What is Complete Feed Block Technology and how is it helping dairy farmers?

In a country like India, where the animals are maintained mainly on crop remains or residues, it is important to see that the ration given to the dairy animals are complete in all sense. In order to get optimum production and maximum benefits from the farm animals you must ensure that the animals are in good health. And good healthy depends on the quality of food given to them.

The complete feed block (CBF) technology helps the dairy farmers in providing a balanced feed to the animals, thus increasing milk production and profit incurred from dairy farming. Apart from being an economically feasible technique, the feed block technology offers many other benefits like easy transportation, cheaper storage, easy handling, correcting multi-nutritional shortage and reduced cost. Moreover, you can store it for at least one year.

About CBF

The complete feed block technology actually comprises of forage, concentrate and other essential supplements in appropriate quantity to fulfill the nutrient requirements of your animals. CBF is an intimate combination of processed ingredients that includes roughage and concentrate parts designed to be the only source of feed in compressed form. It can be of any shape – square, circular or quadrangular, depending on the kind of dye used in the machine.   It is the CFB technology that makes dairy or livestock farming a profitable and viable business. Addition of tree leaves along with locally available agro-industrial-by-products in complete feeds lessens the dependence on costly concentrates.  In addition, feeding crop residues in block form proves helpful for efficient utilization.

Components of CFB

The major components of complete feed block technology are forage and concentrate that is added in different ratios, depending upon the level of production. The minor components include - micronutrients and feed additives.  Forage comprises of crop leftovers such as wheat, paddy straw, maize stover and sugarcane tops. In hilly regions, forest grasses and tree leaves are also used.

The dairy animals should be introduced with the complete feed block technology slowly. In the beginning, you must give the feed in small amounts and once they get adapted to it, you can increase the quantity.

Advantages

There are many advantages of CFB technology and some of them are listed below:

• It fulfills the nutrient requirements of the animals in the best possible way.

• Quality feed is available all around the year.

• It is cost-effective.

• The locally available animal feed resources can be utilized.

• Easy and cheap to store.

• Provides added benefit of correcting a multi-nutritional deficiency in animals.

• Enhances the utilization of poor quality of roughages.

• Results in low methane emission from animals.

• Improved productivity.

Complete feed block technology is a boon for the dairy farmers all over the world. Apart from being a complete balanced food for animals, it relieves the farmers at the time of fodder dearth.   By adopting this technology, the farmers can save lot of money being wasted on animal treatment and medicines. Dairy cooperatives can also adopt this technology for producing complete feed blocks in large scale. Presently there are many companies that are coming up with advanced animal feed block making machines. Hence the dairy farmers can select the best machine for their farms.