Frank Mulligan is a suckler farmer in Granard, Co. Longford, where he keeps 35 suckler cows along with their offspring. He is also chairman of the cattle mart in Granard. Frank is currently feeding his herd with a KEENAN Approved100 10m³ mixer wagon, drawn by his Massey Ferguson 188.

“The main reason I bought a mixer wagon was to have less work feeding. I have sucklers in three different sheds which was very labour intensive, feeding all animals manually with bags of meal.  Now I fill the feeder, feed one shed after the other, and it saves me a lot of time and hard work”, explains Frank.

Further reason for Frank buying his first mixer wagon is that he wanted to incorporate straw into his suckler cow’s diet. Now he able to do this with his KEENAN Approved100 with rear feed-out, making it an easy calving season for him this year.  “Most cows have calved at this stage and I noticed less calving problems, the calves are fitter and livelier, says Frank.  He has also noticed feed saving through the straw that he’s incorporating into the cattle’s diet.

The main reason Frank bought a feeder was to cut down on hard manual work when feeding his cattle, and while he is happy with the achieved labour savings, Frank is also delighted that, “the cattle are much more content, calving has never been as easy, and the weanlings have thrived over the winter.”

Brothers Gordon and Don Gray, together with their father, run a spring calving dairy herd of 165 cows in Bunmahon, Co. Waterford. For the last 19 years they had been feeding their herd with a KEENAN Klassik 140. “It has lasted us a good while and has not owed us anything at this stage,” says Gordon about their resilient KEENAN mixer wagon. Due to rising cow numbers in 2017, they decided to upscale to a bigger capacity machine and acquired a KEENAN Approved MechFiber360 at the 2017 KEENAN open day sale at the factory in Borris, Co. Carlow.

“We can feed more cows at the same time now which greatly reduces labour for us”, Gordon explains. Another reason Gordon prefers using a KEENAN mixer wagon is that it allows him to incorporate their home grown pinched grain into the TMR rations for their beef cattle.

With the KEENAN Approved mixer wagon, they also began using the InTouch nutritional service. The Gray family is working with Mark Moloney, the InTouch Southeast feeding specialist.  Mark has formulated different diets for the Gray’s such as full indoor diet for bad weather, a grazing diet and a dry cow and a beef fattening diet.  “We can change diets straight away when the weather gets bad to suit our requirement through the InTouch service.  The KEENAN cloud accessible weighbox is handy, no rooting in books for previous diets, you have everything at the touch of a button,” Gordon explains. “We can keep our diets from one end of the year to the next”.

Gordon enjoys the possibility of going online at any time to see the performance of his herd. “If, – for example, my protein is down, the InTouch nutritionists can find out the cause and get yields up again.”

Another advantage for Gordon is the stability of the diet he is able to achieve with InTouch and his KEENAN Approved. “It is handy that any person on the farm can fill the KEENAN with the easy to follow instructions from the KEENAN weighbox and cattle are getting the same ration every day.”

Gordon concluded that he is, “very happy with the KEENAN Approved, it is doing exactly what it’s meant to do on our farm and nothing is to fault.”​

The juggling of feed supply and demand has been frustrating, to say the least, over the last number of months. Now we are facing a winter when feed will be in short supply, and we must look for options to stretch it — while simultaneously not going too far outside our areas of expertise.

Most farmers, like cows, are creatures of habit and want consistency. For many years, each farm would have used grass silage and concentrate to feed their animals, occasionally branching out into using maize silage, whole crop and/or beet. Now, farmers are being faced with other alternatives, like moist feeds and forage extenders — and in some situations, they have no forage management practices or expertise beyond the standards for the field.

One ingredient that is present on all farms, but that is sometimes not used as a feed, is straw. Used mostly for bedding, it has very little feed value. However, what it lacks in feed value, it makes up for with effective fibre and bulk.

Every kilo of straw will replace 4 to 5 kilograms of silage. There is a requirement to make up a feed value deficient in some classes of stock — but if we use 50 round bales of straw, we could save 4 to 5acres of silage.

Price and availability of straw are two areas that we must pay attention to this year, and as such, there is an immediate need to contact our usual sources for straw as early as possible to get as much as we need. This might not be feasible in all cases, as the demand is growing, and more and more grain crops are going into whole crop. Therefore, looking for more straw at Christmas time will be even more difficult.

Over-feeding is evident around the country when it comes to dry cows. We need to build any requirements for condition into the late lactation stage, when it is more efficient to place requirements on them. With that done, maintenance during the dry period would be all else needed. During that time, we usually feed ad lib silage — amounting to 50 to 55 kilograms of silage per head, when they really only need <40 kilograms. This could amount to over 100 tonnes of silage for 100 cows calving down, or about 13 acres of silage.

In the absence of ad lib silage here, cows will get hungry and restless; as such, the use of straw in these diets is essential to bringing about rumen fill. Using the right processing methods, straw can be used in dry cow, weanling, finisher and, especially, suckler dry cow diets.

Top Tips

• Work out your straw requirements for the year and purchase/book them now
• One kilo of straw will replace 4 to 5 kg of silage
• Some animals don’t need ad lib silage, so use straw to fill the gap

Whether you are a customer or not, please feel free to contact InTouch on +353 59 910 1320 or email contactintouch@alltech.com to speak to a nutritionist who can answer your questions.