Brought to you by Limagrain
'More return with own roughage'
Dairy farmer Ruben Marijnissen gets a lot of satisfaction from continuously optimizing his company. Not only in the stable, but also outside. He strives to produce as much milk as possible from his own feed, for a high return on his land.
“I have always been a real breeding enthusiast. About 8 years ago I started looking at roughage cultivation in a similar way. In my opinion, milking as much as possible from home-grown feed is the way to reduce fixed costs and improve yields. I got in touch with Antoon Verhoeven of Limagrain and together we started improving and optimizing step by step.”
Marijnissen finds it nice that the energy he puts into forage cultivation is also rewarded. “I get energy from constantly setting new goals and then achieving them. By working a lot with the soil, fertilization, choice of varieties and cultivation, our roughage yield and quality have improved considerably.”
Grass, maize, fodder beets, field beans and alfalfa
In addition to grass and maize, Ruben also grows, in collaboration with arable farmers, Tarine fodder beets, Tundra winter field beans and alfalfa. “Now almost 17 kg of dry matter roughage goes into the cow per day. At the beginning of September I started feeding fresh fodder beets again. That is a very nice addition that increases the feed intake and with which the concentrate dose can be reduced. As soon as this ration is stable, I will also start feeding ground field beans to replace even more concentrates.”
