Managing nutrition at all stages of the lactation for maximum herd performance

Specialist Nutrition work together with our customers to put in place the best possible nutrition plan for their herd and farming system, helping them achieve higher outputs from fewer inputs and close any nutritional gaps.

From rumen health to fertility, our ruminant nutritionists help farmers overcome challenges at all stages of lactation to support animal performance and profitability across the following areas:

• Effective minerals, amino acids, and enzymes for animal nutrition
• Herd health for pre-calving, fertility, and boost immunity
• Gut health management with highquality rumen buffers, enhancers, and production improvers
• Use of yeasts and fats to optimise production for your farm system
• Mycotoxin management

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The nutrition advice I get is brilliant because if anything goes wrong regarding the diet or if the production isn’t as good as I expect it to be, I’m on the phone to Nigel. If he needs to call out, he calls out; if not, just a tweak on the nutrition and it’s done. It’s great to work so closely with someone like that.

We’re milking 180 cows, calving in the autumn and the spring, averaging approximately 7,500 litres.

We started working with Specialist Nutrition over 20 years ago when we were looking for an alternative to a maize crop and we got triticale seed and the advice we needed to grow a good crop. It works very well in our winter diet here.

Like a lot of herds, different issues were cropping up. We had fertility issues and cell count issues here. After speaking with Specialist Nutrition, we got the advice we needed to do some further tests. We now have our own special mineral made up to suit our needs with higher levels of copper and selenium, which works very well.

I like that it’s an all-in-one job where Nigel comes in and takes the analysis, and he’s able to work out the correct levels of feed and what supplementation we need to get the best performance from the cow.

- Brian Rohan, Abbeyleix, Co. Laois

• Dairy minerals

  Our dairy mineral range includes all the essential ingredients in just the right formulation to ensure that you have the optimum balance for all stages of the animal lifecycle.
  

  Helping your cows transition

  Our precalver minerals are formulated to support challenges during transition: hormonal, metabolic, mineral, immunity and inflammation, and to increase resilience to metabolic disease during the transition.

  Precalver minerals are designed to reduce metabolic diseases, improve gut integrity and increase longevity from improved survival rate to next lactation.

I run a high yielding herd of 280 cows in Cashel, Co. Tipperary. It is extremely important for me to be able to maintain herd performance without compromising herd health, and I work with Specialist Nutrition to ensure this is achieved. SN Dairy Elite provides my cows with the right balance of vitamins and minerals to ensure that the optimum production levels are maintained, and I don’t need to worry that the herd’s health will be compromised. ― Michael Kennedy, Cashel, Co. Tipperary

I started using Glucosure liquid feed from Specialist Nutrition in 2018. Cows milked well and body condition was very good, but I didn’t realise how good it was until they came off it! I saw a drop in yield of 2 litres per cow per day. I now feed it for the full lactation. The extra production far exceeds the cost of the product. ― Donal O Sullivan, Mallow, Co.Cork

Specialist Nutrition uses real-time NIR measurement and more specialised laboratory analysis of feed samples while formulating the diet to help improve feed management and minimise variability, to increase production and animal health.

Analysing the forages and grains gives us the information we need to balance diets correctly, maximising the use of home grown forage while keeping bought in feed to a minimum.

Take a look at what else we do:

- Grass and Multi-species

- Magniva Silage Additive