Benefits of nutritional grouping in dairy farms

04-10-2022 | Health | Article

Nutritional grouping involves the grouping of cows with similar nutritional requirements and providing an adjusted diet to each group. This facilitates improved allocation of nutrients due to decreased variance of nutritional requirements within each group. Photo: Canva

Differences in nutritional requirements of individual cows exist even if the group is formed by cows of similar age, the number of lactations, and the lactation stage. Nutritional grouping aims at allocating lactating cows homogeneously according to their nutritional requirements. Common dairy farm management setup does not support formulating a diet that accurately matches individual nutritional requirements for each cow; therefore, a proportion of cows in the group could be overfed or under