How Plant Health Impacts Your Ration Costs Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email By Loren Daentl, PAS When blights and plant diseases infect our forage crops, plant cells die off, eventually causing the death of the plant, area by area. The dried-up blemish remaining on the plant is the plant’s ridged fiber structure, the least nutritional part of that plant. That blemish has been stripped of its sugars and carbohydrates, resulting in reduced nutritive capacity. Furthermore, the lack of moisture and lowered sugar content will work against the fermentation process, prolonging fermentation, risking further nutrient damage, and nutrient loss. Severe infections can significantly harm nutritive value. Regardless of the forage crop we are harvesting, digestible energy and protein are likely our goals for that crop. Ensuring plant health is paramount in the process of harvesting optimal forages, ultimately helping to manage purchased feed costs. Lowering fungal and disease pressure will allow for increased yields, in addition to fewer incidents of environmental fungus, lowering the load of wild yeast spores, and mycotoxin-producing molds within our feedstuffs. When forage crops are blemished with diseases and blights, increased feed costs and reduced production are realistic outcomes. Insight FS encourages forage feeders to do the following things to maximize their forages: Discuss your current forages with an Insight FS nutritionist. Let us review your forage sample history and analyze strategies to structure dietary energy in a cost-effective way for your livestock. There may be cost-effective solutions for current yeast mold challenges that are consuming the energy from your feedstuffs. Devise a complete disease mitigation program for your forage crops with your Insight FS nutritionist and agronomist. Ask specifically for their recommendations for both fungicides and pesticides to reduce infestations, and develop a crop rotation, cover crop, and tillage program to meet your forage quality goals. Forages play a significant role in overall ration costs. Optimizing the forages you have and investing in your future forages will pay dividends on your operation. Related Items Post Day 1 Feeding Colostrum in Neonatal Calves Feeding colostrum is one of the most important practices in a young calf’s life. Ensuring that the calf receives the correct quality and quantity in a timely manner, with clean equipment will help provide the calf with the passive immunity that it needs to fight off any diseases and help make for a healthier calf in the future. In some recent studies, it has been shown that feeding small amounts of colostrum after the first day of birth can improve gastrointestinal health and create a healthier, more productive calf. The best recommendation to achieve this is by adding colostrum powder to whole milk or milk replacer for the first two weeks of life. Read the full story Rumen Impacts of Fiber and Starch As nutrition consultants, we take careful consideration in balancing your farm’s diets specifically to your individual herd and farm goals. At this point in the year, on-farm forages are fully fermented, and nearly stabilized. Many nutrients that change over fermentation may be reaching their full potential. It is important to point out that soluble protein, lactic acid, and pH reduction will not reach the maximum levels until four months after ensiling, and the digestibility/availability of starch will continue to increase six months after ensiling. Read the full story Managing Forage “Undesirables” It is widely known that elements of our forage harvest, storage and feed-out processes can bring potential risk factors to our livestock herds. Topics like mycotoxins and forage hygiene are prevalent, and solutions to these concerns are readily available and quickly deployed to help manage the concern. The concerns associated with these challenges are a real threat to animal wellness and production. Read the full story