Colleagues at the School of Sustainable Food and Farming have supported research to determine effects of precision feeding on the efficiency of feed utilisation and feed costs, environmental impacts of growing and finishing beef systems, and the cost-benefits associated with precision feeding.
Overall findings indicated an oversupply of protein within traditional UK beef cattle diets; in this study, protein oversupply ranged from 140% to 176%. Reducing protein inclusion to be more inline with animal requirements resulted in a maintained animal performance, with a reduction in diet cost (in this study, cost decreased by £0.20 / kg average daily weight gain) and a reduction in the emissions intensity of feed provisions of an average of 11.1%.
A summary of the research, and how it can be used by industry, can be found here, with the full research report available here.