Feeding supplements to your mob: Animal nutrition in livestock production

While Australian pastures may be rich in some nutrients, they often fall short in others. Factors like soil quality, weather patterns, and grazing patterns can all affect the nutritional content of the forage available to our animals. Low levels of plant-available micronutrients like molybdenum and zinc are many agricultural soils in Australia, mostly due to our old, highly weathered soil parent materials.

What this means in a functional sense it that your animals may not receive all the essential vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients they need to stay healthy and productive through eating only pasture. To remedy this you can top-dress your paddocks or your can supplement minerals via injections, capsules, drenches, pellets, pour-ons or as loose licks.

Feeding supplements to livestock can help fill in the nutritional gaps left by feeding on pasture alone.

Providing a balanced diet that meets their specific needs, we can ensure that our animals grow, reproduce, and perform at their best. This is particularly important for breeding stock, young animals, and those under high levels of stress, such as during periods of drought or intense production.

Supplementing increases digestibility of pastures, and helps top up the vitamin and mineral profiles of livestock. Feeding supplements will maintain a positive nutritional plane to prepare herds for weaning, breeding, backgrounding, or feedlotting.

Supplements can also play a crucial role in addressing specific health issues and improving overall herd or flock performance. Certain supplements may help prevent deficiencies that can lead to poor growth, reduced fertility, or susceptibility to disease. This might be when your livestock is calving, lambing or kidding, or when your pastures ‘hay off’ in the summer time. Others may support immune function, digestive health, and the quality of meat, milk, produced by our animals.

While it may seem on the surface that supplements are expensive, the potential gains in productivity, profitability, and animal welfare, the investment often pays off.

Mineral blocks (lick) and pellets to liquid supplements and feed additives can be a cost effective way of delivering these supplements to your mob, and it allows them to manage their own intake.

Ultimately, feeding supplements to livestock isn't just about ticking boxes on a nutrition checklist – it's about caring for our animals and ensuring their well-being in an ever-changing environment.

By providing them with the nutrients they need to thrive, we not only safeguard their health and performance but also safeguard the future of our farms and the Australian livestock industry as a whole.

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Andrea Brosnan