As a member of the Farm Consultancy Group, we spend a lot of time on our own training and development.  As a part of this we spent a day at CEDAR (at Reading University) earlier this month.  It is always fascinating to see the results of cutting edge research, but more importantly, it is good to see the near-market stuff they are doing.  Of course we were there to pick up hints that can practically be applied to UK farms.

An example of this was an experiment to see how low dietary protein in a dairy cow can be taken before production and fertility suffer.  Clearly relevant to this is, of course, the natural variability in diets, however carefully and frequently you test both forages and concentrates as actually fed.

For instance their own (nominally) 18% CP diet actually ranged from 15.8% to 18.5% crude protein! They had every facility they could lay their hands on to minimise variability, but still they found it.

The preliminary results of their trial showed little problem in allowing dietary CP to drop to around 16% in the diet.

Another researcher found that calves kept singly were much slower to learn, both as calves and as adults.  This could, for instance, make them slower to adapt to the milking parlour when they first calve down, so could have a very significant impact on UK dairy farmers who block calve heifers.  In practice, we find that most block calvers keep their heifer calves in groups, as it is far quicker to feed and manage the calves like this.  The experimental results therefore mostly apply to non-block calvers.