Episode 355 - How Breed (Holstein and Crossbred) Influences Heifer Feed Intake and Emissions- UMN Extension's The Moos Room

Brad shares preliminary results from a University of Minnesota study examining feed intake, methane emissions, and feeding behavior in Holstein and crossbred dairy heifers. Using precision feeders, methane-monitoring equipment, and activity sensors, the research team compared Holsteins with ProCROSS and GrazeCross heifers.

The early findings show that methane production generally increased with feed intake. Smaller GrazeCross heifers consumed less feed and produced less methane and carbon dioxide, while ProCROSS heifers had the highest feed intake. However, methane produced per unit of dry matter intake did not differ significantly among the breed groups.

Brad also discusses how often heifers visited the feed bunk, how much time they spent eating, and what sensor data revealed about rumination and activity. These preliminary results highlight how body size, breed, and feeding behavior may influence heifer management and environmental efficiency.

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What is The Moos Room™?

Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.

Welcome to the Moos Room This is Brad here, uh, actually attending the World Conference of Genetics this week in Madison, Wisconsin. So learning all about genetics from dairy, actually beef, there's swine, poultry, all kinds of fun genetics stuff happening from applied to pretty basic stuff. So may share some of that next week.

What some of the hot things were in the genetics world. But I wanted to quick talk about some of the, or at least one of the research projects that we've been working on for a while, and kind of touched on it briefly, but I wanted to go a little more in depth, and we've been looking at feed intake of heifers, especially our Holsteins here at our Morris research herd, and we also have crossbred, so Jersey, Normandy, and Viking Red, and Montbeliard, Viking Red, and Holstein.

So two different crossbred groups along with Holsteins, and our goal was really to look at feed intake. There's not a lot of feed intake information out there on heifers, and so we wanted to see how efficient some of these heifers were and what their kind of methane was compared to feed intake. And we also had sensors on them to see if we could look at sensors and feeding behavior.

So I kinda wanted to at least go through that little study quick, probably a little bit shorter podcast today, but it might give you some information on intake of heifers, which we don't hear about much. We hear a lot of feed intake studies on dairy cows, but not much on heifers. So we really wanted to compare at least the Holsteins and the crossbreds, you know, kind of see what they were doing and what was happening for feed intake.

We had bunk behavior, so we had a lot of behaviors on when they came to the bunk, how often they came to the bunk to eat, and then activity patterns of Hol