Milk Urea Nitrogen: A Tool to Evaluate Dairy Cow Rations

Select Volume / Issue:

• Volume 4,Issue 6,Nov.,2017

Year:

2017

Type of Publication:

Article

Keywords:

Milk Urea Nitrogen, TMR, Feed composition, Milk composition

Authors:

Ranaweera, K. K. T. N.; Kurukulasuriya, M. S.; Priyankarage, N.; Mangalika, U. L. P.

Journal:

IJRAS

Volume:

4

Number:

6

Pages:

300-303

Month:

November

ISSN:

2348-3997

Note:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Abstract:

Frequent evaluation of milking cow feed rations will be beneficial for optimum production in a dairy farm. Milk Urea Nitrogen (MUN) is a tool that measures the efficiency of protein and carbohydrate feeding to milking cows. It is extensively used in many European and developed countries with many research studies on the baselines of MUN values for particular region or country. However, in many tropical countries (i.e. Sri Lanka), dairy herds had not been evaluated for the mean MUN values. This study had taken an initial step to evaluate the MUN values in one of the commercial dairy farm in Sri Lanka. According to the study, the MUN values of the farm had a range of between 12 mg dL-1 to 20 mg dL-1, which are higher than the recommended range (i.e. 8 mg dL-1 to 12mg dL-1). According to the proximate evaluation of the feed of the farm, only slight deviations from the standard NRC recommendations were found. The highest producing group of cows had the highest MUN mean values. The MUN values showed strong relationship with crude protein levels of the feed (p

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