Slash feed costs with genetics

As a dairy farmer, you are always looking for ways to navigate regulations on your emissions and carbon footprint. You have to juggle this with precise cow management, optimising your feed and energy usage, and improving crop performance.

A great way of combining these to reduce your herd’s carbon footprint is the targeted use of feed-efficient genetics.

The Saved Feed Index in the Nordic Total Merit index (NTM) shows how efficiently a cow turns feed into milk. With it, you can identify the most promising bulls to breed high-performing, feed-efficient, more sustainable dairy cows.

The amount of feed intake data is continuously growing. The goal is to have feed intake data for 30,000 cows by 2025 for our three major dairy breeds – Holstein, Jersey, and Red Dairy Cattle.

VikingGenetics leads the way in feed efficiency indexes, being the only company in the world to offer a feed efficiency index for Jersey and Red Dairy cattle.

Dairy farmers across the Nordic countries and VikingGenetics’ 50+ export markets already reap the benefits of breeding for improved feed efficiency.

The Saved Feed Index and the data collected by the CFIT system are widely used in dairy genetic selection to breed more feed-efficient and climate-friendly cows without compromising on production, health, and reproduction.

This way, you can identify their best feed-converting cows and maximise farm returns by breeding cows that combine all profit-driving traits in one package.

You can easily find out what cows are eating away at your profits and which ones are the top contributors by genomic testing them on the Nordic Total Merit (NTM) scale. With these valuable insights in hand, it will be easier to make more profitable choices.