Livestock Feeding & Nutritional Advice

Tim Gibson Ltd food nutrition for dairy farms

Feeding & Nutritional Advice

We have trained over 50 farmer advisers across the UK as part of our Robotic Farmer Adviser Training.

eeding is key to the success of automated milking. It is the driving factor in ensuring cows do what you want them to do. Getting it right makes things easy. If its wrong the time spent dealing with the issues can be more than it would take to milk in a parlour each day. Our lead feeding expert takes a look at the overview of your feeding. Taking the feeds available to your herd and having them independently analysed to check the quality of them, including silage and fresh grass analysis we then formulate a ration for your herd to ensure the nutritional demand of the cows are met but also where the cow needs to go to meet those demands she has. The aim being to drive milking visits from the cows, resulting in more milk and best performance. It is certainly not just a case of feeding more concentrate to get cows to visit the milking robot.

For automated feeding systems the diet must flow through the system, feed out easily and not perish. Timing of feeds in relation to herd performance and what to feed are part of getting things to work right. With an automated feeding system at our own farm, we are more than aware of the benefits the system can bring but also how to avoid pitfalls. Feeding and nutritional standards which are known to many conventional advisors can often go completely out of the window when feeding cows with an automated feeding system. Intakes differ and external factors such as the weather have a much bigger impact when feeding is done in smaller less frequent portions.

Feeding and nutrition is not about selling you feed, we can also provide costing reports and assist in benchmarking alongside other robotic milking herds.