Nutrition Notes Using NutriVantage® To Successfully Combat Heat Stress We have talked on numerous occasions about using NutriVantage® (NV) to stimulate intake in new cattle and as a combination product with Optaflexx® for finishing cattle. The data I am presenting here are a bit of a review, but since now is the time to talk about heat stress, it is a good refresher to share again. The first table was a trial done in NW Iowa during the hot summer of 2012 at a customer who feeds several thousand head of cattle at their facility. There were about 1300 head of black commercial cross-bred cattle split into 6 pens with 3 pens receiving NV and three control pens. As you can see, the NV cattle ate a little more than 1.5 lb more daily dry matter feed. This resulted in about .27 lb more ADG. The economics are about 17¢ for the NV and an additional 12¢ or so for the extra feed. So at $150 fat cattle, they were still 10¢ per head per day better than the controls. Table 1: NW Iowa Feedlot NutriVantage Heat Stress Control NutriVantage June 10 wt, lb 1221 1221 July 10 wt, lb 1328 1336 31 day gain, lb 107 115 ADG, lb 3.45 3.72 DMI, lb 24.7 26.3 The second table represents a field study done in Central Minnesota with PDB customer. There were 121 single-source cattle that were simply split into two pens. They weighed around 800 lb or so during this study. One pen received a popular competitive product that is fed to reduce shipping shrink on fat cattle. The competitive product also claims to help reduce heat stress and its negative effect on feed intake. Since many of our producers use this competitive product, we wanted to see how NV stacked up during a period of heat stress. There was no attempt to compare either product’s effect on shipping shrink. As you can see from the data, NV-fed cattle actually had higher DMI than the competitive product. This was not an attempt to necessarily outperform, but rather to discover if NV had just as good an impact on feed intake during heat stress as the competitive product. In this study, NV out-performed the competitive product at approximately 40% of the cost. Table 2: NutriVantage VS competitive product for Heat Stress NutriVantage Competitive Product Number of head 62 59 (58) Total Feed (59 days), lb 70,000 60,000 Steer Days 3,658 3,449 ADFI (as fed), lb 19.1 17.4 Download PDF Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Related Nutrition Notes Drought Affects Water Quality During periods of drought, concern turns immediately to forage supplies, and rightfully so – cattle need to eat. Water is one of those things that is taken for granted, however,… Read More Derecho Damaged Corn The Derecho damaged an estimated 40 million acres of farm landing, laying fields of corn bent and broken, if not completely flat. This article investigates designing and using cattle grazing… Read More Kent Performance Primer When stress happens it often impacts livestock in more than one way, such as feed intake, maintenance requirements, and even health status. Learn how Kent Performance Primer has proved successful… Read More Want to learn more from KNG research? Give us your email address to be notified when we publish new Nutrition Notes articles.
