The partial replacement of silage with straw, with or without barley or soybean meal, in rations for winter calving beef cows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The effects of partially replacing grass-legume silage with barley straw, without or with either supplemental energy or protein, were assessed in 72 lactating beef cows. Diets were fed from calving in January-February until turnout to pasture in late May. Performance of cows and their calves was measured over this period, and weight and body condition were measured at weaning in September. Apparent digestibility and N balance of these diets was also assessed in growing steers. Replacing half the silage with barley straw reduced diet digestibility (P < 0.05), intake (P < 0.05), body weight (BW) gain (P < 0.001) and body condition (P < 0.001) of cows but did not affect BW gain or weaning weights of calves. Reproductive performance was also unaffected, although overall production efficiency (kg weaned calf kg-1 cow BW) was impaired (P < 0.10). When the silage-straw diet was supplemented with barley, metabolizable energy (ME) intake was increased to the level supplied by the all-silage diet. However, there was a tendency for cows to partition more ME to calf growth and less to body reserves as indicated by body condition score (P < 0.05). This may have been related to better N utilization, since N losses in urine were lower for steers fed the barley-supplemented mixture than those fed silage (P < 0.01). When the silage-straw was supplemented with soybean meal (SBM) to increase crude protein (CP) to equal the all-silage diet, there were no benefits for the cow or calf, because SBM reduced intake relative to silage fed alone (P < 0.001). Thus, although supplementing with SBM improved N balance, relative to silage (P < 0.01), there was no response in calf performance, probably because of insufficient ME intake in the cow. Although silage appears not to be well balanced for the nutrient requirements of lactating beef cows, attempts to optimise nutrient supply did not markedly improve growth performance of the calf or reproductive performance of the cow. Key words: Beef cow, cow-calf, silage, straw, gains, weaning weight, reproduction
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".