Dairy Farmers Can Maximize Efficiency With the SCIO Cup for Feed Management

Optimizing feed management correctly is crucial for dairy farmers. To make milk production predictable in terms of quantity, timing, and quality, dairy cattle feed must be consistent and meet all the optimal nutrient requirements for dairy cattle.
Failing to find the right balance with milk cow nutrition comes with a price. Too much leads to feed refusal, and a farmer is wasting resources and spending more than they should be. Too little, on the other hand, and farmers face all the challenges connected to reduced production.
To achieve this ideal balance and ration appropriately, you need to know exactly what’s in the feed. What makes that so difficult is that dairy cattle feed is non-homogenous, making measurement difficult. As dairy farmers usually know all too well, the dry matter composition of forage can vary tremendously.
Since it’s made up of a mixture of leaves, stalks, stems, grains, and more, and all of these have different dry matter content, it’s natural for there to be a lot of variety. Two different samples from feed might give two different results. Moreover, weather events can change things literally overnight.
In this graph, you can see what happened when a sample was mixed well and broken into 10 sub-samples, which were sent to a lab for analysis.

This experiment was repeated across 6 farms, and the same kind of variation was shown. Due to its non-homogoneous nature, feed naturally has a lot of variation. As a result, ensuring constant dry matter intake is very challenging.

Feed testing should be the answer to all of this uncertainty and diversity, but traditional methods have lagged behind dairymen’s needs. They relied on Kosters or laboratory testing, both of which were slow, expensive, and too resource-intensive to make testing a real range of forage possible. Additionally, Koster testing was prone to error, and could result in fires if the Koster tester was placed near flammable material. In fact, these solutions were such a poor fit as a solution for dairy farmers that many only tested about 12 samples a year – far below what would be needed to get reliable and consistently useful results.

SCIO Cup: The Game-Changer in Dairy Feed Analysis

The SCIO Cup completely changes the nature of the game in dairy feed analysis. It’s a handheld device that’s so simple that anyone can use it, and when used to scan dairy cattle feed it gives accurate results within seconds. With the SCIO Cup, optimizing milk cow nutrition to be a perfect match for the nutrient requirements of dairy cattle is suddenly a breeze.

The SCIO Cup uses Near InfraRed Spectroscopy (NIRS) technology to leverage the near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum to penetrate into the forage material and measure its composition. If you need to know the moisture content in silage, you can find out in real time. 

The SCIO Cup is worlds away from the moisture measurements of the past. Instead of the time-consuming, delay-inducing, expensive feed testing process, with the SCIO Cup dairymen have a solution which is:

• Portable. Accurate analysis, from a device you can carry around easily. The SCIO Cup can measure up to 1.4 liters in a single scan.
• Fast. Results in seconds, right in front of you.
• Flexible.  The data can be stored until you’re online, and obtained once you connect to the internet, or synced automatically with whichever systems you need.
• Non-destructive. No forage is harmed in the scanning of this material. Unlike laboratory testing, feed testing with the SCIO Cup is completely non-destructive.
• Robust. Built for the farm, with low power consumption and zero warm-up time, the SCIO Cup is designed to be used on the go and in all weathers. 
• Easy. With the SCIO Cup it’s a matter of choosing your sample and scanning. The NIRS technology does the rest. 
• Integrates seamlessly into existing systems. No matter which platforms or systems you use for your operations, SCIO’s data can be easily incorporated into your processes, giving you the ability to make data-driven decisions. 
• Enables easy tracking over time. Since the data from the SCIO Cup is not siloed, but integrated into your wider operations, you can track trends and patterns to enable more accurate predictions and plan more effectively for the future. 

In fact with SCIO, dairymen were able to take so many samples so easily and regularly that, unlike with the old methods, a curve representing the True DM can reliably be created:

The Benefits for Dairy Farmers

Measuring feed accurately, instantly,/ and reliably comes with many benefits for dairy farmers, including improving the consistency of feed quality, optimizing feed efficiency, enabling timely adjustments to feed when necessary, and making data-driven decisions possible in a way that simply wasn’t an option before.

Consistent Feed Quality

Given how non-homogenous forage is by nature, it’s simply not possible to maintain real consistency without measuring to see what you’ve got. 

Real-time dry matter analysis is the answer. When you can measure things like the moisture content in silage with a simple scan at the touch of a button, you shift from being forced to use estimation, guesswork and instinct to a position of confidence. 

Using knowledge about what’s in your feed, you can adjust as necessary and ensure consistent feed quality, allowing you to maintain cattle health and consistent milk production.

Optimized Feed Efficiency

Feed is expensive, and overfeeding herds doesn’t help them or your business. It can impact their health, alter milk quality, and require a change in operations. 

If you’re able to measure the composition of your dairy cattle feed, you can ensure that you’re meeting all the cows’ nutritional needs without wasting money unnecessarily. Accurate measurement leads directly to cost savings as well as to confidence that you’re finding the right balance and doing what’s best for your business.

Timely Adjustments

No matter where you are in the world, weather events impact your dairy feed from time to time. By shifting to a daily feed monitoring routine, in which feed is analyzed in seconds and results automatically recorded, you can keep track and keep control. 

Sometimes there are unexpected weather conditions which can necessitate diverse changes in your operations. With the SCIO Cup, you won’t have to make your best guess about what the consequences have been for your feed. You’ll know, and be able to adjust right away based on accurate, real-time data. Since you’ll be able to draw on the contrast between your standard results and the results following a weather event, you’ll be able to readdress the balance as necessary to maintain consistency.

Data-Driven Decision Making

The SCIO Cup doesn’t just make dairy feed measurement easy, fast, and reliable day-to-day. It also makes a long-term difference to your business by enabling you to track trends and flag abnormal events. 

Using this data, you can make sure that your long-term feed management strategies are grounded in the reality of what your cattle feed composition has been over time. You can track, test, and tweak to maximize efficiency and consistency and minimize costs.

Conclusion

Dairy farmers looking to optimize the efficiency of their feed strategies can benefit tremendously from building regular daily monitoring of their feed into their processes and routines. 

When there’s a rain or snow event, rations can be adjusted at once to ensure consistent dry matter intake regardless of the surrounding environmental factors. 

Farmers can also test before chopping, or when buying forage, so that they can be confident that it arrives with the right dry matter value, helping strengthen a chain of consistency throughout the process. With the SCIO Cup, dairymen start leveraging accurate, real-time data from simple scans. This can make the quality and composition of feed consistent, in turn making it possible for farmers to produce milk of a reliable quality in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.