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Starchy maize needed for protein utilization
Grass and silage maize form a perfect marriage: a lot of energy is needed to make good use of the protein-rich grass. Silage maize provides a lot of energy, from the starch and from the cell walls. Your return is the highest with a maize variety that matches your grass share.
With a grass-rich ration, cows need a lot of energy to convert nitrogen (protein) from the grass into milk protein. This mainly happens in the rumen. A lot of energy is therefore required at the pen level. In a ration with less than 30% maize, it is therefore best to opt for starchy maize varieties, such as, among others LG 7005 en LG 7005.
If you feed more maize, then it is not the starch content but the feed intake that is the limiting factor. Then choose maize varieties with the highest VEM; that is the total nutritional value from starch and the residual plant. The residual plant (cell walls) provides 25 to 33% of the VEM, depending on the digestibility of the NDF. There are considerable breed differences in this cell wall digestibility.
A high cell wall digestibility in silage maize always pays off. Cell walls are digested on average for 35% in the rumen and 10% in the large intestine. In the rumen they are broken down much more slowly than starch and mainly converted into acetic acid. Every 1% higher cell wall digestibility increases the VEM per kg DM, the feed intake and thus the milk yield. That is why an easily digestible residual plant has been one of the breeding goals in the LG program for decades.
View our top digestible maize varieties >>
