In terms of health solutions, Choline nutrition has received the highest focus due to its role in better liver functioning. Apart from higher production levels, Choline’s role in improving dry matter intake, immunity and health creates a strong argument for increased provision of bioavailable Choline. Supplementing choline alters the plasma NEFA concentration. This increases the export of hepatic fat and results in less hepatic fat concentration and thus better liver functioning, which ultimately leads to optimal dry matter intake.

Supplementation of rumen-protected choline (RPC) has attracted major research efforts during the last decade, assuming that choline improves liver function by increasing very low-density lipoprotein exportation from the liver, thereby improving metabolic profiles, milk production, and reproduction. To understand better the importance of RPC, a meta-analysis was conducted (Elke et. al., 2019) to evaluate the effects of RPC supplementation on feed intake, milk production performance and metabolic profiles of dairy cows early postpartum.  

Arshad et.al, (2020) conducted another meta-analysis of supplementing rumen protected choline during the transition period on performance and health of parous dairy cows. Mixed model meta-analysis was conducted including the random effect of experiment and weighting by the inverse of the standard error of the means squared. Twenty-one experiments with up to 66 treatment means and 1313 prepartum parous cows were included in this meta-analysis. Prepartum averaged RPC feeding was for 22±6.0 day and post-partum averaged RPC feeding was for 57.5±42.2 day. Research data from year 1984 to 2018 was included in this up to date meta-analysis.

Table : Effect of choline supplementation on dry matter intake, body weight gain and Body condition score (BCS) in dairy cows

Improvement of 200 g dry matter intake prepartum and 500 g postpartum with improved body weight and body condition score can be easily correlated with optimal metabolic health and performance from dairy cows.

Cows going through transition phase during heat stress can even have more negative consequences. For example, Cows fed with cationic diets (diets having a positive charge due to higher concentration of sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium) during pre-partum phase are more likely to suffer decreased dry matter intake, increased incidences of milk fever or hypocalcemia post calving. Anionic/acidogenic diets (diets having a negative charge due to higher concentration of chloride, sulfur and phosphorus) promote a more acidic metabolic state (lower blood pH)) that is associated with increased dry matter intake and a reduced incidence of hypocalcemia post calving.

It is likely that most diets are cationic in nature, based on the dietary ingredients used in the diet of close-up cows. One of the main reasons for this is that these ingredients are fundamentally cationic.

Santosh et al. (2019) recently published a meta-analysis on 42 experiments, including 134 treatments with 1803 cows. The resulting equations from the statistical models predicted that reducing the Dietary Cation-Anion Difference (DCAD) from +200 to −100 mEq/kg would increase blood total calcium on the day of calving from 1.86 to 2.04 ± 0.05 mM, DMI postpartum 1.0 kg/d, and milk yield 1.7 kg/d in parous cows.

Table: Effect of DCAB on dry matter intake and animal performance

Overall, focusing on improving the intake of dry matter during the heat stress in dairy cows is important.

Based on two recently published meta-analysis on supplementation of rumen protected choline and one meta-analysis on DCAB, it can be concluded that Choline and DCAB significantly improve dry matter intake which is critical and important in optimizing farm profitability.

Interested to see the results on how Choline improves dry matter intake during the transition and early lactating phase? Download our meta-analysis to get the numbers.