To Lick or Not to Lick?
WRITTEN FEBRUARY 2023 FOR LEADING SHEEP - AROUND THE CAMP NEWSLETTER
If you’ve missed the summer showers of rain, you probably have a large body of dry summer feed that is heading to seed and drying out fast in the hot summer weather. As a result, you might be asking “Which Lick?”
To answer this, it’s good to know a bit more about the feed situation. Generally speaking, even though the summer grass has a lot of bulk, even if it’s green, it doesn’t mean its good quality. Here are some feedtests that we’ve run lately on farms:
In summary, most of what’s been tested lately has been high in fibre, on the low side for energy, and low in protein. Not only is the animal probably doing it tough (or snacking on other volunteer weeds and plants to supplement their needs) but their rumen bugs are battling. You can tell this is happening by looking at the dung pyramids (rather than pancakes) that are being deposited on the paddock.
We know that if we introduce a little bit of readily fermentable carbohydrate and a little bit of rumen degradable protein (for example urea) into the rumen, we can fire up the rumen bugs and get them to work a bit harder for us, getting more out of the feed as a result. By having a healthy microbial population in the rumen, we encourage the population of bugs to multiply, resulting in more microbial protein being washed down into the small intestine for absorption and utilisation by the animal.
This technique works best in cattle. We know that if we can supplement an adult 550kg cow with around 50g of urea per head per day, we can increase her dry feed consumption (and therefore her energy and protein intake!) by 14-26%. Magic!
We don’t seem to get the same impressive response to urea-based licks in sheep. While the cause of this is not definitively known, it is thought to be because sheep are highly discriminant grazers. Unlike cattle who have no real option other to take a large bite of grass, sheep can get their tiny, mobile mouths into grass butts and low to the ground to eat the tastiest green shoots available. They are already introducing simple sugars and protein to their rumen using their grazing behaviour that cattle cannot, hence we don’t get the same production response using a urea-based lick in sheep.
For this reason, you may be better off to concentrate on supplying additional nutrients to the sheep using grains (cereal or pulse, depending on the situation and class of stock), and supply minerals only via the lick (eg calcium, phosphorus and sodium, depending on the situation).
Having a think about your farm calendar and trying to match animal needs to feed on offer can be of benefit in the long term. We don’t want heavily pregnant or peak lactation animals on the farm during periods that are known to be a feedgap in the yearly pasture calendar unless we’ve budgeted on supplementing them each year.
Of course, we all hope it rains significantly in the coming weeks and we don’t need to talk about dry poor quality summer feed anymore. But hoping for rain is not a strategy for success!
Please seek advice on the best supplementation option before embarking on a costly feeding program. If you need help, give Jillian at Animal Health & Nutrition Consulting a call on 0408331166.
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