Keenan wins “Practice with Science” award

An new, science-based approach to feeding dairy and beef cattle has won feed wagon manufacturer , Keenan, the Oxford Farming Conference and Royal Agricultural Society of England “Practice with Science” award.

Sponsored by AB Agri, the prize money totals £10,000 and will be used by the firm to further research into feed efficiency and carbon footprinting.

The judges were impressed with Keenan’s “mech-fiber” system which gives farmers a practical approach to improving their economic, environmental and animal health performance by adopting a precision feeding regime targeted at rumen efficiency.

Work conducted on 1,086 dairy farms showed that after using the system for one year, milk production increased by 1.74kg/cow/day from 0.64kg less feed, equating to up to 10% improvement in feed conversion efficiency.