Designing Your Perfect Feed Center

Profile Picture of Post's Author Chaiden Duitscher | Posted July 31, 2023

“So what’s the perfect feed-center?” This is the question I have gotten all summer long as I introduce my project to the farms I have visited during my internship with GPS Dairy Consulting, LLC. As I attempted to answer that question this summer, it has become increasingly obvious that there is no answer to the question! Like so many other parts of a dairy farm, we can’t give you a perfect cookie-cutter design because each farm is unique in its goals and circumstances. What we can do is provide options and resources to determine what is right for your operation.

The first step in improving feed centers is to evaluate what we have and what opportunities exist to help improve efficiency. Many GPS herds have already evaluated this through some sort of audit to identify opportunities around clean feed, shrink or feed lean. Having an open discussion and self-evaluation with your farm and consulting team can help you determine where your biggest opportunities lie.

Knowing opportunities then allows us to set goals for how to improve. Maybe that involves putting up and maintaining higher quality forages by increasing the amount of storage we have to better handle forages. It might be a combination of reducing shrink and making better use of the time and resources we have to feed by making modifications to our commodity storage. A good feed center should be built with not one, but all of these things in mind to make the most of your investment so that we build with more in mind than just having something new. Exact goals will vary from farm to farm, but having direction is an important step to make sure we are thinking about how changes are turning our feed center into a profit center.

Finally, we need to consider the options and determine how to execute. While a multimillion-dollar feed center likely solves a lot of problems and may very well be the right thing for some operations, that’s not going to be the right choice for everyone. Looking to our neighbors and their feeding setups can be a great resource but can lack breadth and fail to capture all the options available.

GPS’s goal with the Feed Center Design Module of FeedFIT ® is to give our client base resources to maximize the potential of their improvements related to the feed center, whether as simple as building a new whey distribution bar or designing an entirely new facility. I have worked on this throughout the summer by compiling photos, specifications and producer feedback of feed center components from farms of various backgrounds. We are working to put them into an exclusive online library of resources for GPS clients to use. It is our hope this can be a valuable tool for many of your operations going forward and that this will help you build your “perfect” feed center.

It’s been great to meet and interact with so many of you this summer and I want to say thank you to all of the producers and consultants that have been so helpful in working on this project!

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