ARTICLE 58 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE May 2025 WHAT IS FEED EFFICIENCY? The definition of efficiency is a ratio of outputs to inputs. Therefore, feed efficiency is a measure of an animal’s ability to transform ingested feed into metabolically available nutrients for production. A feed efficient animal should eat less whilst maintaining production or eat the same with increasing production. For example, for a 30 L dairy cow, to improve feed efficiency from 1.4 (l/Kg DM) to 1.5 means that we save around 1.4 Kg DM intake/cow/day. It was long assumed that digestibility was similar across individuals. However, it is now evident that individual cows differ in their ability to digest various feedstuffs. These differences in digestibility among dairy cows is due to many factors such as nutrition (being one of the main focuses), breed (selecting genetically more efficient animals), health of the animal, days in milk, weather, and management etc. As an industry we can make incremental changes to factors such as management, nutrition and selecting more feed efficient animals which will have a big impact overall on feed efficiency. In terms of nutrient digestibility and uptake there are two main focuses: Rumen and small intestine. It is well known that the most efficient diets are the most profitable. Maximising feed intake and milk production is thus essential to improve the gross margin of the dairy farm. In fact, a + 0.1 point improvement in the milk index - ratio between the quantity of fat corrected milk + primiparous correction and DMI - leads to an increase of 0.5 euros/cow/day in the margin on feed cost (Techna Research). Feed efficiency is something you need to manage from the beginning to the end of the career of the dairy cow. FEED EFFICIENCY: THE CHALLENGE OF A DAIRY COW Jamie-Leigh Douglas Ruminant Technical Sales Manager Techna Nutrition UK and Ireland Alizé Philouze Ruminant Nutritionist Techna Nutrition France
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