The decline in digestive efficiency of US dairy cows from 1970 to 2014

Since the year 1970, US milk production per cow has more than doubled, in part because of large increases in feed intake. It is well established that increasing feed intake reduces diet digestibility in dairy cattle. Our objective was to determine whether the digestive efficiency of US dairy cows had also changed. We assembled a data set consisting of diet digestibility measured either by total collection of feces or by use of indigestible neutral detergent fiber (NDF) in lactating dairy cow studies published in the Journal of Dairy Science from July 1970 to July 2014. The data set contained 575 treatment means from 154 individual research trials conducted at 26 US institutions. Based on regression analysis, mean milk yield and dry matter intake (DMI) between 1970 and 2014 increased by 19.7 and 10.3 kg/d, respectively. Temporal effects on digestibility [dry matter (DM), crude protein (CP), and NDF] were determined using the regression model Yi = YEAR1970i + CPi + NDFi + ei, where YEAR1970i is the publication year minus 1970, CPi and NDFi are diet constituents (% of diet DM) that were included to account for their known effects on digestibility, and ei is the residual error. Dry matter digestibility decreased 0.07 percentage units/yr for a total reduction of 3.08 percentage units since 1970. Furthermore, CP and NDF digestibilities decreased 0.04 and 0.17 percentage units/yr, respectively. To account for the potential effect of feed intake on digestibility, DMI as a percentage of body weight was added to the regression model. With DMI as a percentage of body weight in the model, temporal changes in DM, CP, and NDF digestibilities were no longer significant. This suggested that the apparent decline in DM digestibility could be mostly accounted for by simultaneous increases in level of feed intake. Despite lower apparent digestive efficiency, the modern dairy cow has greater production efficiency than the 1970s dairy cow because she produces more milk per unit of feed consumed and digested.