Trial shows inoculant increased FCM milk yield

Bryan Buckley, Ireland business manager at Lallemand Animal Nutrition, said that the trial shows how the use of a crop- and condition-specific inoculant on grass silage can offer massive benefits on farm.
He commented: "The trial used 28 per cent DM grass harvested in April, with half the crop treated with Magniva Platinum Grass Dry and the other half left untreated. The trial looked at how the inoculant impacted the grass fermentation, locking in nutrients, and how this translated into cow performance when feeding the silage.
"There were significantly higher DM losses in the control clamp than the treated clamp, which means there was less silage available for the cows.”
He added: “Due to the DM losses, the untreated clamp shrunk considerably more than the treated clamp, equating to 29 per cent more feedable dry matter.”
The fermentation results from the two clamps showed that the treated silage had superior lactic, acetic and propane diol acid profiles, and it had 10 times less butyric acid.
“The lower butyric acid in the treated silage indicates that clostridia, the bacteria that break down protein and cause foul-smelling silage, were effectively inhibited. This resulted in a more palatable silage, which was evident in the increased dry matter intake seen in the group of cows receiving treated silage in their ration,” he explained.
Aerobic stability was also improved in the treated silage. This resulted in less heating in the clamp, reducing the energy lost to the environment as heat instead of being turned into milk by the cows. This energy loss is caused by aerobic spoilage that occurs when air gets into the clamp and activates spoilage microbes, including yeasts and moulds.
“The control clamp temperatures peaked at 34.6^oC, whereas the treated silage reached only 26.7^oC – a significant difference in energy terms.
“This extra 8^oC of heating in the control group is the equivalent of losing 28MJ of energy for every tonne of silage fresh weight that is unstable. This equates to 5.4kg of milk lost,” he said.
Improvements were also seen in cow performance when cows were fed the treated silage. Bryan explained: “The well-preserved and stable treated silage resulted in a significant increase in dry matter intake by 1.5kg/day, compared to the control. This correlated with an increase in fat-corrected milk of 1.9kg/day,” he said.
“A 0.1 per cent improvement in protein and 0.19 per cent increase in fat was seen in the milk constituents when comparing treatment and control group cows.”