Wintering Cows on Fodder Beet

Rumen Function in Wintering Cows in NZ

The use of fodder beet as a winter feed crop for dairy cows has grown from <500ha to >6000ha in New Zealand in the last five years. The New Zealand feeding practice of grazing the crop in situ is unique in forage based dairy systems internationally, and there has been no research available to guide best practice feeding of fodder beet. In 2010-2011 DairyNZ funded a specific programme of research to determine the risks and feed value of fodder beet winter crop feeding to dairy cows.

This project determined the physiological and toxicological risks of the crop, the actual feed values (energy, protein and mineral) of the crop as fed in industry, and the required supplement proportion of the ration for adequate rumen function. This project will demonstrate the validity of the best practice feeding strategies developed in that earlier project using typical large herds wintering on fodder beet in New Zealand, and provide refined reference ranges for both fodder beet nutritive values and cow health and production metabolites when grazing fodder beet.

Expected outcomes of this project

Benefit

Demonstrated ‘best practice’ fodder beet feeding with various supplements from large scale herd trials, which would inform and facilitate the development of published guidelines. This is currently unknown, though required, by the industry. This project would extend the previous 2010-2011 DairyNZ project and deliver all the recent research findings to the industry in a form ready for use.

Accurate cow blood, urine and faeces measurements, with positive BCS and LWT gain, for cows appropriately managed on FB. There are currently no published references for metabolic assessment of cows wintering on fodder beet, and this data would provide a suitably large and diverse set to enable robust references for the industry.

Robust feed value and toxicological data on FB across the regions and seasons. The only data available on feed value and toxicological assessment in grazed fodder beet is from the previous 2010-2011 DairyNZ project. This project would extend that data set of cultivars, regions and management approaches, and another season’s variation.