Prediction of water intake and excretion flows in Holstein dairy cows under thermoneutral conditions

The increase in the worldwide demand for dairy products, associated with global warming, will emphasize the issue of water use efficiency in dairy systems. The evaluation of environmental issues related to the management of animal dejections will also require precise biotechnical models that can predict effluent management in farms. In this study, equations were developed and evaluated for predicting the main water flows at the dairy cow level, based on parameters related to cow productive performance and diet under thermoneutral conditions. Two datasets were gathered. The first one comprised 342 individual measurements of water balance in dairy cows obtained during 18 trials at the experimental farm of Méjussaume (INRA, France). Predictive equations of water intake, urine and fecal water excretion were developed by multiple regression using a stepwise selection of regressors from a list of seven candidate parameters, which were milk yield, dry matter intake (DMI), body weight, diet dry matter content (DM), proportion of concentrate (CONC) and content of crude protein (CP) ingested with forage and concentrate (CPf and CPc, g/kg DM). The second dataset was used for external validation of the developed equations and comprised 196 water flow measurements on experimental lots obtained from 43 published papers related to water balance or digestibility measurements in dairy cows. Although DMI was the first predictor of the total water intake (TWI), with a partial r2 of 0.51, DM was the first predictive parameter of free water intake (FWI), with a partial r2 of 0.57, likely due to the large variability of DM in the first dataset (from 11.5 to 91.4 g/100 g). This confirmed the compensation between water drunk and ingested with diet when DM changes. The variability of urine volume was explained mainly by the CPf associated with DMI (r.s.d. 5.4 kg/day for an average flow of 24.0 kg/day) and that of fecal water was explained by the proportion of CONC in the diet and DMI. External validation showed that predictive equations excluding DMI as predictive parameters could be used for FWI, urine and fecal water predictions if cows were fed a well-known total mixed ration. It also appeared that TWI and FWI were underestimated when ambient temperature increased above 25°C and possible means of including climatic parameters in future predictive equations were proposed.