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Feed Bunk Management

If you look at feed bunk management, people especially in feedlots are probably better than certainly anyone in other areas of ruminant nutrition or they do a better of job of managing bunks. During set up or after you have received cattle, it is probably beneficial to have some feed in the bunk at each feeding or before each feeding, right? When we talk about dairy, what happens if you have no feed in the bunk? Your animals are probably hungry, right? Remember, that initially received cattle have poor feed intake, so you probably do not want to limit intake during this period. Once you get to this diet and so the animals are on their final diet. You want to ensure that the cattle are consuming an adequate amount of feed per day for the level of gain that you want them to achieve, but you also want to maintain a relatively constant level of intake over time. And so it gets down to this practice called bunk reading. What you would shoot for is that the last mouth full of feed in the bunk is consumed at exactly the same time as the feed truck is coming through and delivering the second meal or the third meal or the first meal, whichever meal that it may be during the day. And so there is one mouth full of feed left in the bunk at the simultaneous moment that the feed truck comes in to deliver the next meal. People refer to this as a clean or a slick bunk within a 24 hour period. Another way to achieve this is you have a clean bunk within a 20 hour period, so for four to five hours a day there is no feed in the bunk. I thought this was pretty interesting because what they are trying to do is challenge the cattle to actually increase their intake. Suppose you fed at 5a.m. in the morning, you read the bunks at midnight. At midnight, if the bunks were clean, you would increase maybe feed delivered or feed offered by a pound per head per day. The next midnight, if bunks were clean again, you would continue to increase. If animals leveled off at a certain level of intake and then you would pull back again. What they are doing is challenging the animals to actually increase more. If you limit-feed animals, you will actually get higher levels of intake than if you ad-lib feed animals. The net affect of bunk management is you get maximal feed intake. And really what they are striving for is minimal day to day variation. They like the animals to consume X number of pounds each day with little variance. And so that should relate to what? If you have relatively constant levels of intake, you should have relatively constant levels of gain also.

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