Effect of dietary fat source and concentration on feed intake, enteric methane, and milk production in dairy cows.

Dietary fat can be used in dairy cow nutrition to reduce enteric methane (CH), but studies with multiple dietary fat concentrations are scarce. Among fat sources, rapeseed is easily accessible in Europe and North America, and palm kernel fat has been shown to be a potent inhibitor of ruminal methanogenesis. Forty-eight cows (half primiparous and half multiparous) were used in a 6 × 6 Latin square design, with 6 periods of 21 d each.

Effect of carbohydrate type in silages and concentrates on feed intake, enteric methane, and milk yield from dairy cows.

Dietary carbohydrate manipulation can be used to reduce enteric CH emission, but few studies have focused on the interaction of the different types of carbohydrates that can affect feed intake and ruminal fermentation. Understanding this interaction is necessary to make the most out of CH mitigation feeding strategies using different dietary carbohydrates. The aim of this study was to test the effect on enteric CH emission, feed intake, and milk production response when cows were fed either grass-clover silage (GCS) or corn silage (CS) as the sole forage source (55% of dry matter, DM), in combination with either barley (BAR) or dried beet pulp (DBP) as a concentrate (21.

How much can performance measures explain of the between-cow variation in enteric methane?

Enteric CH produced from dairy cows contributes to the emission of greenhouse gases from anthropogenic sources. Recent studies have shown that the selection of lower CH-emitting cows is possible, but doing so would be simpler if performance measures already recorded on farm could be used, instead of measuring gas emissions from individual cows. These performance measures could be used for selection of low emitting cows.