Thank you very much indeed, . I avoided nutrition for quite a while, it must be said, partly because even with a degree in biochemistry, I thought it was complicated and potentially somebody else's job. But as hopefully I'll talk through today, I think vets do have a, a role and a specific different role than others involved in dairy cow nutrition.

And what I want to try and do is rather than give you loads and loads of detail, it's give you pointers and ideas about how to get more involved and to dip your toe in being involved in cattle nutrition, or more like get your foot through the door as far as being involved in conversations on farm and with farmers. So I'm more trying to motivate your interest. You can't learn.

Everything you need to know in an hour webinar or in, in many years, but it's more an approach of asking questions and finding out things to bring to the party, as it were. So that's the approach I'll be talking about. So, so I want to talk about what things we need to consider when balancing the ration of a cow, what factors affect the dry matter intake and why that's important, and also energy density and fibre intake as well.

Discuss some methods of monitoring and compare them and show that actually you've got quite a lot of information that nobody else has, or access to techniques that nobody else is legally allowed to do, that could very much help for the team and improve the welfare and health of the cows under your care. And so the idea is, how are you gonna get involved in this? What can you do?

One specific part I want to talk about and that's . Mineral audit, because there are minerals that are veterinary medicines, and they come under different regulations than the ones that are feed additives. So it's important to bear in mind if you're selling in supplements, that actually the supplements going into the ration with the nutritionist have to be calculated on the total diet.

And you might be selling in. Supplements that they are not aware of, or they might be supplementing things that you're not aware of. So we'll discuss that at the end and I'm on a working party of the Food Standards Agency, looking at over supplementation currently.

And AHDB are doing some work and there's actually a webinar on Monday, which I'll signpost you to, about that as well. So I'm gonna really advocate a team approach, not necessarily replacing other people in the team, but actually getting a veterinary voice around the table and a veterinary viewpoint, about nutrition on the farm. First of all, let's set the scene.

What actually is the energy demands on the modern dairy cow? And how do they compare to other things. So, a marathon runner may do twice maintenance requirement for one day, and the fastest ones will do that in under 2.5 hours.

Tour dean cyclists, 3 to 4 times maintenance, and the race lasts for 3 weeks. They get 1 day off a week as well. .

But a dairy cow, that might be peaking at 50 litres, she might be doing that for 4 to 5 months, and she'll be doing. That's 4 to 5 times maintenance. And we wanted to conceive during that period of time.

And those human athletes can have reproductive cyclicity issues, just like our cows sometimes can do as well. So, so we are asking a lot for these cows, we've bred them for their. Milk production, and partly that is by making them able to eat more, but also then we need to think about how well we can manage the issues that we've put on them.

Breeding is improving things like fertility now, but we went a long way in the wrong direction as far as the health and fertility of cows. So I'll concentrate on the welfare of the cow and your view of that as well as the vet. The thing is to think about what do you want to do as far as nutrition.

Are you actually interested in supporting your current clients better? Or there's certainly people who've built up a client base of people of farmers who they're advising on nutrition and then moved to do that full time, . This is gonna require you to move out of your comfort zone.

Because you're gonna have to actually go and put an opinion you might not feel as confident with as you do about your ability to do a DA surgery or your ability to diagnose other things. But that's good for you. It's also potentially good for your business as well.

The first thing to do is to start showing an interest. So you shouldn't expect to come from no interest at all to er saying I want to be your trusted nutrition advisor overnight. So a lot of what I want to talk about are ways to get into the conversation, ways to identify issues that you can bring to the party, to start becoming.

Somebody that they consider to talk to. And we've done quite a lot of research, colleague, Helen Higgins and some of the vets during the time in Bovanne reproduction, have, done surveys with farmers and with vets about, what they want from their vets and what stops the vet from doing things. And a lot of them do want more expertise on nutrition, more of a holistic view, and actually value from their vets.

Caring And it being interested rather than necessarily being totally technically expert, the idea that you're trying to help and that you're bringing something, something different in a different perspective. I ask questions of other people, I don't actually confront them. If I can ask a good question, they might think I know the answer, but at least somebody will get the answer.

And actually, if I want somebody to change, telling them what to do might not be as helpful as guiding them in a direction which makes them come up with the answer. So a good question might help the whole group, instead of just telling somebody what to do if you're a genius in nutrition, which I certainly am not. There are some vets who are very good at nutrition, however, and evidence group, evidence-based veterinary consulting.

Are one group of those that are, and they run some very good courses, and also Feeding the Dairy Cow, by Doctor Tom Chamberlain is a book that's very veterinary focused in describing how to feed dairy cows. There's also a master's in ruin and nutrition at Harper Adams, which I know some vets have been on. That's a two-year part-time course, and I'm also, as Bruce mentioned, programme directing the.

Diploma bover reproduction at Liverpool, and we have a week of that course, it's 8 weeks over 2 years, but a week of that is on nutrition. That happens to be coming up in December, but, that's not quite as in depth obviously as a master's just on nutrition. So what do you know about the herd that other advisors who might be involved don't?

Well, they might know the calving interval, but that's very historic. You potentially have up to-date information about what's going on, and we'll talk about fertility and nutrition later on. You know, the disease in instance, it might be directly like DAs or ketosis, but it might be other diseases.

And because the immune system uses a lot of energy and uses a lot of trace elements, actually it's quite sensitive to deficiencies. So knowing about when diseases occur and when they do in the production cycle might be very important information and might be a warning that there's a problem. You may have a better view of the whole farm business, or you may actually be able to gain a better view by becoming more involved in the nutrition.

And as I said, you may also be Providing supplements in addition to what the feed company is doing, and it's important to be aware of that. So, what does your client actually want to achieve? Well, their milk contract should give you a pretty good clue, because some of them will be requiring to do a certain type of fat and protein concentration, and they are very related to the genetics of the animal, but also to the diet the animal's on.

But More and more, some of the contracts are restricting potentially, or at least regulating the type of access to things like palm oil or soya that might be in the rations, or the amount of grazing that's required potentially as well. So it's useful to know what's in their contract because that might change what you might be thinking of as important as far as volume of milk versus constituents, etc. What skills and resources do they have?

What's the farm like, what could it grow? That becomes important. How good are they at growing it?

How good are they at actually mixing, And making a consistent match. How good are they at attention to detail? That can be very important when you're starting to think of, are we gonna have a complicated nutrition system or a very simple one.

So where do they need your help? Is it your help or somebody else's? And where do you currently fit into that?

Are you just the fire brigade coming to do the DAs, or are you also involved more holistically? Is it something where you want to take more control of the overall vision of the farm if they accept it, or do you want to ask questions to somebody else who can actually do the, the rationing? AHDB are very much pushing the idea that farmers should consider three distinct farming systems.

Autumn carving, or spring carving, block carving type 9 to 12 weeks, or all year round carving. And different nutrition systems are required to optimise those potentially. So that could be grazing, it could be self feed forage and parlour cake, which requires relatively little infrastructure, particularly if the parlour feeder is already in place.

Partial mixed ration, where there's a mixer wagon, tractor mixing, front end loader, etc. Which is gonna increase the capital cost, but also some feed to yield in the parlour, or a total mix ration where. There's no feeding in the parlour at all, but you've got access to potentially a.

Very energy dense or relatively energy dense ration for all of the animals, and potentially they can then put weight on with extra feed they don't need later in lactation. So there are all pros and cons of those systems. So with the, Spring or autumn blocks, you're trying to either with the spring, have calving and peak production.

To synchronise with grass growth, and we'll talk about grass growth later on. Or in autumn, you're gonna have a higher peak yield potentially feeding inside and then relatively unsupplemented later lactation production from grazed grass. The problem with these systems is if the fertility's not good and they fail to conceive, then their next carving is gonna be in the wrong place.

So either they have to move to a different block or to be called or sold on. There's some talk about persistent lactation as well, so increasing the, persistency of lactation having less of a fall, and that can be done by 3 times a day milking, by nutritionally not driving them into the peak, and also by the genetics of the animals. So these sort of globally, what's the farm like, what's the system like, what's the contract like can long term change where you want to give you advice.

So What are we gonna look at? What are we gonna look at the ration on paper. The ration has actually fed to the cows, which may or may not reflect much to what's on paper.

And also then look at the cows to see whether they agree that the ration on paper or the ration fed is appropriate for them. As vets, you can do investigations that may be considered more invasive than anybody other than a veterinary surgeon can do. So blood sampling, ruinnocentesis, etc.

And that's something that you can definitely bring to, to that discussion. So, what are the issues, what is the problem? Well, as we've.

Encouraged and genetically selected for an increase in yield, the dry matter intake increase. Lags behind, and so animals go into a period of negative energy balance where they lose body weight, and the duration and depth of that negative energy balance has knock-on effects on their health, but also on their fertility and then their likelihood of conceiving. So what is this energy demand?

Well, The maintenance requirement is around 65, 70 megajoules per day for a 650 Holstein cow. Smaller animals tend to have relatively higher maintenance per kilo. It's actually related to the body surface area or to the body weight to the 0.75.

Lactation, depending on the milk constituents, has a. An energy content or an energy requirement of 5 to 7 megajoules per litre. And then pregnancy initially has a very small demand, but in the last month, it's about 30 megajoules.

And that reflects about 1 kg of calf weight gain, and fluids, etc. The level of activity, for example, walking out to pasture does have an effect, but sadly if you think about how much a 10 minute walk puts onto your Fitbit or other activity metre. It's not as much as maintenance, so this is a relatively small portion of the whole demand.

But also with heifers, depending on if they're carving down with any growth requirements, how much they've met their, their mature body weight, there may be a significant requirement for growth as well in those animals. So if we look at that more schematically. They have 65 for maintenance, 30 for cows at dry off and into their last month.

For high yielding cow maybe peaking at 50 litres, we've got 5 times maintenance and that's coming to 315, and these are for 5 megajoules per litre, relatively low fat and protein milk. Once they get to lower yields here at 25, then we're down to 190. So do we have a separate ration for the highs and a separate ration for the lows, or do we then try and have the same ration and maybe these high yielders might lose some body weight, maybe the low yields will gain some.

But if we have a low ration, say based in. Maintenance plus 40 for the highs and maintenance plus 25 for the lows. What happens when an animal doesn't conceive and goes down, has a longer lactation and maybe he's down at 20 litres?

That's when we have to make a decision, do we dry them off onto a 35 litre so if . A ration with 30 megajoules extra, or do we keep them doing some work and producing milk, and at 25 megajoules of extra, which is about 0.5 kg of body weight gain plus, and we'll talk about why it's plus in a minute.

So They're the requirements. What does that mean as far as the amount the animal has to eat? And what's a reasonable amount of dry matter intake we're gonna consider.

So for these high lit yielding Holsteins, say you're needing 3150 megajoules. If we can get them to reach, say 22 kg. Then they're gonna need 14 megajoules per kilo of dry matter.

If we can get them to eat 10% more, 20% more, then they're gonna need 12 megajoules per kilo. Now think of these numbers in your head when I start showing you the constituents and the energy density of various feeds as we go forward. Because The high yielding cow really becomes limited on its dry matter intake as far as being able to meet the demand for energy.

If they can't then they're gonna mobilise fat or protein, so a fat cow is gonna mobilise fat, when it starts getting down to. Body condition score 2.5, it's gonna start mobilising protein.

And it's gonna have to mobilise 3 times as much protein in kilos to get the same energy out as it did when it was mobilising fat. So when you see a thin cow, a fat cow become thin and then become a lot thinner a lot quicker, it's because it's then losing protein at the same 3 times the rate to get the same energy as it was losing the fat. And that's not energy efficient because it's costing that much to deposit it.

And that's why our 25. Kilo 25 megajoules of extra, saying in a low yielding cow puts on 0.5 kg of body weight.

In dry cows, actually they don't eat a lot. And our issue is then that we want to maintain their dry matter intake, so when they calve down, they have a high dry matter intake, but we have to do that by diluting. The food, so it's under about 10 megajoules per kilo.

If we dilute it too much with stuff that's too boring like straw, and particularly if we can sort it for the goodies, then we have a problem that they don't eat as much or they will end up putting weight on. So it's a real balance with the dried cows as to keeping the diet palatable enough that they eat a lot. It's like putting dressing on salad to to get that dry matter intake up.

We won't talk too much about dry cow nutrition today, but it's the difference between trying to maintain dry matter intake by keeping palatability up versus, maximising dry matter intake because every mouthful is what's required to meet energy in higher yielding animals. So why don't we just feed these cows really dense diets, you know, Eskimos do it. They eat seal fat, seal blubber, why don't we do that or just feed them starch.

Well, there is a relationship between dietary fibre and rumen pH. The cows have to salivate. To buffer the fermentation in the rumen and the acidity in the rumen.

And also there's a balance between dietary fibre and dry matter intake. So, what are they? This is some modelling work from a group in Germany.

And what they've done is looked at 14% starched rations, or 22% starch rations, and 20 kg per day or 25 kg per day. Put into perspective our ration that I'll talk to you later from the university farm is 24% starch. So, the area under this curve is the time.

That these cows were likely to be below 5.8 pH in the room and so have acidosis. So the more starch.

In percentage terms or in kilogramme terms per day, the longer they're gonna be in acidosis. So, we can increase the pH by giving them more fibre to chew on. So why don't we just give them.

30% NDF, so NDF stands for neutral detergent fibre. So traditionally defined that in a ration. The ration was mixed with detergent at a neutral pH and anything that could be dissolved wasn't fibre, and it was then put through a sieve, and what was left was neutral detergent fibre, and that was dried and weighed compared to how much of the ration and that gave you a percentage NDF.

So that means that 30% of the ration. When mixed with neutral neutral pH detergent, wasn't dissolved. OK, and the PE stands for physically effective, it has to be big enough to give some form of scratch factor in the room.

So 30 seems like a good idea. Yeah, but maybe more than that, we could get more than that, couldn't we? The problem is that that fibre takes time to digest.

So it fills the rumen and then takes time to come through. And also the animals physically take longer to eat it. So.

After probably around 20 we start to get a decrease in the dry matter intake. And at 30, we're starting to lose 10% or so of dry matter intake, but we do have quite a range, these are individual animals. So I think it's worth bearing in mind we can have animals that can eat a lot more and circumstances where we can encourage that.

So how do we encourage that? Well, first of all, how do we calculate it? So one rule of thumb is 3% of body weight.

Another one is 2.5% of body weight plus 0.1 for yield.

So an example of a 650 kg cow giving 30 litres, 3 times, 3% body weight would be 19.5 kg, whereas 2.5% would be 16.25 kg, and then there will be.

3 kg for for the production which will give you 19.25. So, similarish sort of numbers.

And then there were correction factors, these come from Tom Chamberlain's book. So giving a complete ration TMR the animals can have less. Periods of acidosis, because every mouthful has equal amount of concentrate in, and that might increase the yield, the intake by 20 to 30%.

Outer parlour feed is where the animal can have maybe 5 or 6 small feeds of concentrate, rather than 2 big ones in the parlour, can mean that they will eat more as well. Having a mixed forage, so as well as maize or grass, actually having a third forage to open up the ration and make it more interesting can increase it more as well. Holsteins have been bred to eat more too.

Heifers will eat less, particularly if they're carving down in, not their mature body size. So I would aim for 90% of mature body size for heifers, if they're smaller than that, they're gonna eat less, but also they're gonna have more partition for for growing as well in that first lactation period. There are things we can do to really put the cows off eating, one of which is actually having to go to a silage clamp and pulling it out with their teeth self feed silage.

Putting an electric fence to stop them going up to the silage clamp and walking over it does actually make them eat less as well. If I electrified your fridge door handle, I think you'd probably eat less. Poor quality, silage, poorly preserved, particularly butyric silage, doesn't taste very nice, will reduce intakes as well.

And I, as I say, as lactation goes on, the demand is less, so the intakes will go down, but often they are, they are more than is required for the lower yielding that the cows are doing. There are some which factors which are less easy to quantify. When we talk about ad lib, that means with freedom, the animals should be able to eat whenever they want to.

You're probably gonna have to make sure there's quite a lot left behind for them to really truly be ad lib, . When is the food scraped up, so farmer comes, scrapes it up, starts mixing another one, and new ration to put down. It could be an hour or more before the new rations down.

That's 5% of your day, where the cows have no food at all. I've also been to farms where the residue of old food. I just left and they just feed on top of it.

And eventually you get quite mouldy, horrible food, either the bottom of the trough or or on the concrete. And the particular one, they were saying, why are cows only eating 16 kg of food? And the answer was, well, once they've eaten to that, they've then got horrible nose full of mouldy stuff from a week ago that's sitting there.

And then you might not have fed the cows for an hour, but also they might be away for milking. So some large herds will pride themselves on getting the last cow out of a shed through their parlour and back again in an hour. Some will be taking 3 hours twice a day, and the last cow can be away from food.

So there are things you can think of doing like putting food in. Troughs in the collecting yard or at the exit to the parlour, particularly if buildings are going back to a long way away, and one mouthful, 1 kg of food is pretty much equal to 2 litres of milk. So getting that extra 1 kg is important, and I know one farmer who says that each cow takes 2 kg of food from their trough at the exit to the parlour.

So that's increased his, his intakes and his yield by making sure that they don't have to walk too far before they start filling up with food again. How much space is important. A lot of research has been since been done on how little space you can get away with, but we are talking about marginal gains here, so I would certainly think that at least .

Mhm 90 centimetres per cow, if not more, would be, would be useful, and particularly in dry cows, making sure that they don't have the space. And the design as well, so some barriers where the animals can't compete and push out, particularly if you've not got a heifer group or you've got small heifers, then they really need to be thought of as being protected as well. So these are things you can walk around the farm and look at and consider and make suggestions.

Now, can we increase the trough space, can we put a, A feed trailer with some of the TMR in the loafing area, ways to expand things. So let's go to looking at the ration on paper. First thing is, have they assumed at all any body weight loss?

Or any change in condition score, and what body weight and therefore what maintenance requirement have they suggested. So if you've got big hole stones and you find that the ration put there has assumed that they're relatively smaller, then the bigger animals aren't gonna have enough necessarily. And what milk composition does the.

Amount they put per litre reflect what's actually being produced in fat and protein, and AHDB actually have a table on one of their websites where you can look at that. I thought it was a bit excessive to show that here. And then what dry matter intake are they assuming the cows are gonna have?

And how does that actually compare on the farm to what they're eating? So the farmers should know if they've got a mixer wagon specifically, but even you can do that on a mass, how much feed are they ordering per month. And how many bays and the density they're going through a self feeds solid, you can calculate the her dry matter intake.

Is that actually what they are eating? If they're not eating that by 10%, then you've got a problem. So you can say, right, well we need to reformulate this for a lower dry matter intake and then see if we can make it work.

The way it's gonna work is whether or not you can actually produce the energy density and have enough fibre for the cows to actually ruminate properly and not go into acidosis. I've mentioned protein there as well, protein is important to maximise yield, but it's also increases the palatability as well. But it's also a big cost, er, and one that most of the things that farmers are buying into their herd tends to be for protein.

So what are the forages we can choose from in the UK? . And one of the important things is how much fibre they have, and sugar is good for palatability.

Starch is good to for propionate production and lactose production for milk production. And protein, as you say, we might have to balance it by buying in rape or soya. So structural fibre is important and one of our issues is that.

Grass and high digestibility grass silages can be actually lower in effective fibre than we might think. So, here's one of my only really nice pictures, that's first that silage day on the wimble, so that was this year. Our farm manager got a drone for Christmas.

So it's a good way of socially distancing, keeping an eye on what the contractors are doing. So You can do some DIY analysis of forages. This leaflet I've given you the link there is from Mentor a Business, which is part of the Welsh government.

I like this one. A lot of them, AHDB have them and others do have them. A lot of feed companies will have them for farmers.

This one's got a nice balance between information and Making sense and being able to do it yourself. So I use that quite a bit with students. There is also a good step by step guide on assessing and analysing forage, including the commercial forage analysis done by Richard Cooper and Ben Hutley, which is in in practise article here at that link as well.

If you're not in If you don't take the record, you do have to pay, but it's definitely worth downloading for the amount it costs. So this is the type of forage analysis that you'll get from a feed company. They might include that free of charge, but also you can then get them done by Eurofin or whichever lab.

So these just send it to all the labs anyway. So Eurofin is one lab, that would do it in the UK and you can send, private samples to that. So the thing I'm interested in.

From the level I'm talking to you, these dry matter, these are bits that they calculate from the data, for their own sort of analysis programmes, so don't worry too much about those, . So looking in more detail, so this is a grass silage sample, it was first cut from last year. They conveniently show what they think the target should be and the range of samples that they're getting through from other farms.

So this for a first cut was relatively wet, but it's quite leafy. It's quite high in energy, therefore, and it's also quite high in protein, the crude protein. Ammonia fraction gives you an indication if there's been secondary fermentation and breakdown of the protein, so you want that to be low.

And the sugar makes it palatable, but that sugar is broken down into lactic and acetic acid here and so. You can sometimes feel that if you take a sample and feel it on your gloves and it's sticky, so that wouldn't be very sticky, but it would be sweet because of lactic acid. Tastes sweet and it's good for palatability.

NDF is the neutral detergent fibre, and how quickly that leaves the room and depends on its digestibility, and there's a calculation for digestibility here. ADF or ADL stands for acid detergent, fibre or acid detergent lignin. So basically, the more fibrous parts that resist acid and a detergent.

So you've got the NDF which is the fibre, and then the stuff that's gonna take a lot. Time to digest and break down is ADF. And that was traditionally measured by having acid and a detergent, mixing it up and seeing what didn't dissolve, and that was the acid detergent fibre, or in this case, I call it ADL, acid detergent alignant.

Ash is the mineral content, and I'm wary of samples over 100 or 10%, because that might mean the soil inclusion. We then have crude oil, which is the, basically the fat, . For farmers who produce this one have IT3 which is polyunsaturates.

We'll talk about that potentially a bit later on. The pH is 4, so normally it'd be around 4 to mean that it was stable. From preservation and mould point of view, and lactic acid is a better palatability than aceticopropionic acid, but they're stronger acids and are better from the point of view of preservation.

So this sample I'd have thought would smell just a little bit of vinegary. OK, and then from a maize silage point of view, again, what we're really looking at is dry matter which tends to be significantly drier than grass silages, . Energy tends to be similar or slightly higher, and that energy is coming from starch rather than from sugar.

Not as much protein, and again the ammonia fraction is just really telling you whether you've got breakdown of that protein by secondary fermentation. And you've got some fibre here, and slightly less allignin than maybe you would have. And there's not as much fat either.

OK. With the ash, it depends a lot on the weather as to whether you get soil inclusion when it's being harvested. And here you have lactic and acetic acid too.

We haven't got any butyric acid, which is the nasty horrible stuff considering secondary fermentation. So They're the key things I'm looking for. How much starch, cos that's why I'm growing the maize in the first place.

With the grass silage, how much protein and how much sugars, and how much lactic acid, which is telling me about the digestibility and the, the palatability. And it's important to look at the metabolizable energy. OK.

So we're gonna put the grass silage and the main silage analysis in any of the forages. Together, work out how much we've got, how much we've grown, and that can vary quite a bit from year to year, to then put into an analysis package and the nutritionists are going to do that. You can buy that rumnut one that, for example, that's done by Tom Chamberlain and others are available too.

To give a trial of what I've grown and what that does to meet the requirements of the cow, and then I'm going to in this case. Bring in alkalage, which is an alkaline treated whole crop wheat. And some caustic wheat as well, they're both alkaline treated to counteract to some extent the acidity of the grass silage, and then we're gonna produce a blend.

Of Ingredients to balance up what we've grown that we're gonna buy in. So this ration was suggesting we, the cows are gonna be eating 26.9 kg, and our cows just about do that.

So I would make sure that the cows are actually eating that amount. Now we've got some big Holstein cows and plenty of feed space. The energy density though, we talked about 12, this is 11.9, so we're not asking them to do.

A really concentrated diet and the NDF here is 32. So we shouldn't expect too much acidosis, even though we have got 21% starch. So as long as they're gonna eat that amount, those numbers should work.

So what do we have to put in the blend, oh by the way, we're also adding some water. Which keeps the blend bound to the forages and also then means that it's not too much like eating a cream cracker. And we have minerals and the minerals we put in with a liquid feed of molasses to stick them in as well.

So our blend. Ha rapeseed, biscuit, limestone, linseed is a polyunsaturate, we won't go into that today, . Rolled wheat and maize distillers.

So what are they offering me? Look, oh, OK, don't know what they are. I suggest you download this mini feeds guide that's available from AHDB and this contains a brief summary of the typical nutrient.

Content of the different so-called straits, . But a much more detailed description is available in the complete version rather than the mini version, and that's available from contextbooks for 30 pounds. So if you're getting further interested, it's definitely worth, worth, first of all, dipping your toe in by looking at, a ration and then trying to work out what's in it, and then maybe looking at the more detailed one after you've been doing that for a while.

So our wheat is mainly giving us energy in the form of starch. Our biscuit waste is giving us energy, which is quite cheap, it's a waste product, and it's giving us starch and sugar, but as it's ground, it ferments much more quickly and is much more risk of acidosis than maybe rolled wheat or slightly damaged wheat. We then have maize distiller grains, which is partly for protein and partly for fibre.

And it's got a bit of starch, but mainly, it's relatively cheap protein and fibre. And then we have grapeseed meal, and that's for protein, so it's 38% protein. Soya would be up to 49% protein and actually have more oil itself as well and more energy dense.

Part of the rate that we put in our ration is protected, which means it goes through the room and it doesn't get broken down by the microorganisms. So that increases the feed value of some of the, some of the rape we feed. So, you know, get a ration, have a look at it, have a look at the manual, the feed directory and work out what bits giving what, what's giving the starch, what's giving the, what's giving the energy, is it starch, is it sugar, what's giving the protein, etc.

And try and work your way through a ration so you understand which bit's doing what. We can also now do analysis of the total mix ration. That dries the sample and grinds it up, because each individual constituent needs to be homogenised through it to give a representative sample and uses near infrared spectrophotometry to do that.

And so this is a TMR sample from the cows at a university farm from last month, so it's pretty similar to what we were trying to get. So 16.5% crude protein, 24% starch, 35% NDF.

So it's quite close to what we thought it was going to be. Overall pH is about 5. So we have increased that pH a little bit by using, the alkaline and also the fact that the buffer is the.

The blend is generally neutral. So now we need to look at it as it's being fed. So How much space is there per cow?

How much access do they have? What's the quality like? It's all like having a number on a piece of paper, but you need to use your nose and you need to look at it and you need to think, what does it look like?

How long are they eating it and how much is there, and you can also see how much they've sorted it as well. So when they scrape the food up, you can ask for a bucket of the stuff left and you can compare it to what they put down freshly. How far away are milking, and you can also look at the fibre by getting a Penn State separator, which is a series of different sized sieves, which you then use to shake the foods to separate it into into different layers, and you can look at the long fibre, the medium fibre, and the really fine, fine stuff food.

They're quite expensive, they're very useful, but one way of getting into doing that from a cheap point of view is take a handful, put it in a jug of water and mix it and see what floats. That's what produces the raft in the rumen, which is going to get them to ruminate. So that's a, a very visual thing for a farmer to understand.

But as you develop things, then getting a Penn State separator and looking at the Penn State website about how to interpret it is very useful as well. Also consider water, water quality, how. Often though the water truss cleaned out, how much water space is there?

Where is it? And also consider where it comes from. Mains water can be blended to make sure it's within relatively close limits because it's being blended to make sure that humans with kidney problems, etc.

Don't have a problem. If you take borehole water, then it really does balance what's in the aquifer and the rock underneath where it's underneath the farm. Some of them can have more iron in, or more calcium, etc.

So if it's borehole water, then you need to think about that with a, from a minimum analysis point of view. OK, then you need to start thinking about looking at the cows. The obvious one to look at is body condition score, and we're gonna talk more about that and the determinant for body condition score loss in a minute.

The demeanour are the agitating, swishing their tails, chewing their cud, etc. What's the faeces look like? And you might see that on the floor, or you might be on your arm in the fertility examination.

You can sieve as well, and we'll go into these in detail as we go through. So body condition score. This was work done by Phil Garnsworth, the University of Nottingham, which showed that cows which were higher body condition score buying overfed in the previous lactation lost more body condition and produced less milk.

And those that were thinner but weren't ill, ate more and produced more milk. So what he found was 80% of the variation that R squared means of 0.8 means 80% of the variation in body condition score change post calving was predicted by body condition score at carving.

So fat cows lose more weight. However, getting the right cow for the right system is important too, so Holstein's with high concentrate in this study. Just about maintain their body weight after originally losing it on a low concentrate, they lost it, whereas Norwegian reds on high concentrate just got fat, whereas they could survive low concentrate.

So thinking about the cow and the system on your farm is important too. So how does preg fertility allow you to monitor as well? So this is a cusome, which means that if a cow is pregnant to a service, the line goes upwards, and if it's negative, it goes downwards.

So during this period of service, which was about a year, the conception rate was 30%, and then at this point, it was 40%. And we have a change again in July, and we asked the question. What changed?

Well, in this farm, we had good quality maize with high starch, and the cows got more energy, and then unfortunately we ran out of maize at the end of July, and the new maize wasn't as good. So, putting into the farm diary when people change a feed clamp and then looking back at acusum and fertility by month, etc. Can be very useful.

So we know energy and body condition score loss reduces fertility. Starch will encourage cyclicity post carving. But actually fat and particularly polyunsaturates fat, improve icy quality.

So we've got a problem that starch isn't as good for icy quality, fat isn't as good for cyclicity. So a bit of both is good. Monitoring to see cysts where the cows have ovulated their first CL to their first dominant follicle pose calving, etc.

Can give you an idea where the problems are. We can also then look at data regarding the milk composition. So we can give full metabolic profiles, .

And university Reading, particularly, but other labs will also will do that and give you very comprehensive reports, and you provide a history of the ration, etc. You can look at Nephans, which are about fat mobilisation. They tend to be used more in dry cows to look at body condition score loss in dry or gain in dry cows.

And then you can have these handheld. This is an older style, there's a newer style, exactly the same strips though, . Of Handheld metre used in human diabetes that can measure be it hydroxybutyrate.

And if you've got some ketosis problems, or DAs, etc. Then suggesting you start sampling and taking blood samples of this can be a really good way of getting into that management discussion. Mm.

Milk urea can also be measured, because the protein that's broken down in the rumen to ammonia ions can then be absorbed and produce urea in the liver, if there isn't enough carbon skeleton and energy for the bugs to capture it and produce protein. So, in the circulation, it can go back into via the saliva back into the rumen or screeing in the kidneys or into the milk. And you can measure that.

So here we've got milk protein against milk urea and you can see there's roughly a trend. That The higher protein lower urea, and in this case in cows, in the 1st 60 days you see lower your ears, and specifically more of a trend that some of the cows have got plenty of energy and are capturing the urea, others are not got as much and are not getting it. And in general, it's quite relatively low ures there.

You'll also look at bulk tank. This is bulk tank fat and protein, and you see in this particular herd, their fat goes down and their contract requires 3.8 to 4, and it goes down below that.

During the summer and then back up again and then down again. So what's driving that pattern? If you flip it up the upside down, you'll see it's like two peaks.

So what do those peaks correspond to? Well, it's actually the grass growth curve. So this is data from AHDB on grass growth.

You see, this year, 2020 has been a three peak year, but normally there's two peaks, one in the spring and one later in the autumn, and when it's warm, we get less lush grass and more fibre, and so. Lush grass means poorer, poor butter fat because there's not as much digestible fibre. And you can get, because there's monitor farms, individual grass growth in different areas, so this was when there was poor.

There was this summer drought, and in Devon, there was only 15 kg of grass growth, whereas in Carlisle, there was 6 times that. So it can be useful to get information about your locality from AHDB and then open that conversation up. And this is from this last week, and you'll see the grass, dry matter is relatively low, but the energy is still quite high, and there's quite a bit of variation in protein.

So that's the sort of discussion you can have with a grazing farmer or somebody who's going to produce 3rd, 4th cut now as to what their grass is looking like and say well actually AHDB stuff suggests. So you can get information there. OK, I'm running out of time a bit, so what I will do is just flick forward and just go to have a quick chat about.

The supplementation I was talking about. As I said, I'm on an advisory committee on animal feedstuffs, and working with Jeff Brown, who's secretary of the British Association of Feed, Supplement and Additive Manufacturers, we did a presentation at BCVA conference to highlight the vet's role in vitamins and minerals, and I thought it was worth just mentioning that today. So, there are maximum permitted levels for different nutrients, different minerals to be added to animal feed, both for animal health, but also for the consumer environment and the end user of the material as well.

And that's by EU regulations after European Food Standards Agency assessment. Bit complicated because it's done on 88% dry matter level and it's normally expressed as milligrammes per kilogramme of the dried of the food. And the sources we're looking at are grass, forage, the straits, compound feeds, blends.

And that's what the nutritionist and maybe the farmers are aware of, certainly the nutritionists are aware of. But actually, the animal might have free access minerals, mineral blocks, buckets, bolus, drenches, there's the water, . But you might be producing bonuses for the dry cows, but depending on how long they last, and when they're put in, they might be lasting into lactation as well.

Or you might be giving, an antalytic to, to sheep which also contains a minerals. So these ones are more complicated for the farmer to be aware of. Part of the grass silage analysis and maize silage analysis can be a mineral analysis as well.

And for example here we have relatively high copper and they nicely partition out the things that can be antagonists to copper. We'll talk about that in a second too. One of the problems though is that the labels might include copper as the copper sulphate, which also contains the water element, so it's copper sulphate pentahydrate, or some bags might talk about just the copper.

So it's important to have a look and find out what is being quoted. So does it matter? Is this a human health risk?

Well, on average people are eating less liver, and liver is where copper's are sequestered. But it is cheap, so some individuals are eating more than their fair share, and certain foods have more than their fair share as well. And people are now tending to go to known places, such as specifically farm shops.

So what's happening on that farm becomes a big issue for who's eating it. And there are certainly food safety issues which are particularly linked to particular places. So we have to be aware that.

It's not being diluted into all of the meat, and you have a you know, 1 millionth of each carcass. So that can be an increased risk now as well. We don't see the copper in the milk, it's more accumulation in the liver, and some retail samples in the UK are high.

There are some conditions in humans that have been linked or that make them particularly more susceptible to to copper as well. So Food Standards Agency were concerned about this and produced guidance in July 2011, which suggested that you shouldn't be feeding more than 10 milligrammes per kilogramme of dry matter. And compared to the EU 40 maximum, or the new one that's coming out, which is 34.

National Research Council of America, requirements for copper is set at 12, so ACAF will give still giving headroom in their recommendations, and the EU seem to be allowed to be more. So 40s plenty, and the Food Standards Agency think in the UK without specific issues, you shouldn't be needing more than 20. So, do we still have a problem after that?

So chemical food safety reports and disease surveillance reports from AFA would suggest pretty much every quarter we have dead animals due to copper toxicity. These are the dead ones, OK? So it tends to be death that's reported, not, liver accumulation.

Some of these, a lot of these are sheep, but also we have large groups of cattle sometimes exposed as well, and I know of some legal cases involving that too. So Nigel Kendall from University of Nottinghamer took on to look at liver copper from an abattoir close by to sea, and he found that. About 40% of the dairy cows were showing liver accumulation above the upper reference range that Afa suggests, is, is high.

But looking at the sources of the animals, there didn't seem to be any correlation with their age or the geographical location of the source farm. Liam Sinclair from Harper Adams then has gone on to look at the feeding on 50 farms in the north west and the Midlands, and looked specifically at copper and found that, Most of them were actually over the ACAF amount in their early lactation. And 6 out of 50 were above the EU legal limit.

If you want to know more details, he actually did a webinar on Monday which is available on the HDB website. So it could be that people are feeding extra on the basis that they think there are these antagonists. So what are the antagonists doing?

Well, one of those antagonists is iron, because all of these 2 + minerals are absorbed from a. Particular transporter in the small intestine, so that copper can get through with the molybdenum cobalt, etc. But if you have sulphur and molybdenum, then that binds.

The copper, and therefore you don't get absorption. You will also find some mineral companies talk about chelated minerals, and what, what's happening there is that the mineral is bound to an amino acid and circles that and goes through the amino acid transporter instead, so it doesn't have to queue and doesn't actually precipitate either. So, er, you'll hear about chelating minerals, and that's what's happening with, with those.

OK, so in the same experiment or same study, er Professor Sinclair looked at molybdenum in the diet, and he found no correlation at all. So it looks as though people are giving copper without any need and without the er actual antagonists being in the ration. So we're concerned that this is becoming a continuing problem.

The other thing is that veterinary bonuses don't necessarily get included in this maximum permitted limit level calculation that's going on in the laptops, ideally of the nutritionists. So the vets prescribing them have to take responsibility for that, and I think that's one reason why you need to become more involved. There are also drenches, exact wormers, etc.

That might contain certainly selenium and cobalt as well. Is it just copper? Well, certainly in his study and in another study from University of Reading looking at phosphorus, there is quite a lot of oversupplementation going on.

So just bringing this to an end now. I think ideally, the vet needs to be part of a round table on a farm with the nutritionist, agricultural advisor, and the, the farm team. And that farm team can be the farmer, but it needs to also include people who are doing the job, who are making the feeds, etc.

And making sure that it's actually happening to the cows rather than just happening in the office. And I would add the agronomist who's actually also advising about the plant growth and the, the fertiliser, etc. To make sure those forages are as good as they could be.

And for that team to then monitor, manage, And measure and go round in that cycle, so. Summarising It's a round table, you're all on the same side. It's not about blaming, it's about bringing different things and different perspectives and then coming to a conclusion that helps both the animals and the client farmer.

Get to know them and work with them and don't just end up calling them when there's a problem. Try and know who they are and be on good terms. Don't start diagnosing treating deficiencies without a diagnosis of them.

So that might involve, for example, liver biopsies or looking at liver copper in cold cows. Certainly don't go over the ACAF limit without a proper diagnosis. And also make sure that you know where the supplements are coming from and who's giving what and everybody takes responsibility because legally it's not clear exactly who is supposed to be making sure the MPLs are met.

OK, so, probably went a bit over time, I apologise for that, but thank you for listening, and any questions? Rob, thank you so much for that. That was really very, very interesting and certainly quite thought-provoking.

As you said, we have run a little bit over, but not to worry. I think it was really, really worth it. And, we don't at this stage have any questions coming through.

So your timing was absolutely perfect. Thank you very much. And if anybody does have any further questions, then I'm very happy for them to be passed through to you as well.

Fantastic. Thanks, Rob. To everybody that's attended tonight, thank you so much for your time once again to Rob Smith.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us and, Phil, my controller in the background, thanks for making things happen nice and seamlessly. From myself, it's good night.