Digestibility of Dry and Ensiled Forages When Feeding Young Dairy Heifers

Balanced diets fed to growing animals are very important to ensure that young animals have the proper nutrients available for growth. The goal of feeding dairy heifers is to feed a very digestible diet that will provide nutrients to keep dairy heifers healthy and allow them to grow faster, while spending less money on feed. The objective of this study was to determine whether feeding heifers diets containing dry or ensiled forage (haylage) improved digestibility. Our hypothesis was that incorporating hay into the diet of 16 week old dairy heifers would provide a more digestible source of nutrients. For this study, 12 heifers were randomly assigned to treatments with 6 heifers fed hay based diets and the other 6 heifers fed haylage based diets. The fecal collection was achieved by collecting fecal samples from individual heifers every 6 hours over a 3 day period. Digestibility of the diets and nutrients were determined using chromic oxide as an external marker. In order to determine the digestibility of treatment diets fed to the heifers, the percent of chromic oxide in feed was compared to the percent of chromic oxide in feces. In summary, feeding dairy heifers hay based diets did not significantly improve digestibility of either the dry matter or NDF content of the diets.