Milk producers have a lot of information at hand these days and knowing how to interpret it all can be daunting. When you get your milk results from a collection, your monthly coop statement, milk recording, blood sample, dung sample or urine sample, it is essentially your herd/cows way of communicating with you. They are telling you their opinion of how they are being fed and managed. One such piece of information available to some producers around Ireland now is the bulk milk urea figure.
Do you have access to your herds milk urea and are they after dropping recently? Do you have dairy farmer friends or relations around the country that you could ask as a reference for their urea’s? Are butterfat’s starting to slip too?
A herds milk urea is a reflection of their protein consumption and utilisation. A normal range for milk urea is 15 to 35. When grazing full time in normal conditions you would expect a herd to read 22-30. This spring many herds have seen figures as low as 8 with many between 8 and 14. When insufficient protein is consumed, then milk urea’s drop.
Why would protein currently be low in diets? What drives protein in grass? Nitrogen uptake and utilisation drives growth and also grass protein content.
As we have had little or no rain in the last number of weeks, in conjunction with unseasonably low temperatures, large proportion of the nitrogen spread has not been washed in or utilised efficiently. As a result the nutrients have not reached the grass root structure. Ultimately, cold weather combined with a low nitrogen supply mean very poor growth rates at present.
Low protein diets also cause a depression in total feed intake. Lower intakes will mean lower fibre digestion, which is a contributory factor in dropping butter fats. Another aspect relating to lower butter fats is the high oil content of grass at this time of year. The oily nature of the grass prevents the rumen microbes from efficiently breaking down fibre meaning less fibre is digested and this contributes to the butter fat drop off. High yielding, high energy grasses have higher oil contents, while not a bad thing, require careful management. Grass is also low in fibre in spring/early summer which adds to the fibre digestion conundrum. However if we can promote grass intake we will invariably increase fibre consumption and digestion.
Many have become short of grass on the grazing platform and some have had to graze silage ground over the last 2 weeks. One solution to low growths and low protein content in grass has been to get the nitrogen into the available moisture below the surface through Liquid fertiliser. Omex Nitroflo Liquid fertiliser has 3 forms of nitrogen plus sulphur and gets to work straight away once it hits the ground as it enters into the soil structure and gets to the roots of the grass. The 3 nitrogen sources means that we get a fast, medium and slower timed release of nitrogen meaning nutrients are constantly available to the plant.
Our liquid customers who have applied Omex Nitroflo to their grazing ground have seen much better growth this spring when compared with granular products of similar nutrient make up. Grass measurements in both 2020 and 2021 show up to 50% more grass grown after 14 and 21 days with the same nitrogen units from liquid versus granular.
Regrowth’s are considerably faster and the swards look healthier and test higher in protein. The higher protein swards have encouraged better grass intakes, kept milk urea’s at optimum levels and maintained animal performance.
With 1st cut silage about to commence, Liquid fertiliser is an ideal product to get nitrogen into the soil immediately post-harvest to promote faster growth, with the added benefit that you don’t need to wait a week between slurry and nitrogen applications. Thus getting all of the valuable nutrients required for the subsequent crop into the ground at least 7 days faster. This will optimise your days growing and mean you can cut your 2nd cut faster and/or have access to after grass earlier in the growing season
Why not try it for yourself and see the benefits. Faster application, faster action, no waste on headlands, no overlaps or skips, no waiting for rain, more grass in a shorter period of time etc, etc.
We now have an extensive network of agents and contractors covering all of Munster and Leinster.
Call Laura @ 087-9713419 for more information or talk to your company Rep today.
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