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Louise Cook says making the switch to pelletised minerals has made a huge difference, both in terms of staff morale and time management.
Could it be that pelletised minerals is the thing that makes the difference in a herd? Louise Cook, general manager of the Southern Demonstration & Research Farm for Southern Dairy Hub, seems to think so.
The research farm runs four herds with 740 cows – two herds of 140 cows and two herds of 230 cows – and she says that making the switch to pelletised minerals has made a huge difference, both in terms of staff morale and time management.
Cook says that over the past four years, minerals would have to be dusted, a job she says takes approximately 45 minutes.
“We’d be dusting minerals right through until January,” she told Dairy News.
“The person fetching herds is busy at the best of times with the comings and goings we have on the farm,” she says. “So, that 45 minutes was time they weren’t able to spend having a quick assessment on feed levels and residuals in the paddock and whether more or less feed was needed and what changes we might need to make.”
She says the decision was made last year to switch to the CP Lime Solutions Vitalise pellets to be able to free up time for staff on-farm.
“The decision around trying to do it was around making time for people so they could focus on better decision making and get a pay back from making more milk and more efficiency decisions.”
At the time, they had considered an in-line dispenser. The downside of that option, she says, is that staff wouldn’t have necessarily known if the dispenser broke down.
So, with the pelletised option, which is mixed into the herd’s grain, Cook says the staff knew the cows were getting fed and getting the necessary nutrients as well.
“So, we’ve had the cows get what they need without the team being over-busy on a really manual task.
“We’ve seen a lot more milk out this year [because] the team were better able to manage the pasture on the days where there wasn’t enough or… the days where there was too much,” Cook says.
She says that morale has improved about the farm because of the time the pelletised minerals have given back to staff.
Cook says that when they had the dusting issue, when there had been extended periods of wet weather, there would be metabolic issues because the cows weren’t getting as many minerals as they needed.
“All of those things went away… when times are tough and the weather’s poor, the last thing you want to be dealing with is metabolics.
“We’re not feeding on a feedpad, it’s not like we can just go and dust onto the feedpad, we were dusting out in the paddock and so, when you had a wet September, it was all getting washed off again,” she says.
“So, the guys have loved that we don’t have those niggly complications come back in. They’ve really enjoyed not having to dust.”
For the team at the research farm, Cook says, it has made a typically busy afternoon less stressful.
“At the end of the day, what I need them to be doing is making sure cows are fed well. So, giving them time to do that became quite an easy decision and we believe it has certainly paid back.”
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