Veterinarians and dairy nutrition management: basic concepts and design-it-yourself—a veterinary-oriented ration evaluation program

Abstract

Veterinarians increasingly play a major contributory role in dairy practice and management. Withincreasing importance of economical pressures, bioenvironmental limits and increasing demand for higherquality products, veterinarians are more involved in nutrition management and advice, both from aneconomical view of productivity and preventive aspects of veterinary medicine. The concept of food animalproduction medicine is the hallmark of such a change from purely diagnosis and treating sick cows to designstrategies for disease prevention and economical profitability. One of the essential parts of the new role is tohave a good command of nutritional concepts and acquaintance with ration formulation procedures and alsosoftwares. It appears that the available ration formulation softwares are insufficient in view of estimatingnecessary criteria for dairy practitioners. Moreover, the release of new edition of NRC and subsequentmodification of software programs for ration formulation always lag behind the generation of newknowledge in dairy nutrition. This article describes the basic nutritional concepts, as well as a practicalapproach to design a ration evaluation program based on Microsoft® Excel. The program can be designed in a profession-oriented approach.