A 100-Year Review: Metabolic modifiers in dairy cattle nutrition

Abstract

The first issue of the Journal of Dairy Science in 1917 opened with the text of the speech by Raymond A. Pearson, president of the Iowa State College of Agriculture, at the dedication of the new dairy building at the University of Nebraska (J. Dairy Sci. 1:4-18, 1917). Fittingly, this was the birth of a new research facility and more importantly, the beginning of a new journal devoted to the sciences of milk production and manufacture of products from milk. Metabolic modifiers of dairy cow metabolism enhance, change, or interfere with normal metabolic processes in the ruminant digestive tract or alter postabsorption partitioning of nutrients among body tissues. Papers on metabolic modifiers became more frequent in the journal around 1950. Dairy farming changed radically between 1955 and 1965. Changes in housing and feeding moved more cows outside, and cows and heifers in all stages of lactation, including the dry period, were fed as a single group. Rations became wetter with the shift to corn silage as the major forage in many rations. Liberal grain feeding met the requirements of high-producing cows and increased production per cow but introduced new challenges; for example, managing and feeding cows as a group. These changes led to the introduction of new strategies that identified and expanded the use of metabolic modifiers. Research was directed at characterizing the new problems for the dairy cow created by group feeding. Metabolic modifiers went beyond feeding the cow and included environmental and housing factors and additives to reduce the incidence and severity of many new conditions and pathologies. New collaborations began among dairy cattle specialties that broadened our understanding of the workings of the cow. The Journal of Dairy Science then and now plays an enormously important role in dissemination of the findings of dairy scientists worldwide that address existing and new technologies.

Nutrition and feeding of dairy cattle

“…Ionophores have been fed to dairy cattle for many decades resulting in improved feed efficiency, reduced coccidiosis in calves and heifers, and reduced incidence of ketosis in lactating cows. 36 There probably have been more research evaluating ionophores in ruminant diets than any other feed additive. They are classified as antibiotics and are produced from the end-products of bacterial fermentation by two bacteria, Streptomyces cinnamonensis (monensin) and S. lasaliensis (lasalocid).…”

Feeding Dairy Cows With “Leftovers” and the Variation in Recovery of Human-Edible Nutrients in Milk

“…Furthermore, some scenarios do not evaluate best practices in assessing the contribution of livestock to the agricultural system. In applied animal nutrition, feed processing methods (Giuberti et al, 2014), genetic modifications (Ferraretto and Shaver, 2015), and metabolic modifiers (McGuffey, 2017) have been consistently used to improve feed efficiency in livestock.…”

Review: Epigenetics, developmental programming and nutrition in herbivores

“…In the recent literature, research has focused on adjusting nutritional recommendations for herbivores to adapt to global warming, reduce the C footprint of dairy cattle (Wilkinson and Garnsworthy, 2016) and enhance cow health, fertility and welfare (Sordillo, 2016;McGuffey, 2017;Lean et al, 2018).…”