Services

Technical Services

In today’s economic climate, you need accurate and timely information to allow you to make the best decisions for your business. Our customers have access to an extensive range of technical services designed to help increase output, margins and profits.

Dairy Herd Costings

Using specially designed software to show monthly, annual and rolling herd performance, our unique on-farm costings service is available to all customers.
Your NWF Specialist will work alongside you to decide the best course of action to take regarding the feeding regime and other aspects of herd management. The costing service allows you to monitor the success of the plan and take timely corrective action as required to help the herd meet of exceed the targets set. With over 90 reporting options including graphic reports available, you can concentrate on the areas of most interest to your business.

Ration Planning

Our comprehensive Feed Rationing System is regularly updated to take accounts of all the developments that improve our understanding of how to ration cows effectively. Following discussions with your Feed Specialist the program will formulate a cost-effective, balanced ration with sufficient levels of all essential nutrients to suit your yield, milk quality and animal welfare requirements.

Forage Analysis

The foundation of effective ration planning is an understanding of the feed value of forages. We offer a full Forage Analysis Service from our on-site laboratory at Wardle which is maintained and quality assured by Frank Wright Trouw Nutrition International.

NWF Consult

In a unique service to the industry, we have joined forces with Berrys, a leading business consultancy group to launch NWF Consult, a range of specialist services designed to help you to improve performance and profits on livestock farms.
NWF customers are able to choose from a range of business advice services delivered by experienced farm business consultants from Berrys which complements and adds value to the nutritional advice we already provide

Diet Sieving

Sieving is a major new technique that helps you get the best from your rations.

The way cows perform on a diet depends not only on the nutritional specification of the diet but also on the physical form of the ration. We have been working closely with Frank Wright Trouw Nutrition Intewrnational in a research project to modify the sieving system used in the Unites States (the Penn State Separator System) and make it suitable for UK forages and systems.

The result is a mechanism to assess the physical breakdown of diets and to compare what is being fed to targets and to modify diets accordingly. The system predicts what the breakdown of the particle sizes will be when the diet is formulated. It also assesses the quality of the fibre in the diet and how effective it is in promoting chewing and rumination, both of which are essential for high yields and milk quality.

BSC Monitor

Body Condition Score (BCS) is an essential management technique and we have developed a simple system to help you assess the condition of your cows. The monitor simply requires five groups of cows to be scored each month with the results entered onto a spread sheet. Averages are automatically calculated and plotted onto graphs giving target scores by stage of lactation. This shows not only how the condition of your cows compared to target and also very importantly how scores change between groups. The monitor uses average results needs careful interpretation as individual problem cows can affect the average.

Audits

We currently hold five on farm audits which enable our specialist to undertake quick but effective assessment of frequently questioned performance areas on farm, including fertility audits, dry cow audits, rumen health audits and body condition score assessments. These help to identify your management strengths in each of these areas as a benchmarking tool.

To find out more about our technical services ask your feed specialist or click here