a long way. And I don't, you know, we don't always know why it is. Yeah, we're gonna get some more butyrate, definitely gonna get some more microbes.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:16:01):
But we also know that, that the protozoa are pretty good at digesting fiber. But the protozoa might need some quick energy to grow and reproduce and do things like that. You know, they're, they're a little chemotactic, right? They're, they're not. They're gonna, they're not just omnivores out there eating everything, although they kind of behave that way sometimes. So, so you get 'em a little sugar, you make 'em happy, and they go out and they eat some more fiber. But we see increases in fiber digestibility, in, in microbial yield. And I, you know, in, in a 40 minute talk like this, there's no time to go back through that data. But Hoover's, hoover's old data was actually pretty clear cut on that. And so, I, you know, I think if we're trying to get more microbial protein, trying to get more milk protein synthesis pushing the sugar up a little higher than we have, than we, a lot of people generally do, I see a lot of diets.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:16:51):
Three to 4% at best, right? So in many cases, we're actually gonna double the sugar content still not that high. And anybody who, who you know, we get into the situation where somebody says, well, I don't know how high in sugar I can go. This is an Irish pasture grass. We've been doing some research over in Ireland. And you can see here, the water soluble carbohydrates in those high quality pasture grasses are running about 24%, right? They don't have a lot of starch. They sure have a lot of sugar, and I can tell you, we sure get a lot of protozoa out of those. But again, that's their energy source. And remember, it doesn't really go to lactic acid. So the the, the chance of true ruminal acidosis, the way we used to think about it just isn't there, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:17:40):
There's just not much starch in those diets. But a lot of water soluble carbohydrates from cooling the fructans in there. So, you know, there's no problem feeding sugars to cows. It's just, can we afford to do it? And where should we be? Which is why I'm thinking if we can get that to five to seven right now, I think we'll see. We should see a nice increase in microbial yield, more energy, faster energy, and generally we see a push towards a little bit more milk protein, okay? And you can see that here, because what we know is, as we do things to drive de noble fatty acid synthesis, in other words plenty of acetate, plenty of appropriate good fermentations and, and plenty of microbial yield. This is data from Dave Baro. As we get more de novo fatty acid acid synthesis, we see more protein output, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:18:38):
And we know because those two processes are kind of intimately linked. As we get more lactose, we generally get more milk protein. And the more de novo, not the preform, but the more de novo means the gland is working better, synthesizing its own fatty acids, will also synthesize more milk protein. But that's dependent on having a good balance of nutrients. So we're looking at propionate, we're looking at amino acids coming from microbial protein. We're looking at good NDF digestibility, all those things coming together to push this response or encourage this response. Okay? So again, just driving towards how do we get a little bit more microbial yield. One way to do that here is just get some sugar in that diet. That's one way to do it. Obviously, we could make our starch more digestible and we can come back to that.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:19:34):
And, but I'm not sure a lot of people are pushing starches it is, or what's available. A lot of people process really, well, if you're using steam flake corn then I don't know what else we're gonna do to improve that. You could, you could crank it up a little bit more, but I'm, I would rather see a little more sugar go in there than, than that, doing that. So in a lot of the country right now, based on the weather last fall and the rain, a lot of people don't have a lot of forage. Yes, we've been chopping, but again, in the northeast, we've been short on rain, corn silage is coming along. We still have some corn silage from last fall. May not be the best stuff. Our haylage has not been high yielding. 'cause we've had a lot of rain deficits in the upper Midwest.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:20:26):
We had a lot of floods last year. And so one of the things I wanna talk about here is, is how do we enhance intake? And instead of talking about starch, I was gonna turn around and talk about, well, what are some other things we could bring into the diet that might enhance microbial yield, really enhance intake. Again, it's obvious that energy is gonna drive milk protein synthesis. And it's really hard to change, but maybe we can make subtle manipulations of the diet to, to increase some intake, right? Because if we've got you know, we will scarce on forages, maybe we don't have high digestibility forges. Or if we do, we don't have a big inventory of 'em. How do we do this? So we ran a study a few years ago. This is just getting ready to be sent to the journal where we looked at high and low, low fiber or forage.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:21:19):
We were looking at our NDF pool. So the next few slides gonna look really complex. I'll distill them down. But, you know, 144 cows, nine pens, 16 animals, three by three Latin square, 21 days, five day sampling period, right? And what we were doing is a high UNDF diet, a low UNDF diet, and then basically
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:22:25):
So we, we had, you know, alfalfas, we had BMR corn silage, we had conventional corn silage, you know, so we can see the conventional corn silage and the, the high UNDF diet the BMR in the low UNDF diet with a low UNDF alfalfa. But what's most important here, so we've got these 70% forage diets here on the left, and then on the very right column, the high UNDF non forage diet, and you can see a little bit of the alfalfa, a little bit of the corn silage, and then a whole lot of byproducts, right? Citrus, corn, gluten, corn, grain cotton seed, soy plus sunflower seed hulls. Those were fun to get here. That's not common anywhere in, in the northeast. Wheat, eggs, vitamins, and minerals, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:23:23):
So when we look at these diets we see crude protein right around 16 and DF you know, we tried to be right around 33%. And DFOM we're gonna skip the pools for now. This is really just about about intakes and about how do we make, how do we make adjustments to diets? 'cause I don't think anybody's gonna move all the way to a 30% forage diet unless they absolutely have to. But it, what it might mean right now is if I can make a deal on a byproduct that gets me better digestibility than some of my forages changes my intake a little bit, I can pick up on some of these milk protein and, and get a little bit more margin out of it, right? Starch running about 25%. Nothing too dramatic there. Trying, trying to be right around 6%. Sugar and ether extract right around four. And you can see lysine methionine was fairly fixed on, on this one. We were targeting, you know, right around 96 to a hundred pounds of milk on a protein basis or on a me and MP basis, dry matter intake, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:24:38):
Dry matter intake at, at 61 61 on the two high forge diets. Look what happened on that byproduct diet. We're pushing up to almost 71 pounds of dry matter intake, right? And those cows, you know, they filled up on, on A and DFOM, you know, 20 to 23. So we see about a three, just over a three pound increase in A-N-D-F-O-M-U-N-D-F went up accordingly. And we don't need to get into all of this, just the idea that, that, I think what's important about these, these diets where we're trying to make some manipulations to increase intake, get more protein you just wanna make sure you got enough NDF in there to keep everybody happy, right? Mostly the bugs and the cow. We don't want acidosis. But I think here's what's really important, right? We look at 91 96 and about 106 pounds of milk energy corrected belt, you know, 94, 96 0.8 a hundred.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:25:39):
The fat kind of went down. And again, I, we did, we expected that a little bit. We had with the byproducts. We've got some more unsaturated fatty acids. But what I wanted to you guys to see here is look at the true protein yield 2 6 7 2 8 3 2 huge increase, you know, six tenths of a pound increase in milk protein output on these cows where we modified the diet, reduced the forages, brought in some highly digestible byproducts made things a little more, you know, just increase our intake. And I know some of you're gonna say, well, you're really screwed up. And you can see the true protein percentage here, right? Went up nicely. And again, like all these, you gotta protect against the milk fat. We had a little bit too much unsaturated fatty acids. And we couldn't control for that. That just came along with the byproducts.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:26:34):
And, and that's something that I don't know what to do with at least in this case we didn't. But you look at the feed efficiency, right? And we're looking at energy corrected milk to dry matter intake, and you say, well, geez, you lost efficiency. Well, we did lose a little bit of efficiency, but we picked up a, a fair amount of protein that today would be worth quite a bit of money. But I think one of the things that you have to keep in mind here is that we picked up some energy too, right? And I realize that this is probably not right. This is bacteria. These cows gained a lot of body weight. And you can see rumination was good, right? So I think there's two things here. Feed efficiency might not look good, but the cows realize the energy.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:27:22):
Because if you're doing this to early lactation or high producing cows, you're actually picking up body weight. They're not losing the energy, they're just partitioning it to some of it, to body composition or body energy replenishment. And I think we miss that because we don't weigh cows, and we're not always conditioned scoring as frequently as maybe we should, but also just maintaining the NDF content of some of these product, these byproduct diets will maintain chewing and rumination in an acceptable level. You know, we're above that 500 minute per cow per day threshold. But I think the most important thing here to me, is the ability to drive intake a little bit right now and pick up some microbial yield and get a little bit more of that milk protein that's so valuable. So that's where you have to do, you know, if you're contracted on a bunch of byproducts, great.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:28:13):
If you're not, maybe there's some room here to make some manipulations, right? And I just, I want to talk about that because I think that's a different way of doing it. We're not going high starch. We're saying, Hey, what can I bring in here that can pick up a little bit of intake, maybe overcome some of my not so good forages? Gimme a little bit more uniformity of, of intake. And remember, a few years ago when we had the drought in the Midwest, and a lot of herds moved this direction, they actually saw their components go up and their milk go up as they dropped their forage amount. 'cause The, 'cause the byproducts they purchased were actually really uniform and higher digestibility than their higher digestibility than their forages. Okay?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:29:00):
So D ad, right? We talk about this, there's been a lot of work done on potassium potassium's, really expensive to get in the diet. You know, it's great if you've got it coming in the forage through the manure
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:29:47):
But it looks like, you know, again, we're not gonna do a full review of this, but the other thing they observed is that as they increase the DA right, and moving towards, you know, above three 50, above 35 that they see a nice increase in intake, right? And we've, people have been working on why is that? Well, it looks like fiber digestibility is enhanced. So whether there's a potassium requirement or a buffering capacity, I don't have, I don't see anybody with a real answer on this yet, but I've seen lots of data that said, well, maybe the fiber bugs need a little bit more potassium. Maybe we're just buffering the rumen better. Maybe we're, maybe in certain conditions we're buffering the cow a little bit better, right? Especially right now when it's hot outside, it's gonna be 90 and upstate New York again today, cows probably need a little bit more pots potassium anyhow.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:30:41):
But you know, it, it looks like, you know, D ad is a really effective way of improving milk protein output, primarily through enhanced digestibility. And this particular study 11% increase. And again, they did two levels of protein and two decad levels independent of the protein, 11% increase in milk protein, and actually a 20 yeah, 26% increase in milk fat. And a 26% increase, almost a 20% increase in lactose too, right? Which isn't in here. So, again, D ad looks like a fairly simple way. If you're not currently doing that, maybe get your D ad cranked up, get it to three 50 or a little bit higher, 35, whatever number you want to use using the original equation, dec A one. And that, that looks like it does a nice job. If you review enough of literature, it's pretty clear cut for the most part.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:31:47):
On, on increasing milk protein, I think there's a few studies where they don't see increases in milk protein output. And I've read those studies a few times now, and I, I am pretty, I think that some of those studies that don't see a response are probably amino acid limiting. I know I'm saying this independent of the protein. I think there's some other things. There are some levels where if we get into a limiting amino acid situation, we're gonna, we're gonna miss it. Other things you could do tomorrow. And, and I got a bunch of these questions after I did the first chem webinar and amino acids. I got hit up with a bunch of questions and a bunch of emails about why we're not looking at fatty acids and insulin responses and milk protein. So I wrote my colleague Mike or Tom McFadden, or John, yeah, Joe McFadden, geez, Pete's too name, McFadden's Joe McFadden.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:32:45):
I walked across the hallway and said, tell me everything you know about this. So he sent me a bunch of papers and I read everything that Adam Locke has put out lately. And this fits with some things that I've been wondering about because we, for years, we just fed fat. But these guys are starting to get to the point where they're saying, Hey, maybe there's a requirement, maybe there's a profile that makes cows more energetically efficient. As we get to that profile that looks more energetically efficient, we're seeing improvements in insulin signaling, right? So, so I, I pulled some of that apart here. I've got one paper in the interest of time. I've got one paper that looks at this, but there's three or four papers out there now that all point in the same direction that, that as we get this profile of fatty acids, correct, the cows saying, Hey, that's a good thing.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:33:34):
I'm gonna help you guys out by changing my insulin signaling or my sensitivity. I have not looked at IGF one yet. So if we look at this paper by Jasa published in 2019, they looked at the ratio of C 16 to, you know, basically palmitic to oleic on productivity, and they're looking simply at the fatty acid blends. I think we should probably be looking at this on a dietary basis, right? And you can see the, the ranges there, 80 to 10, 73, 17, 66, and then 60 30. So like a one and a half to one. You are gonna hear me come back to that. And again, happy to share the slides will be shared with you in the interest of time. I'm gonna keep moving. But when we look at when we look at that you know, on a percent dry matter, the 16 0 1 5, 8 1 4 4, 1, 3, 3, 1 2 6, the dropping a little bit.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:34:31):
And as the C 16, oh, as the palmitic drops, the oleic increases 0.68, 0.78, 0.8 8.98, right? And whether this is digestibility or just fatty acid profile in general for metabolism I'm not sure we really know that yet. But what's most important is when we start to look at what are those cows doing with lactose and protein. And we see these nice, even though this isn't significant here on the treatment, and I recognize that if you look at this data and you get that ratio about 1.5 to one on Palmitic toole, we see about a five to 6% increase in milk protein yield that we didn't see before. And actually we see about a 7% increase in lactose, in these cows at that same ratio, right? So what this suggests to me is that the, the gland is moving in concert, it's picking up efficiency.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:35:35):
We've got some signaling going on, right? Because we're seeing both both protein and lactose move in a, in the same direction. These cows might be a little bit amino acid limiting. Anyhow, things you could do tomorrow. Almost everybody's feeding fat, right? I don't know if too many diets that don't have some form of fat in it. What this would suggest is maybe as we feed fat, we alter these ratios a little bit, try to get to that one and a half to one range, and pick up the opportunity to get a little bit more milk component yield, right? Because it's so valuable right now, again, coming back to the 5 62 a pound for milk protein. Okay, one more thing. I always say this, pay attention to digestibility. This is a slide from Paul Conan Off's lab that he shared, graciously shared with me.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:36:31):
This just happens to be feather meal. And he and I were comparing notes one day, and he actually ran he ran mobile bag. We ran, he ran, had this run in a commercial lab with a Ross assay. And you can see that, you know, there was pretty good agreement between the two methods on digestibility. That's not the point here. The point here is that notice that there's a range in digestibility of these sources. This part, this particular source of feather meal running from 49 to almost 80% digestible. I see blood meal, I see distillers, I see a bunch of other ingredients that behave the same way. So if we're gonna balance for amino acids, we have to make sure that we're understanding digestibility. And we know from previous studies where we've tested this, that the cows will in fact respond to high and low digestibility.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:37:26):
They will be protein limited, they will respond that way. And a lot of times that happens and we don't have this information, and it drives all of us crazy because we really don't know what's going on, right? So you can't go out and be cheap, right? If milk protein's running 5 62 a pound, you know, do some math figure out, okay, what can I afford? Go find some better protein, you know? And what I've learned is you kind of get what you pay for. At least in, in the, the stuff that we've analyzed for many years now. There are some really great products out there. Pay a little bit more for that consistency and performance. There are some that you can buy really cheap and there's a reason for it, right? So just, you know, make sure you're paying attention. Don't go too cheap trying to do this because the cows will respond with more milk protein if you get this.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:38:21):
Right? Right. So we'll just finish up here talking about balancing amino acids. If we just look at the broken stick model on milk protein yield and, and C-N-C-P-S we're at about 2.6%. So I'm taking kind of an NRC approach here. We're at about 2.6% digestible methionine, it's a percent of the mp to optimize milk protein yield using C-N-C-P-S 6.5 on lysine. We're at about seven digestible lysine and about 7% of the metabolizable protein, right? And these numbers have been out there for a while. But in the interest, you know, in the interest of moving ahead, we developed moving towards version seven, you know, actual numbers, grams, you know, the, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, the fifth column grams of amino acid per alala, me, right? And we're working to get version seven out into everybody's hands. We've done enough studies now we're comfortable with its predictions and we've fixed some of the offsets.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:39:30):
So hang on, we're getting there. But I'd like to see it gone. But, you know, we were at 1.14 on methionine, 1.14 grams of amino acid per CMY and 3.03 for lysine, right? And, and kind of the traditional numbers you would see as a percent of the essential amino acids. Well, we ran a study, there's a few more slides here. We ran a study look, looking at those numbers on 144 cows. And what we tested was the range in the data, right? So we came up with those optimums, but there's a standard deviation around the methionine and there's a standard deviation around the lysine, and there's a standard deviation around the rest of the essential amino acids. So we ran a study evaluating this find to try to find out, well, if we go down one standard deviation for all essential amino acids from our optimum or up one standard deviation, will the cows tell us anything different than some of our initial studies, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:40:31):
So we're just boundary testing. So again, I, in the interest of time, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this heavy corn silage, high moisture corn, some tri Kali, and then a bunch of other ingredients to, to round out our carbohydrates in our proteins. Some room protected methionine, some room protected lysine, some blood meal energy booster notice down there. Second from the bottom, we've got dextro again, we like sugar. We tend to see better responses to milk protein yield when we've got some sugar in the diet. And we're doing that now instead of pushing the starch all the way up. So when we look at the crude protein 14, 14, 7, and 16, right? So that just reflects the amino acid balance. NDF’s are running 31 32. Sugar's not quite as high. We were pushing for that at least five range. We didn't quite make it.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:41:20):
We're running right around four there. So we should have added just a little bit more. And we were expecting the starch to be just a little bit lower in the end, but that's just how it turns out. And that's what happens with corn silage. Okay? And there's our grams of amino acid. So you can see on things like methionine 71, 78, 92, lysine 2 0 1 2 22, 2 50. So these are the actual grams fed every day on the study. So we've got a really nice titration there. And the cows basically said if you go low we don't like it and we're not gonna produce as much energy corrected milk, and we're not gonna make as much protein, but our optimums, what we call the neutral here you know, they did fine. True protein yield was good. Not, not statistically different from the positives. So even when we went way up, we didn't see big responses there.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:42:11):
The true protein content actually was the same, right? So this gave us, the fat was the same. So it gave us a lot of comfort. But those numbers are pretty good. Where am I going with this? Well, where I'm going with this just to end up, is that after we ran that study, we put everything back through version 6 55. And the optimum methionine level turned out to be 1.19 grams of methionine per mca. Me, that's a little higher than version seven. And that just reflects the differences between having protozoa and endogenous protein in the model, which we don't have in six five. In both versions, you'd need to maintain a lysine and methionine ratio of 2.7 to one. Okay? But I, I know, and I'm showing you guys this because I think if you're gonna push for more milk protein, we have to push our methionine and lysine levels a little bit.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:43:06):
And, and I know some nutritionists have pushed back on me saying, Mike, that's just really high. And I said, yeah, I know it is. But this is what the cows tell us they need, right? So if the cow's consuming 60 m cows of me, you multiply that by 1.19, you come up with a requirement for 71 grams of methionine at the small intestine, and we know that the relationship between methionine and lysine is 2.7. So you'd multiply that out by 2.7. So we need 193 grams of lysine, and that freaks people out even more, right? Simply because we don't tend to run lysine that high in a lot of diets. But again, this is what the cows are telling us their requirements are. And I think when people say, gee, I have amino acid balance in the past and I just never made it work. I think it's because we're just not close to the requirements, right? We might be doing better, but we might not be in the or we might not be in the right relationship, right? We got our methionine up there, but because of digestibility and, and sources, we didn't get our lysine up there. So always calculate methionine first and then, and, and then move on with your lysine. And with that, I'll take any questions.
Commercial (00:44:20):
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Scott Sorrell (00:44:45):
Dr. Van Amburgh. Our first question actually we got two that's somewhat related from Todd and Darrell. One is asking, Mike, are all sugars the same? What specific types of sugars should be, should we be feeding? And the other is, do we treat lactose the same as sucrose?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:45:07):
Great question. No, they're not really all the same. Sucrose and fructose would be at the top of my list. Dextro, I love dextrose, but it's, it's really expensive. You know, 'cause you just know what you're getting. Lactose Jeff Burkins did a nice, he never published it. I got to see it a couple times privately, sort of. He did a nice review of of lactose in cows and, and they respond very well to lactose, but it's a really slow degrading sugar in the room. And they'll adapt to it and they'll get up and running. So it is a functional sugar, but I think you're gonna get more bang for your buck out of sucrose. Fructose and dextrose and things like that. We could get into the rest of the sugars, but those are the ones we tend to see the most.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:46:05):
You know, and it, there's, you know, over time sniffing has pushed my buttons about four car or five carbon sugars versus six carbon sugars. And I think there probably are some differences in the rumen. But I, you know, what, what we call water soluble carbohydrates in most forages, you know, I go back to the, the you know, the fructans and things like that. Those, those things really drive ProTool growth and microbial growth. So I think that's what we've gotta focus on. But anyhow, not all created equal. But sucrose, fructose, dextrose, things like that.
Scott Sorrell (00:46:45):
Alright, we're gonna stay with the sugar theme here. Could the sugar effect on increasing fiber digestion that Hoover reported be mediated by anaerobic fungi as well as bacteria and protozoa? Not all anaerobic anaerobic fungi can use starch.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:47:03):
That's true. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna feign ignorance here. I have tried to learn about fungi is, but I haven't tried a lot. 'cause I've been so focused on getting the protozoa figured out for the modeling purposes. So I, I can't give you good answers. 10 years ago we ran a study trying to manipulate the fungi and, and get some outcomes and we just were really unsuccessful and I never went back to it. Right? That's when I started on the ProTool thing. So I I don't have a good answer for you. I wish I did. If anybody out there is listening and has any good answers about the fungi, I am all ears.
Scott Sorrell (00:47:47):
All very well. We'll stay with sugars. James is asking, in C-N-C-P-S sugar KD reduced approximately 40% per hour from original versions and assigned to liquid passage rate. So ruminal digestibility of sugar can be less than a fast starch. So does the model predict the bump in microbial protein synthesis with added sugar you mentioned?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:48:15):
It does. And that's a great observation. We're going to, that's one of the fixes in the model. The next ly the next feed library, we will have a fix in it. 'cause Forty's too low it'll be 60. How's that? Probably not entirely satisfactory, but yeah, well, we dropped it from two to 300 which I think in vitro you can measure some things like that. And there's some other data out there, you know, there's some data out there where it's even faster. But I think that's somewhat analytical error. 'cause I've tried to go back and recreate some of that and we can't do it. But I don't think anything disappears at 300% per hour initially. 'cause I think, again, we're trying to replicate, it depends on what form we're feeding the sugar in. But I, I think in that 60 range, we're gonna probably hit just about everything and we'll try to, to detail that over time. But yes, it needs to be a little bit higher. So I agree with the, whoever asked the question that that 40 is too low.
Scott Sorrell (00:49:25):
All right. Ran is asking protozoa are specifically retained in the rumen, basically engulfing bacteria and increasing recycling. What are your thoughts in regards, is this the right way to increase microbial yield and mp?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:49:43):
Great question. Just finished a very long PhD dissertation trying to get an answer to that. What we learned is they're not preferentially retained in the rumen. Our new characterization of ProTool flow, this is all for version seven. And it winds up with all the other literature data that are out there. 'cause We ran it against every basal flow study we could find that had good data. The protozoa flow about 80% with the liquid and 20% with the solid passage. So they, they actually aren't preferentially retained. And we learned that by dosing protozoa or bacteria, just dosing the rumen with a bunch of stable isotopes, measuring the concentration in the rumen, measuring the concentration at the ESAL orifice get getting the flows. And and what we found is that they're, they, they do flow primarily more with the liquid passage and that does fit some older literature. But there wasn't, there's not been a lot of work done on that. No, nobody's actually dosed the, the protozoa in the room and, and then measured it and had the same marker and had the right marker. So we're feeling pretty comfortable about this because it actually, like I said, fit all the other ESAL flow data pretty well and it cleaned up our bias in, in version seven predictions.
Scott Sorrell (00:51:19):
Alright. There's a lot of pushback on beyond r corn and producers are looking at other corn varieties. Since everything discussed today hinges on fiber digestibility, where do you stand on this and what are your thoughts on the potential impact on milk protein production with this move? And that comes from William?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:51:39):
Hey William. I, I yeah, and I'm, I'm, I don't take sides on the BMR conventional thing anymore. There are so many forages coming online and so many ways of thinking about forages. You know, I I am just starting to look for those highest digestibility varieties that you can find BMR or otherwise, right? Everything's gonna respond to light, heat, and water, whether you're A BMR or a conventional forage. You know, as we have more water scarcity, that's gonna change digestibility as we get more heat, a little bit of that's gonna change digestibility. So I'm, I'm just looking at some of these some of the data. I'm always looking on a regional basis, you know, 'cause I, I can't trust if somebody grow the corn silage in Georgia versus New York. I'm not gonna trust that data to replicate our system saying Wisconsin would be closer to New York.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:52:34):
I think it's important that we just start looking at all the digestibility data we can. And my recommendation is you know, we're looking at that three pool system now and we're saying, Hey, we want, the corn silage was the largest fast pool. And we don't, it's not just the corn silage. We want every forage we can get with a large fast pool, right? So the, the, the greater that first that fat, that rapid rate of digestion, right? And some of the labs are now moving to 12 hours time points to capture some of this information. We're gonna support that because our data says we probably have to have a 12 hour time point to capture these really good forages are more of, more of the information. And the, the higher that it is, stability in those early hours, the greater the intake potential, the greater the it is.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:53:25):
And I think that's how we have to reorient our decision making process. And if you go way, way back and you read Van Se book, he's got a graph in there from some data in the UK where the 12 hour digestibility of dry matter or organic matter had the highest correlation with dry matter intake. So, so I think we just have to get focused on digestibility and, and whatever forage is out there and you know, and again, we don't want them too mature. I think the other thing we've gotta worry about or be concerned about is I see too much tension, yet I know this is true because we just overgrew our dairy and don't have the land resources. But this, this tension between yield and digestibility is a big one. There's a few more points of yield of digestibility really powerful, but sometimes we don't have the inventory to allow that
Scott Sorrell (00:54:22):
Very well. Mike, I'm gonna do a time check real quick here. It's at the top of the hour. We typically cut it off at the top of the hour, but we've gotten a lot of feedback from the audience that they enjoy the q and A session. And so I'm willing to proceed a little bit longer if, if you've got the bandwidth for it and the time.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:54:41):
Sure.
Scott Sorrell (00:54:44):
Maybe five, 10 more minutes,
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:54:46):
Whatever. Yep. I got 10 more. I, yeah, 10 would be good.
Scott Sorrell (00:54:50):
Alright, great. Our next question comes from Buzz. Could you comment on the amino acid requirements when the CP level of the diet is 14% to 15%
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:55:06):
Buzz? I need your context. The requirements are the same. I think the question is, is what's the supply? So as we pull the protein levels down, I, I think what he's really getting at is what becomes first limiting. So when you're in that 14 to 15% range on crude protein, depending upon your forages and however else you're putting your protein supply together, you know, methionine and lysine are definitely pretty close to one in two. I think there's, we're a little, we're looking more at histidine, although we haven't quite figured out how to put that in there yet, right? It's a little expensive to bring histidine in and with common feed sources. And, and then we get into the branch chains. So you gotta pay attention to the leucine as you start to pull your protein down. This is why, that's why blood meal, good quality blood meal or animal protein in general becomes your, your best friend as you get towards a lower limit of nitrogen intake.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:56:17):
And, and that we could go back and look at that in Andrew Lapier study is that it was hard to build those diets in a way where we could meet most of those amino acid requirements. But we were, again, we weren't really trying to, we're just trying to test those boundaries. But you get into those scenarios where you start to worry about, gee, I don't, I wish I had a source of room protected hise histidine or leucine even tryptophan, right? We, we've run some studies or not studies, we've run some diets where we're a little suspect on, on some of those, an amino acids.
Scott Sorrell (00:56:58):
All right? One of our past guests Dr. Mike Hutchins is asking you, use me versus me. Why the difference in your ratios?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:57:11):
I use me instead of me. Yes, Dr. Hutchins I use me because I have spent a lot of time looking at how we manipulate milk composition based on season, based on dietary makeup, based on fatty acid profiles. And the ES assume that fat is fat because we're tend to use static value for the energy concentration of fat. Yet we know that as we go from short chain and de noble fatty acids to preformed and longer chain fatty acids that the energy content of the fat changes, which to me, makes it more difficult to actually use NE precisely. If I could figure out what fatty acid profile the cow was secreting or synthesizing, then it would probably be easier to use E. So I am always referring to me, and I know that's not a satisfactory answer to a lot of people, but when you're trying to model NE excretion, I find it really difficult because it does vary quite a bit based on that fatty acid profile.
Scott Sorrell (00:58:32):
And yet, another question from a past guest lecture Dr. Chase is asking our animal protein blends less variable than sources like blood meal for digestibility?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:58:46):
Good question, Larry. I miss having you around. Yeah, I think one way to, yeah. So my answer, my easy answer would be yes, blending them up is always the lesser of all the evils because you're spreading out your risk. And that, that falls into all the work and all the talking, and all the papers and all the calculations that Bill Weiss and Norman St. Pierre have done over the years that you can't put all your, all your eggs in one basket. So diluting out that risk of having something that just isn't the same one week to the next is important. So yes, blending, blending is a better way to do that. But again, I would still say you still should do checks every once in a while to make sure that your blends are not being corrupted by a couple ingredients that just aren't what you think they are.
Scott Sorrell (00:59:45):
Very well. And Mike, we have a lot of questions, but we're gonna la ask just one more and would remind everyone that we will answer all of these questions in writing, and we'll put them on our website Dr. Van Berg. Our last question is, you mentioned lysine methionine ratio several times today. That seems like a move backwards to the way we feed cows with the NRC. How can we integrate this with some of the work showing more complex relationships between methionine, lysine and other amino acids?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (01:00:20):
So, I, I fully agree with you. I'm only talking about those two right now, because in field, as it is right now, in a field applicable model, we don't have full capacity to model all essential amino acids. Now, that's a great question. It's one that frustrates me. My way around that has been, let's start, and that's why I showed you those few slides. You know, we, we have recommendations specific, not recommendations. We have actual numbers that we feel pretty good about. Now, based on that study I showed you from, from Andrew LaPierre, where we're pretty comfortable, at least within the structure of version seven, that we can balance for all essential amino acids on a gram of digestible amino acid per m me basis, right? So I, I agree with you. We've gotta move away from just ratios, but what you should have observed in, well, either the second last slide or the last slide, the second last slide is that I gave you grams, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (01:01:27):
So, you know, if a cow's eating 60 M cows, you need 71 grams of methionine and at the small intestine, or if you're, and that should lead to 193 grams of lysine. So, I, I want to get this to a grams, they require grams not ratios. So don't, I'm just talking about the relationship between lysine and methionine. I use the term ratio, but there, there does seem to be that relationship whether we, no matter which way we did the calculation we always end up with that same relationship in terms of how many grams of lysine follow the, the methionine. But no, I, I wanna get away from all that stuff. I'm not, we're not going backwards. I want to get to grams.
Scott Sorrell (01:02:11):
All right. Thank you, Mike.
Jose Santos (01:02:14):
Hello, everybody. My name is Jose Santos. I'm a professor in the Department of Animal Sciences, and I want to take this opportunity to invite everybody to come to Gainesville next month to attend the Florida Ruminant Nutrition Symposium on February 24 to 26 2025. So we've prepared an excellent program with the help of bca Purdue Agribusiness and other sponsors that will be probably very enlightened in terms of content networking and other opportunities. In this particular slide here, you have two links that can take you to our registration website either to the symposium website or to the registration itself. As part of our program for the 2025 event, we have a mini symposium, traditionally that's been sponsored by Balchem. So we are bringing Dr. Tara Felix from Penn State University, Dr.
Jose Santos (01:03:29):
Brett Johnson from Texas Tech Dr. Albert de Reese here from the University of Florida, and Dr. Tom Overton from Cornell University. And they are gonna dive in and spend the entire afternoon discussing multiple aspects of beef on dairy carcass composition management aspects relative to the performance of those animals and feedlot the economics of beef found dairy, as well as transition cow management, in particular, the dairy cow, the transition dairy cow. So following the Balchem Mini Symposium, we have a traditional Brazilian, what we call shasco or, or asado for those friends from the south, or a barbecue that you're gonna be delighted to attend. And the following day, on Tuesday, we have a packet day with the morning being sponsored by Purdue Agribusiness with a major focus on room metabolism and animal health.
Jose Santos (01:04:43):
We have Dr. Jeff Firkins from the Ohio State University discussing aspects of room fermentation. Dr Diwaker Vyas here from the University of Florida, Dr. Alex Bach from Spain. And Dr. Lance Baumgard from Iowa State university. So the home morning will be taken by those four speakers with a lot of discussion followed by lunch. And then we have a full afternoon plan for that Tuesday, February 25th. So in the program of Tuesday afternoon, we have this lineup of speakers here on top. And for the Wednesday morning, we have this other lineup of speakers here on the bottom. So, Dr. Bob Cousins, who is an expert on zinc metabolism and zinc transport. We'll start our afternoon program followed by Dr. Dave Fraser from university of Sydney, college of Veterinary Medicine in Australia. And we're gonna finish our first session of the afternoon with Dr.
Jose Santos (01:05:52):
Jerry Spears. So the whole goal of this first session in the afternoon is to really target and focus on mineral metabolism. Dr. Cousins will discuss zinc. Dr. Fraser will focus on calcium. And then Dr. Spears will talk about different sources of trace minerals for ruminants. So we'll have a break followed by three other speakers who will focus primarily on manipulations of the early calf and impacts on lifetimes. So Jim Drackely, Dr. Jim Drackley from University of Illinois, will talk about nutrient requirements of the Prew dairy heifer, followed by Dr. Javier Martin-Tereso from trial nutrition in the Netherlands. He is gonna discuss experiments in which they manipulate the diet during the Prew period and what impact that has on lifetime productivity. And then we have our own PhD student here, Masroor Sagheer, who works under the mentorship of Dr.
Jose Santos (01:07:03):
Pete Hansen, who's been doing experiments, looking at manipulation of the medium in which embers develop early on, and what impact that has on. The offspring is also conduct experiments in which he's strategically supplemented methyl donors, such as from protected choline looking at potential impacts on offspring development in beef and dairy cattle. In the following day, we have a mixture of presentations, fo presentations, focusing on newer methods to understand RU and fermentation using breadth of cows, which is what Dr. Muatian Niu from Switzerland is gonna discuss with us. So they have new technologies that can be used that are not invasive to evaluate Ruminal fermentation. Then Dr. John Goeser will talk about new methods to evaluate forest quality and how that can play a role in diet formulation for dairy cattle. Our own Lais Lima who is a PhD student under the mentorship of Dr.
Jose Santos (01:08:19):
Dakkar vs. Will talk about the experiment she's done looking at nutrient cycle on a farm focusing primarily on nitrogen, but other nutrients. And then we have, again, Dr. Brad Johnson, Dr. Tara Felix, which will complete the program on that Wednesday, discuss an impacts of beef on dairy on the cow itself, the cow that carries that calf. That will be some of what Dr. Tara Felix will discuss. So now going back of Bifo Dairy Implications to the Dairy Cow, and Dr. Brad Johnson will discuss aspects of tissue deposition, a and muscle deposition in animals relative to interventions with beef on dairy. So we believe we have an attractive program with a lot of interesting information. Don't be shy to go to our website and check our program and opportunities to come and attend the conference. So I hope that you'll come to Gainesville, particularly if you're from the northern states of the US or Canada or other places. Come here to get a few days of collegiality defrost. Some will be warm, hopefully here in Gainesville and enjoy this extension program. So I thank you and I hope to see you all here in Gainesville next February.
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