Farmer knowledge hub.

Never switch a herd or a flock in one morning. Rumen and gut flora take a few days to adjust, and an abrupt change shows up as loose dung, a dip in intake and, on a milking animal, a dip in the can.

Move over across five days: four parts old feed to one part new on day one, then 3:2, 2:3, 1:4, and full Arunodya on day five. Keep water in front of them the whole time.

A day-old chick cannot pick up a finisher pellet, so the first three weeks are on crumbs: Pre Starter for the first week, then Starter Crumbs to day 21. From day 22 the bird handles a pellet, and a pellet is where feed conversion improves — less sorting, less dust, less wastage under the feeder.

Whichever form, keep the feeder at back height and do not fill it to the brim. A feeder filled to the top is a feeder that spills a third of the bag.

Chick crumbs to six weeks, grower to sixteen, prelayer for the three weeks before the first egg, then Phase-I, II and III as the flock ages. The prelayer window is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that sets shell quality for the rest of the cycle.

The full schedule is on the layer feed page.

Work in two parts. Maintenance is roughly 0.4% of body weight in concentrate — about 1.6 kg for a 400 kg cow. On top of that, add roughly 400 g of concentrate per litre of milk for a cow and around 500 g per litre for a buffalo, because buffalo milk carries far more fat.

Then pick the grade to match: AF-15 up to about fifteen litres, AF-25, AF-35 and AF-45 as yield climbs. The feed plan calculator does the arithmetic for you.

Concentrate is on top of green and dry fodder, never instead of it.

The piglet is on the sow for the first two weeks. Dry feed starts in week three, at a few hundred grams a day, and climbs steadily to around 2.5 kg a day by the finishing weeks. Our published chart on the swine page gives the figure for every week, so a load can be ordered against the calendar.

Starter to week nine, Grower to week seventeen, Finisher to market.

Feed picks up moisture through a concrete floor and through an outside wall long before anything is visible. Stack on pallets or a raised wooden platform, leave a hand's width from the wall, and keep the stack no more than ten bags high so the bottom bags are not crushed.

Every bag is printed with its batch details. Feed the oldest stack first and keep stock moving — four to six weeks is a sensible ceiling in normal weather, less in a humid monsoon. Vitamins degrade quietly; the bag looks the same on the day it stops doing its job.

A loading hook tears the stitching and punctures the barrier, and from that point the bag takes on moisture whatever you do with it. Lift bags by the ends. It costs a few seconds a bag and saves the last few kilos of every one.

Check the roof before the rains, not during them. Keep the store ventilated but dry, sweep spilled feed the same day — it is what brings in rodents — and look at the bottom of the stack weekly. Caked or musty feed goes out, it does not get mixed into a fresh bag.

Feed intake follows water intake, not the other way round. A high-yielding cow may drink 80 to 100 litres a day in summer; a broiler shed drinks roughly twice what it eats. If intake drops, check the water line, the trough and the water temperature before you suspect the feed.

Almost always the changeover, not the feed. Go back a step in the five-day transition and hold there for two days. If it does not settle, or if animals go off feed entirely, that is a veterinary question and not a nutrition one — call your vet.

Mould grows in damp, warm, still air, and the toxins it leaves behind carry through into milk. Our cattle feed is aflatoxin controlled under the quality assurance programme, but a good bag stored badly is a bad bag. Never feed caked, musty or discoloured feed, and never to a milking animal or a young one.

Sudden mortality, coughing, lameness, a drop in egg production with no change in intake — these are health and management questions. Feed can support an animal, it cannot treat one. Ring your vet first, and ring us after, with the batch details off the bag if you want the lot checked.

Most feeding on most farms is done by the tin, and most tins have drifted. Weigh what your scoop actually holds, once, and write the number on the wall of the store. A ten percent error on a 200-bird shed is a bag a week.

Price per bag tells you very little on its own. What matters is rupees of feed per kilo of live weight, per litre of milk or per egg. A cheaper bag that takes an extra week to reach weight is the expensive one.

The feed plan calculator gives you the kilos for a full cycle, which is the number you divide by.

Date, bags in, animals fed, weight or litres out. One page per shed or per herd is enough to spot a problem in the week it starts rather than the month it ends. It is also the first thing we ask for if you think a lot is off.

Any formulation in the range can be sampled before you commit to a truck. Take the sample onto the farm you are actually running, on the animals you actually have, and judge it there. Ask us for one.