The National Association of Specialists in Bovine Medicine of Spain (Anembe) held the XXVI Anembe International Congress of Bovine Medicine.. The event took place between April 24 and 26 in Cordoba (Andalusia) and 12 technicians from different areas of AIRA (clinical, feeding, ADS, reproduction and milk quality) went there.
The event features top international speakers, who bring the latest scientific advances in bovine production and aims to train veterinary professionals. In this edition, the Cooperative’s technical feeding team gave a presentation, which aroused great interest among the congress participants.
José Luis López Salgueiro and José María Viana Ferreiro, both veterinarians and technicians of the feeding team, carried out an analysis in which they studied how different parameters affect production in several farms with robotic milking, fed with wet mixture manufactured in AIRA’s plant in Sarria. López Salgueiro was in charge of presenting the main results at the Congress with the talk ‘It’s not the feed’s fault’.
The particularity of the study lies in the fact that all the farms analyzed have the same feeding, location and homogeneity in the parameters of robotic management in milking. They studied four farms, all of them close to each other, in order to share a very similar environment. The farms share the same milking system, the robotic milking system with the same brand. They also share the same Unifeed wet-mix feed plus robot feed (Airobot©). They are in the same geographical area, with the same climate (humidity and temperature) and the same housing system: free stall with cubicles and free circulation. They also share the design of feeding tables for milking robots and feed prices. Finally, another parameter they have the same is the age of the managers, who are young.
Thus, individual deviations in the results cannot be attributed to feeding. Variations in results will be due to other factors: facility design, ventilation, comfort, animal handling, robot handling, occupancy, etc.
