New Dairy Ration Balancer Has More Accurate Information and Features at a Lower Price We can't reinvent the dairy cow, but we can find better ways to get her to make milk more profitably.
![Dairy Cow Ration Software Dairy Cow Ration Software](http://rumen8.com.au/styled-2/files/v2mainwindowcow.png)
Easily create dairy cow dietsRumen8 allows farmers and consultants to easily manage dairy cow and heifer diets to increase production and reduce costs. An emphasis on ease of use sets it apart from many other nutrition applications which makes it ideal for quickly creating or checking cow diets by farm managers, owners and visiting nutritionists. Rumen8 provides an easy interface allowing creation and adjustment of diets while exploring changes in production and margins. Much more sophisticated nutrition models are available but require more feed information and considerably more time and knowledge to determine suitable diets, restricting their usefulness on farm. Rumen8 has been used by the authors for well over a decade to manage the diets of research herds as it provided good predictions of cow performance on the pasture based diets common in the Australian dairy industry.
It was originally developed by the staff of the as an ‘in-house’ tool for managing the dairy herds on the Vasse Research Station near Busselton, Western Australia. Ownership has now been transferred to and who are funding further development. What does Rumen8 do?Rumen8 allows the user to design a diet from up to 15 feeds or mixes and ensure a cow’s dietary needs are met. Multiple diets can be stored and compared and the difference between feed price and return from milk calculated. Reports can be printed or saved as PDF files.
Rumen8 uses a relatively simple nutrition model that we have found accurate enough over many years using it on farms and Research Stations. More sophisticated models of dairy cow nutrition exist but they require a higher level of user knowledge, depend on less readily available and more expensive feed analyses, and require more time to use. We have found that Rumen8 provides a good balance between ease and speed of use and performance that is fitting for the pasture-dominated dairy diets common in Australia. Dairy Australia independently evaluated Rumen8 version 1 (many years before they owned it) against a range of nutrition models in use in Australia at the time and it performed admirably. You can read the report yourself as it is available from the page and the Dairy Australia web site (A review of 11 applied dairy nutrition models used in Australia, 2009). The nutrition model in Rumen8 3 is unchanged from version 1.
Predictive Reliability in Field Practice The Formulate2 DFS stand-alone application is a diet formulation application for dairy animals that fully implements the NRC 2001 animal model as well as the post NRC work conducted at the University of New Hampshire by Dr. Chuck Schwab et al. The objective of the post NRC work was to extend the applcation of the NRC model to predict changes in lactation from changes in predicted intestinal supplies of Lysine and Methionine.
That work, orginally conducted in 2003-2004, has been supplemented with additional work by Dr. Schwab and Nancy Whitehouse of UNH. Completed in 2015, this new work extends the data set used in the post NRC effort from approximaley 300 diets to almost 1000 diets and includes data from higher producing animals.
This post NRC work is implemented in Formulate2 as the AA and MP Calculator. The Calculator employs the equations from Dr. Schwab's post NRC work (both 2003-2004 and 2015) to generate MP-Lys and MP-Met gram requirements for user stipulated milk yield and milk TP precentage. Because requirements are stated on a gram basis - not as perentages of MP - the NRC MP requirement can be refactored while the total grams of MP-Lys and MP-Met required for the user stipulated milk yield and milk TP content remain constant. In addition, the Calculator generates a milk yield prediction based on predicted milk TP yield calculated from model predicted MP-Met supply and also provides a means of adjusting the NRC prediction of microbial crude protein yield (MCP) to account for changes in rumen fermentation. The yield most precisely predicted by NRC 2001 is milk true protein yield (TP). On well managed farms where a single diet is fed to all lactating animals, the Calculators predicted, TP-adjusted milk yield correlates very closely with actual on-farm milk yield.
Some 40 years of research in the area of the AA nutrition of lactating dairy animals has consistently indicated that Lysine and Methionine are the first limiting AA in typical diets fed to lactating dairy cows in North America. The NRC 2001 model, the post NRC work and the TP-adjusted milk yield predictions of the AA and MP Calculator are all well aligned with that body of research.
In terms of predicted EAA flows, the NRC 2001 AA sub-model exhibits a high degree of predictive reliability as illustrated by the MP-Met plot to the right. That predictive reliability is the basis of the close agreement between NRC predicted animal peformance and actual on-farm animal performance. NRC theoretical biolgy and 'living' biology are therefore in close harmony.
If you're looking for a diet formulation model that reliably reflects the response of 'living biology' to the diets you formulate, including AA supplies, then you're looking for NRC 2001, the AA and MP Calculator and the robust, fully model-compliant, optimization capabilities of Formulate2 DFS. The new release of Formulate2 now under development will function as a host application for the Formulate2 Core Components described below. This arrangement allows us to maintain one body of code for the functionality encapsulated by the Core Components for use in both the new Formulate2 and FRB as well as other applications that host the Components. General Deployment of Demos of the current release of Formulate2 has been suspended pending completion and release of the newest version of the program. The coming release moves Formulate2 to the modern Delphi 10 development platform which ensures compatibility with all future versions of the Windows operating system. Delphi 10 also provides many other advantages such as significantly decreased solution time etc. If you would like more information about this exciting new release of Formulate2, please click.
We'd be happy to assist you. The Formulate2 Core Component Suite consists of core Formulate2 functionality that has been extracted from the Formulate2 stand-alone applicaton and encapsulated as self-contained, add-in executables that may be integrated with any diet formulation application that implements the NRC 2001 model in an evaluative capacity.
The AA and MP Caclulator and the proprietary Formulate2 optimization process are the core Formulate2 functionality embodied in the Formulate2 Core Component Suite. As the result of a collaborative effort with Feed Mangement System, Inc.
(FMS) the 'Core Components' have been fully integrated with the FMS diet formulation application Feed Ration Balancer (FRB).See the right top sidebar of this page. See and listen to, real-world, on-farm experience with AA balancing with FRB, NRC 2001 and the Formulate2 Core Components.