Environmental and Economic Responses to Precision Feed Management in Dairy Cattle Diets

Abstract

The dairy industry is under pressure to reduce its environmental impact while producing more milk to meet society’s needs. Precision feed management (PFM) is one tool that can be used to meet this challenge. A simple definition of PFM is to provide adequate, but not excessive, nutrients to meet animal requirements. There has been an industry trend to decrease diet nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in the last 20 years. New York herds lowered diet N by 10.8% between 1999 and 2019. Milk per cow increased by 40% during this time, while total manure N excretion decreased by 8.1%. Research results from on-farm trials have consistently indicated that lowering diet crude protein (CP) decreases manure N excretion while improving profitability; in a 3-year study with 8 herds, diet CP was decreased by 9.7%, while manure N excretion was 14% lower. Income over purchased feed cost increased by $137/cow/year. Carbon footprint (CF) has also decreased. A decrease of 19% between 2007 and 2017 was reported for the United States dairy industry. The dairy industry has already made significant strides in improving milk production while lowering its impact on the environment; however, there are additional opportunities to further reduce nutrient excretion and emissions into the environment and increase the efficiency of nutrient use.