Dairy Herd N Management

Efficient N management within dairy herds revolves around two major areas.

1. Decreasing nutrients brought on the farm by more accurately formulating rations based on farm specific animal requirements and feed content of carbohydrate and protein fractions and other nutrients.
2. Recycling nutrients from the manure, crop and soil, and feed storage enterprises on the farm by making the most of high quality, high yielding homegrown feeds.

The pages in this section will supply both background and applied information about dairy herd N management.

• The basics of N utilization and excretion from dairy cattle.
• Short-term and long-term strategies for precision feeding on dairy farms.
• Approaches to evaluate and improve N use in dairy herd rations.

Continue to the next page to begin.