Effects of nutritional management on lameness and production measures of Gorgan's commercial dairy farms

This study was carried out to evaluate the effects of some important effective nutritional management strategies on laminitis prevention and some production, reproduction and economical indexes. For this purpose, a questionnaire were distributed among 75 commercial dairy herd of Gorgan district to investigate dairy herd’s circumstances from view point of implementation of these nutritional strategies and important production, reproduction and economic indexes. Considered nutritional management strategies were: proper ratio of forage to concentrate, use and non-use of feeder, use of sodium bicarbonate as a buffer compound, use of biotin as effective vitamin to lameness prevention, use of mineral and vitamin additive in transition period, use of total mix ration to acidosis prevention, that assayed their effects on dependent or response variable that included average milk production, milk fat percent, losses percent, average days in milk, number of insemination per success fertility, average fertility, laminitis incidence rate and treatment costs, culling percent and milk decrease percent by applying a multivariate linear regression. The results indicated that effects of these management strategies on some production and reproduction factors were statistically significant. Correlation coefficients showed that there are significant association between mentioned management strategies and production, reproduction and economical indexes.