Dairy farming system markers: The correlation of forage and milk fatty acid profiles from organic, pasture and conventional systems in the Netherlands

Abstract

The relationships between the fatty acid (FA) composition in forage and milk (F&M) from different dairy systems were investigated. Eighty milk samples and 91 forage samples were collected from 40 farms (19 organic, 11 pasture and 10 conventional) in the Netherlands, during winter and summer. The FA profiles of F&M samples were measured with gas chromatography. The results showed that the F&M of organic farms were significantly differentiated from the F&M of other farms, both in summer and winter. The differences are likely due to the different grazing strategies in summer and different forage composition in winter. The Pearson's correlation results showed the specific relationship between individual FAs in forages and related milk. A PLS-DA model was applied to classify all milks samples, resulting in 87.5% and 83.3% correct classifications of training set and validation set.

Advances in fatty acids nutrition in dairy cows: from gut to cells and effects on performance

“…Milk is an interesting food matrix where fat is present mostly as TAG (98%), and other type of lipids such as DAG (around 2% of the lipid fraction), cholesterol (less than 0.5%), phospholipids (about 1%) and free FA (about 0.1%) [312] are a minor part. Milk FA are originated from two sources, the preformed FA found in the feed and from microbial activity in the rumen [313]. In other words, FA in bovine milk are produced by de novo synthesis in the mammary gland mostly using byproducts of the rumen microbial fermentation or taken up from plasma lipids.…”

“…Production systems can also be different in their milk FA profile, for example, compared with cows fed on total mixed ratios (based on corn silage), milk of cows fed on pasture-based diets (either full grazing or based on grass silage) has higher concentration of some UFA such as various trans C18:1, C18:2, and C18:3 [313]. The high proportion of C18:3 in milk of grazing cows is due to the high amount of this FA in the galactosyl diacylglycerols constituting the thylakoids [343], the main membrane structure of the chloroplast.…”

Modeling heat stress under organic dairy farming conditions in warm temperate climates within the Mediterranean basin

“…Ferreiro et al 2015). Organic milk has also been found to contain high levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which has been shown to be altered by heat stress (Liu et al 2017;Liu et al 2020).…”

“…Again, the impact of THI on milk quality in organic systems may be related to both genetic and management factors in these systems; for example, high phospholipid content in organic relative to conventional milk has been attributed to differences in diet, season, stage of lactation, and breed between organic and conventional systems (Schwendel et al 2015). A major issue in untangling the effects of these factors has been that the role of heat stress is often confounded by seasonal changes in feeding patterns (Liu et al 2020). Differences in diet, including access to grazing in extensive organic systems, represents an important difference between organic and intensive conventional systems in Spain (Orjales et al 2019).…”

Nutrient production in pastures of Triticale BRS Saturno submitted to different levels of nitrogen in topdressing

“…The synergies of carbohydrates and nitrogenous constituents for the production of microbial proteins affect the performance of ruminants (Bumbieris et al, 2011). The biofunctional nutrients (fatty acids) contained in pastures affect the composition of meat (Freitas et al, 2014;Lobato et al, 2014) and milk (Buccioni, Decandia, Minieri, Molle, & Cabiddu, 2012;Liu et al, 2020). The production of nutrients in Triticale pastures is the result of the interaction of climatic conditions, represented mainly by the thermal sum and the physiological cycle of the plants (Coblentz, Akins, Kalscheur, Brink, & Cavadini, 2018).…”