How to Make Dairy Concentrates

Ask how to mix a dairy concentrate and you will be given a proportion. Three documents from the same East African dairy programme give three different ones, and a worked Ugandan mix matches none of them. That is not a reason to give up on home mixing. It is the reason the target is a crude protein percentage rather than a ratio, and working out that percentage is the skill this page is about.

What a Dairy Concentrate Has to Do in the Feed Ration

A concentrate is a feed rich in energy or protein or both, low in fibre, with a high dry matter content. It supplies far more nutrients per kilogramme than forage does. It is always a supplement to a basal diet of forage, never the diet itself, and that framing decides everything downstream: you are not building a feed, you are building the missing part of one.

So the first job is not mixing. It is knowing what the forage already supplies, because a concentrate mixed for a cow on good Napier and legume is a different product from one mixed for a cow on maize stover. Where the basal ration is very poor, high levels of concentrate are needed to reach any given yield, which is the expensive corner of dairy farming. Where the forage is good, a modest mix does the job.

Two limits are worth fixing in mind before any ingredient is weighed. Push the concentrate share of a diet too high and rumen fermentation suffers, digestion efficiency drops with it, and the response curve bends instead of climbing. The second limit is that how well a concentrate works is set by the basal ration beneath it, so a mix can build on decent forage and cannot rescue bad forage.

Choosing Energy and Protein Ingredients Available in Uganda

Every home mixed dairy concentrate is built from three groups, and the whole craft is knowing which group an ingredient belongs to.

The three groups, with the crude protein figures that decide what goes where. Crude protein below about 9 percent counts as low, 9 to 18 percent as moderate, and above 18 percent as high.

Energy ingredients, the bulk of the mix. Cereal by products above all: maize bran at about 11 percent crude protein, wheat bran about 15 percent, wheat pollard about 16 percent, rice bran about 12.5 percent. Also cassava meal, sweet potato tubers, molasses, brewers grain waste and coffee hull. Whole cereals are rarely used because they cost too much and people eat them.

Protein ingredients, the expensive part. Oilseed cakes: cottonseed cake at about 35 percent crude protein, sunflower cake about 26 percent, groundnut cake about 45 percent, simsim, copra and kapok cake all in the high band. Soybean meal reaches about 47 percent and the whole bean about 40. Anything above 20 percent crude protein on a dry matter basis counts as a protein supplement; below that it is an energy feed carrying some protein.

Minerals and premix, about a hundredth of the weight. Limestone, bone meal, common salt and a commercial mineral powder. Small in quantity, and not optional, because forage and cereal by products together will not cover a producing cow's mineral need.

The free protein option worth knowing. Leaf meal from fodder trees and herbaceous legumes such as leucaena and calliandra can substitute for oilseed meal, which is more expensive and not always available. Guidance caps leaf meal at around 30 percent of a daily ration.

Several ingredients carry conditions rather than just numbers. Groundnut cake is the ingredient flagged for aflatoxin contamination in the same guidance that recommends it, so its quality is a real question and not a formality. Raw soybean is worth less than heated beans or the meal because of toxic substances that hit calves hardest. Fresh cassava root carries a high level of prussic acid, destroyed by boiling or sun drying. Rice bran and copra cake go rancid in store because of their fat. Wet brewers grain turns rancid fast and is used immediately or ensiled. And animal protein other than fishmeal is not used in ruminant feed, following the bovine spongiform encephalopathy ban.

The Dairy Feed Mixing Proportion: Three Published Rules That Disagree

Here is the problem this page opened with, laid out.

Source	Energy	Protein
Regional dairy manual	70 percent	29 percent
Home mixing leaflet	60 percent	40 percent
Worked Ugandan mix	82 percent	17 percent

The manual's rule for a home made concentrate is energy sources 70 percent, protein sources 29 percent and minerals or vitamins 1 percent. The leaflet from the same programme gives the rule for a farmer with no weighing scale as energy to protein at 3 to 2, which is 60 to 40. And the Ugandan mix that programme publishes as practical experience from a Kampala peri urban area runs 82 parts maize bran to 17 parts cottonseed cake and 1 part mineral powder.

These are not three errors. They are three answers to different arithmetic, and seeing why is the moment home mixing starts making sense. A mix of 82 percent maize bran at 11 percent crude protein and 17 percent cottonseed cake at 45 percent lands at about 16.5 percent crude protein, which is a normal dairy meal. A mix of 60 percent maize bran and 40 percent cottonseed cake would land far higher and would waste expensive protein. The ratio is not the target. The crude protein of the finished mix is the target, and the ratio that gets you there depends entirely on the crude protein of the ingredients you can actually buy.

So treat all three rules as starting points for a farmer with no figures at all, and treat the crude protein calculation in the next section as the thing that actually decides your mix. If the only cake on the market this month is sunflower at 26 percent rather than cottonseed at 45, your proportion has to move, and no published ratio will tell you that.

A Worked Ugandan Dairy Meal and Where Its Money Went

The mix below is the one published as practical experience from Uganda, at about 16 percent crude protein. It reconciles exactly, which is why it is worth using as a model: 82 kg at 10.7 percent contributes 8.8 points of protein, 17 kg at 45.2 percent contributes 7.7, and the two sum to the 16.5 percent stated.

A Ugandan home mixed dairy meal, per 100 kg of dry matter, with what each part contributed to the protein and to the bill. The shilling amounts in the original are old enough to mislead and are not reproduced; the shares are not.

Maize bran, 82 kg. Crude protein 10.7 percent on a dry matter basis, contributing 8.8 percentage points of the mix's protein. It was 82 percent of the weight and about 64 percent of the cost.

Cottonseed cake, 17 kg. Crude protein 45.2 percent, contributing 7.7 percentage points. It was 17 percent of the weight and about 27 percent of the cost, so protein cost roughly twice as much per kilogramme as energy did.

Mineral powder, 1 kg. Contributing no protein and about 9 percent of the cost. One percent of the weight and nearly a tenth of the bill, which is why it is the part people leave out and should not.

The result. 100 kg at about 16.5 percent crude protein. Almost half the protein came from a seventh of the weight, which is the whole reason a concentrate is mixed rather than just fed as bran.

The mineral powder in that mix was a commercial product carrying calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, sodium chloride, phosphorus, sulphur and zinc, at a calcium to phosphorus ratio of about 1.68 to 1. This page names no product. Which mineral source to use, and at what inclusion, is a question for the mineral supplements page, the bag label, and a livestock services provider who knows what your district's soils are short of.

Four other formulas are published alongside it, each totalling 100 kg, and their crude protein contents land at 12.5, 18.6, 18.6 and 11.5 percent. That spread is the warning. The most common commercial dairy meal in the region runs 15 to 18 percent crude protein, so two of those four published home formulas come out weaker than the bag they are meant to replace. Mixing your own is not automatically as good. It is as good as the arithmetic you did.

Working Out the Crude Protein of Your Own Dairy Feed Mix

This is the one calculation worth learning, and it is a single line repeated.

For each ingredient, multiply the kilogrammes you are putting in by its crude protein percentage. Add the results. That total, out of 100 kg of mix, is your crude protein percentage. The Ugandan example above is exactly that sum done twice and added.

Two cautions on the inputs. First, published crude protein figures are averages and real ingredients vary, cottonseed cake being quoted anywhere from 23 to 35 percent depending on how much oil was extracted and how much hull went in. Second, the figures are on a dry matter basis, so a wet ingredient supplies less than its table value suggests. Where you want the real number rather than a table value, a feed analysis laboratory measures it, and Uganda's feeds law provides for a quality control laboratory.

Once you can compute a mix's protein, you can also compare buying against mixing honestly. Divide the cost of a bag by the kilogrammes of crude protein it contains, then do the same for your mix. The cheaper bag is often the more expensive protein. Home mixing has been reported to save over 30 percent of the total cost, and that figure is worth testing rather than trusting, because it depends on your local by product prices and on whether your own labour counts as free.

For a mix of two ingredients where you have a protein target rather than a proportion, the standard tool is the Pearson's square, which back solves the proportions from the target. The feed formulation pages carry it. What this page adds is the reason to bother: without it you are choosing between three published ratios that disagree.

Mixing Dairy Feed by Hand on the Farm Without a Weighing Scale

The physical process is short, and the failure in it is always the same one.

List what is available and group each item as energy, protein or mineral. Set your proportions from your protein target. Find a clean, dry mixing area on a hard surface. Then mix from the smallest quantity upward: start by combining the salt and the mineral, add any premix or yeast to that, and mix it thoroughly before it ever meets the bulk. Only then fold that small, well mixed portion through the bran and the cake, turning with a clean shovel until the colour is even throughout. Bag it and store it.

The reason for starting small is the failure mode. The ingredients used in tiny amounts are the ones that end up unevenly distributed, and they are the minerals and premixes. Tip a kilogramme of mineral powder onto 99 kg of bran and stir, and one cow gets a mouthful of mineral while the rest get none. The source's own list of disadvantages names this: it is difficult to mix homogenously, especially the ingredients used in small amounts, because the mixing is done manually.

A farmer with five or more milking cows can justify a feed mixer, and machines with outputs as small as 500 kg an hour are made for small industries. Below that, the shovel and the discipline of mixing upward from the smallest ingredient are what you have.

Feed Ingredient Limits, Urea and What Can Kill a Cow

This is the section that matters most, and it is the one home mixing guides usually leave out. The published list of disadvantages of home made rations ends on it: it is difficult to observe recommended limitations for some ingredients, which can be toxic or have negative effects.

Ceilings and hazards in a home mixed dairy concentrate. Every one of these is a maximum rather than a target.

Urea can be toxic or lethal. It is non protein nitrogen, it is the cheapest nitrogen source there is, and rumen microbes can use it, which is exactly why it gets recommended. The level a cow tolerates depends on how far she has been adapted to it and on the type of diet. This page states no urea inclusion level, and a home mixer should not estimate one. If a ration needs non protein nitrogen, the amount is set by a veterinary or extension officer or a livestock nutritionist, not by a guide.

Urea on poor roughage is worse than no urea. An animal on poor quality roughage should not be given non protein nitrogen at all, because the energy needed to use it is not there. True protein such as cottonseed cake goes in instead, or the urea is paired with a good energy source such as molasses.

Molasses above about 25 percent of the diet causes diarrhoea and reduced feed efficiency. It is useful below that as an energy source, a palatability improver, a pellet binder and a way of keeping dust down.

Fat above about 8 percent of the ration causes rumen disturbance. Waste fats and oils raise energy density and reduce dust, and high fat levels also make a mix go rancid in store.

Leaf meal at no more than about 30 percent of a daily ration, wetted before feeding to cut spillage.

Mouldy is a discard, not a dilution. Mould in an ingredient means mycotoxins in the mix, and mixing does not reduce the total. Groundnut cake is the ingredient this guidance itself flags for aflatoxin.

No dose, medicine or hormone goes into a home mix. Medicines can be dispensed through feed, and a feed carrying one inherits its withdrawal period. That belongs to a prescription and a veterinary practitioner. Uganda's feeds law reaches it directly, limiting which additives may be used, barring others, and governing hormones and veterinary drugs put into a ration.

The pattern across that list is worth naming. Every hazard in a home mixed concentrate comes from an ingredient used in a small quantity or from one used past its ceiling, and both failures are invisible in a finished bag of feed. A mix that looks right and smells right can still be wrong, which is why the ceilings are learned before the mixing starts.

Feed Storage for Homemade Concentrate and Keeping the Batch Traceable

A mix that has gone off has not saved anybody money. Gunny bags in a dry, cool, ventilated store, off the floor and away from the walls so moisture cannot wick in, and protected from rodents and poultry. Use the oldest stock first. Mix quantities you will feed within a few weeks rather than building a store, because fat bearing ingredients such as rice bran and copra go rancid and vitamin activity falls with time.

Keep a record of each batch with its own number and what went into it. This sounds like paperwork until something goes wrong, at which point the batch record is the only way to work out which ingredient caused it, and it is the practice the source guidance asks for. It also matters legally, which is the next section.

One other practical note. A mix can be fed as a dry meal, cooked and fed as dough, or pelleted. If it is pelleted it should be dried before storage, because a warm moist pellet in a sack is a mould culture.

How Much Homemade Concentrate to Feed, and Where It Stops Paying

Mixing it is the easy half. Deciding how much to feed is where the money is won or lost, and the rules in circulation disagree by close to a factor of two. One says nothing up to 7 kg of milk and then 1 kg of concentrate for every extra 1.5 kg. Another sets forage at 70 percent and concentrate at 30, rising to 60 percent concentrate for high yielders. A third gives 1 kg per 2 to 3 litres of milk. A fourth gives 1 kg per 2 litres. The document carrying the first two rules settles the matter in its own words: work the figure from what the cow actually needs and it will be right, and the two inputs that move it are how good your forage is and how much she is giving.

So use challenge feeding instead of a ratio. Start the cow on a low level of concentrate at calving and raise it step by step. Keep raising while each increase buys more milk. Stop at the point where a further increase does not. That point is your answer, it is specific to your cow, your forage and the season, and targeted feeding of this kind has been shown to raise net returns for smallholders.

Now the number that should slow anybody down before they scale up. In smallholder dairy work behind the same guidance, most farmers were feeding 2 kg of concentrate a day and getting 5 to 7 litres of milk. Raising the allowance to 8 kg a day for a targeted period lifted total milk yield by about 24 percent.

A fourfold rise in bought feed for roughly a quarter more milk. Whether that trades depends on two prices and nothing else.

Work it as a ratio, not a total. Four times the feed against 1.24 times the milk means the extra feed has to cost less than about a fifth of what the extra milk earns, per unit, before it pays. At most Ugandan feed and farm gate milk prices it does not.

Which is the argument for mixing rather than buying. Home mixing has been reported to cut concentrate cost by over 30 percent, and the same 24 percent milk response against a cheaper input is a different trade. That is the honest case for this page's subject.

And the stronger argument for fixing the forage first. Good forage with a legume in it supports 8 to 12 kg of milk a day with no concentrate at all, while poor crop residues support none. Moving the basal diet is cheaper than moving the supplement, and Ugandan farmers who grew improved forage produced about 3.5 litres a day more per cow than their neighbours at roughly a quarter of the cost per litre.

The margin is thin either way. An output to input ratio of 1.06 was measured across 100 south western Ugandan dairy enterprises. There is not much room for a feed decision that goes the wrong way.

Where concentrate is clearly worth the money is early lactation, when intake is high and the cow is milking off her own body reserves, and for the calf, where concentrate stimulates rumen development faster than fibrous feed and a little early is worth more than a lot later. Those are the targeted uses. A flat daily allowance regardless of yield is the expensive one.

Feed Law, Labels and Selling the Concentrate You Mix

Uganda used to have no specific law on animal feeds. The ministry's own policy position was that the quality of feeds on the market was poor precisely because no regulatory mechanism or standard existed for producing and marketing them. That has changed: the Animal Feeds Act, assented to by the President, now provides for an Animal Feeds Committee, for licensing the production, storage and sale of animal feeds, for approval of premises, for packaging, labelling and transportation, for regulated additives and prohibited substances, for the use of veterinary drugs and hormones, for a feeds quality control laboratory, and for feeds inspectors and feeds analysts. It prohibits the sale of feed that does not comply with established standards.

Three consequences for somebody mixing at home.

Mixing for your own cows is feeding your animals. Mixing to sell puts you inside the licensing and labelling provisions, which is the line to establish with your district office before you take the first order, since the status of the regulations and the licence process can change and a district veterinary office is where the current position lives.

The label on every ingredient you buy is now a regulated document, and it carries the crude protein figure your arithmetic depends on plus the batch number you would quote if the ingredient turned out wrong. Read it and keep it. A mineral premix or additive is used at the inclusion the manufacturer states and not at one you estimate.

And the nutrient specification a concentrate is judged against is a published standard rather than an opinion. The one printed in the regional manual is the Kenya Bureau of Standards specification, which sets minimum crude protein at 18 percent for dairy calves and 14 to 16 percent for heifers and mature cows, with maximum moisture of 12 percent, maximum crude fibre of 8 percent for calves and 12 for older animals, minimum calcium of 0.7 percent, minimum phosphorus of 0.5 percent and common salt at 0.5 to 0.6 percent. That is a Kenyan standard and not a Ugandan one, and it is named here as Kenyan for exactly that reason. It is still a useful yardstick, and it explains why two of the four published home formulas fall short. For the Ugandan specification, the bag label under Uganda's own feeds law and the ministry's standards are the documents that govern.

Where to Get a Homemade Dairy Feed Mix Checked in Uganda

The honest position from the source guidance is that to mix a quality concentrate you need good information on feed quality and on the animal's nutritional requirement, and that you should get it from a livestock services provider. The regional manual goes further and says home made concentrates should be built with the help of a nutritionist, and that the only accurate concentrate allowance is one a nutritionist calculates.

In practice that means your district veterinary officer or extension officer for what local by products are worth and what your soils lack, a feed analysis laboratory if you want a real crude protein figure rather than a table value, and current local quotes on bran, cake and minerals, since those move with the maize and cotton harvests and with how far you are from a mill.

Start at the animal feeds and health hub. Before mixing anything, settle what your cow actually needs and what your forage already gives, which is on dairy feed requirements, with the daily quantities on dairy cow feed requirements per day and the routine on the dairy cow feeding guide. Ingredient by ingredient detail sits on maize bran in animal feeding, cotton seed cake in animal feed, sunflower cake in animal feed and soybean meal in animal feeding, and the mineral part on mineral supplements for livestock. If mixing by shovel is the constraint, feed mixing machines covers the step up. Because the cheapest protein is often grown rather than bought, read Napier grass farming and silage making for dairy cattle alongside this. Storage failures undo the whole exercise, which is storing animal feed safely. The money sits on the cost of dairy farming, and if you are thinking of mixing for other farmers, starting an animal feed business is the page for that.

Questions Ugandan Farmers Ask About Mixing Dairy Feed

Is it actually cheaper to mix my own dairy meal? Reported savings run above 30 percent of concentrate cost, and that figure is worth testing rather than trusting. Divide what a bag costs by the kilogrammes of crude protein in it, do the same for your own mix at current local bran and cake prices, and compare. Two things usually decide it: whether there is a mill near you selling bran cheaply, and whether you are counting your own mixing labour as free. Current prices for bran, cake and minerals move with the harvest and by district, so get quotes rather than working from any published figure.

What crude protein should I aim for? Commercial dairy meal in the region runs 15 to 18 percent crude protein, so that is the band a home mix is competing with, and two of four published home formulas come out below it at 11.5 and 12.5 percent. A calf concentrate is a different product and needs more protein than a mature cow's. The Kenyan standard, which is the only published specification in the regional manual and is named here as Kenyan rather than Ugandan, sets a minimum of 18 percent for calves and 14 to 16 for heifers and mature cows.

Can I use urea to raise the protein cheaply? This page gives no urea level and you should not estimate one. Urea can be toxic or lethal depending on the size and timing of the dose, the tolerance depends on how far the animal has been adapted to it and on the diet, and on poor quality roughage it should not be used at all because the energy to use it is missing. It is the one ingredient on the list that kills. If a ration needs non protein nitrogen, a veterinary or extension officer or a livestock nutritionist sets the amount.

Do I have to add minerals? Yes, and it is the part most often skipped because it is 1 percent of the weight. Forage and cereal by products together do not cover a producing cow's mineral need, and in the worked Ugandan mix the mineral powder was a hundredth of the weight and about a tenth of the cost. Which product and what inclusion depends on your district's soils and on the bag label, and the mineral supplements page covers it.

Can I sell the feed I mix to neighbours? That is a different activity from feeding your own cows. Uganda's Animal Feeds Act provides for licensing the production, storage and sale of animal feeds, for approval of premises, and for statutory packaging and labelling, and it prohibits selling feed that does not meet established standards. Establish the current position with your district office before taking an order, because the detail of regulations and licence processes can change.

How do I know my mix is properly mixed? By the order you did it in rather than by looking at it. Combine the salt and mineral and any premix first, mix that thoroughly on its own, then fold it through the bran and cake until the colour is even all the way through. The ingredients used in the smallest amounts are the ones that end up unevenly spread, and they are the minerals, which is a real risk rather than a theoretical one on a hand mixed batch.

Will more concentrate always give more milk? No, twice over. Past a point the extra feed stops buying milk, and challenge feeding is how you find that point on your own farm: raise the allowance stepwise from calving and stop when an increase no longer pays. And the rumen itself sets a ceiling: past a certain share of the diet, fermentation suffers and digestion efficiency falls, so the curve turns down rather than levelling off.

Ingredient prices, bran availability and mineral stock all vary between districts and between one month and the next, so the sensible next step is local: ask your district veterinary or extension officer who is milling and selling good quality bran and cake in your area, get current quotes from more than one seller, and compare the crude protein on the labels rather than the price on the sacks.