The water intake of British Friesian cows on rations containing various forages

Abstract

The intake of drinking water of lactating British Friesian cows in 14 herds with a total of 840 animals was measured monthly from November to April inclusive. The intake of food, the air temperature and relative humidity were also recorded. The herds which mainly contained autumn-calved cows were managed under controlled commercial conditions. The average daily intake of drinking water was 49-9 (range 20-1 to 87-1) kg/cow for animals yielding an average of 16-8 kg milk/day in an environment with a mean temperature of 8-2°C and a relative humidity of 84-8 %. The amount of water drunk daily was positively and significantly related to the mean daily milk yield and the drymatter content of the ration, but not significantly related to either the mean air temperature or the relative humidity. The average intake of water was 3*70 kg per kg of dry matter consumed after subtracting the amount of water in the milk. On average, 40-0% of the total daily intake of water was drunk between 15-00 and 21*00 hr. Behaviour studies of 24 hr duration on five herds showed that drinking time ranged from 2-0 to 7-8 min/cow per day, and the rate of drinking varied from 4-5 to 14-9 kg/min. Recommendations are made for the provision of drinking water for dairy cows being offered a wide range of forages under modern conditions of housing.

Prediction of drinking water intake by dairy cows

“…Consistently, the new model (Equation 4) including milk yield, NaK, DM%, and DIM best predicted FWI of lactating dairy cows. The extant model in Castle and Thomas (1975) including only milk yield and DM% also performed well on independent data but had a larger RMSPE% (19.7%) than the RMSPE% of the new model (17.9%, Table 5). Predictions from the new model without DMI had small mean bias (1.2% of total bias, Table 5), although slope bias (28.6% of total bias) was quite notable (Figure 3).…”

“…Estimates of FWI may also be useful when attempting to match available resources to newly constructed facilities. To do so, several mathematical models have been published and may be used to predict FWI in dairy cattle (e.g., Castle and Thomas, 1975;Little and Shaw, 1978;Murphy et al, 1983;Stockdale and King, 1983;Dahlborn et al, 1998;Meyer et al, 2004;Cardot et al, 2008;Khelil-Arfa et al, 2012;Appuhamy et al, 2014b). The majority of extant models require DMI of individual cows as an input, which may not be routinely available in commercial dairy farms.…”

“…The majority of extant models require DMI of individual cows as an input, which may not be routinely available in commercial dairy farms. A few extant models (Castle and Thomas, 1975;Dahlborn et al, 1998;Khelil-Arfa et al, 2012) allow for predicting FWI without using DMI. Nonetheless, the performance of some of these equations has not been evaluated using independent FWI measurements, particularly from modern cows under current management.…”

“…When multiple models had similar likelihood values, the model associated with the least Bayesian information criteria was chosen as the best prediction model. All the meta-analyses were Castle and Watson, 1973;Castle and Thomas, 1975;Little et al, 1976;Holter et al, 1982;Murphy et al, 1983;Stockdale and King, 1983;Andersson et al, 1984;Woodford et al, 1984;Andersson, 1985;Janicki et al, 1985;Nocek and Braund, 1985;Richards, 1985;Anderson, 1987;Gorewit et al, 1989;Holter et al, 1990Shalit et al, 1991;Bahman et al, 1993;Dado and Allen, 1993, 1995, 1996Silanikove et al, 1997;Dahlborn et al, 1998;Dewhurst et al, 1998;Muller et al, 1994;Mooney and Allen, 1997;Burgos et al, 2001;Osborne et al, 2002aOsborne et al, , 2009Voelker and Allen, 2003;Cottee et al, 2004;Meyer et al, 2004;Taylor and Allen, 2005;Harvatine and Allen, 2006;Chaiyabutr et al, 2007Chaiyabutr et al, , 2008Thomas et al, 2007;Cardot et al, 2008;Kume et al, 2008Kume et al, , 2010Longuski et al, 2009;Kramer et al, 2009;…”

“…The intersection moving away from the intersection between the zero error line and zero centered-prediction value line (vertical) indicates the presence of mean bias. New and extant models for predicting FWI of lactating cows by Castle and Thomas (1975), Little and Shaw (1978), Murphy et al (1983), Stockdale and King (1983), Dahlborn et al (1998), , KhelilArfa et al (2012), Appuhamy et al (2014b), and Meyer et al (2004) were evaluated.…”