Are There Financial Advantages of Grouping and Feeding Dairy Cows by Nutritional Need?

Nutritional grouping is a herd management strategy that provides different diets to different groups of lactating cows to better fulfill their nutrient requirements. Hence, it can be beneficial by saving feed costs, improving productivity, improving herd health, and decreasing nutrient emissions to the environment (Cabrera and Kalantari, 2016). Total mixed rations have become an industry standard for feeding management. For example, 58% of Wisconsin and Michigan dairy farms used the same TMR for all lactating cows (Contreras-Govea et al., 2015). When feeding only 1 TMR diet, it is usually formulated for high-producing cows to ensure these cows reach their full milk production potential (Weiss, 2014), which results in overfeeding lower-producing cows (Cabrera and Kalantari, 2016). A strategy to relieve this problem is adopting nutritional grouping with more precise diets, which will result in financial advantages due to the better-tailored diet to the cow requirements in a group even when it could require more capital management and labor costs (VandeHaar, 2011). Within this context, Kalantari et al. (2016) studied by simulation modeling the economic efficiency of nutritional grouping in 5 Wisconsin commercial herds. This paper is an adapted excerpt of that study highlighting its practical results.