Watch our focus on spring webinar series

Focus on – Livestock health and nutrition

The Beef Sheep Network’s ‘Focus On – Spring’ webinar series began last month with presentations on livestock health and nutrition from Livestock Industry Development Officer Nick Linden and District Veterinary Officer, Dr Jeff Cave.

The focus of the webinar was late winter and early spring livestock health issues such as trace mineral deficiencies, early pasture growth and the practical use of tactical feed budgeting.

Dr Cave highlighted an increase in the cases of trace mineral deficiencies such as iodine, selenium, cobolt and copper this year. The reason for this is good early season growth, meaning intake via soil ingestion was lower than average. Compounding this, rapidly growing pasture are already lower in trace minerals.

He recommended ‘if you are in a known deficient area, you should review your trace mineral supplement strategies early’. The animals most at risk are lambs and calves as they have a higher demand for trace minerals.

Nick spoke on animal nutrition and feed budgeting, highlighting how important early planning is in ensuring adequate feed and ground cover over the summer period.

‘Feed budgeting provides a strategy for the next few months, allowing you to plan when to start conserving feed and estimating your start of summer target’ Nick said.

The webinar uses a worked example on how to perform this tactical feed budgeting approach, which ensures you have adequate dry feed grown in spring for the long summer period.

The webinar series is proudly supported by the Victorian Government’s 2019-20 drought support package. If you would like access to a PDF of the presentations please click here