Interview with Kevin Lawrence

Following on from the last blog summary where I identified that some farmers have had great success with feeding fodder beet and others had faced large fatalities I wanted to talk to some industry experts about whether they considered the deaths to have been completely avoidable or that misleading information is available regarding the management of the crop.

On the 17^th July 2016 I met with Kevin Lawrence. Kevin Lawrence is a Senior Lecturer in Pastoral Livestock Health at Massey University. I spoke with Kevin Lawrence about his experience with feeding Fodder Beet following issues in the 2014 season. Dairy cows from Massey University’s No. 1 Dairy farm were winter grazed on fodder beet at Keebles. During the wintering period there were several fatalities on the crop. Kevin Lawrence identified poor management to have been the cause of death on the crop and said “the deaths were completely avoidable”. Firstly, Kevin identified that there was an issue with crop allocation. Because there was not enough room on the crop for all cows to graze simultaneously this resulted in some cows eating more than their allocated amount while others missed out. He identified this as a management issue that caused cows to gorge themselves on the crop and rumen acidosis resulting followed by death of the cow. He suggested that cows should never be fed hungry and supplementary feed should be fed before the fodder beet allocation. He also suggested the use of a headland to reduce competition and allow all cows to graze at once, reducing the potential for cows to over-eat. An additional recommendation which was carried out at Keebles was to allocate the crop perpendicular to the direction of the rows that the crop is sown as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Recommended fodder beet break fencing alignment. Perpendicular to the rows of sown fodder beet as indicated by the two red lines.

Secondly, the biggest loss of animals was as a result of flooding where the cows were taken off the crop for a period of several days and then placed straight back onto the crop. He suggested that under these circumstances the cows should be “re-introduced” back on the crop, rather than allocating the same amount as when they were removed from the crop. Additionally, for these circumstances as well as transitioning cows onto the crop Kevin suggested developing a method for farms to detect when cows have transitioned using something that can be easily tested such as faeces, urine or milk.