Sciantec launches new grass silage analytical service for livestock farmers in Northern Ireland

Sciantec has launched a new grass silage analytical service exclusively for livestock farmers in Northern Ireland. This service presents grass silage results and interpretation based on the AFBI advisory system, giving farmers the necessary insight to adjust livestock nutrition effectively for optimal productivity.

‘By providing customer-specific interpretation based on AFBI’s advisory system, we are helping farmers in Northern Ireland make more informed decisions around livestock nutrition,’ says Mike Whitfield, Business Development Manager at Sciantec. ‘For example, if you’re a dairy farmer, your results are used to calculate the silage and feed required for optimal production—in this case, milk yield. Not only will this help these farmers ensure peak animal productivity, but the knowledge will also save them money and reduce the incidences of nutrition-related diseases.’

Sciantec has recently invested in new NIR instrumentation for quality forage and silage analysis. This state-of-the-art equipment has an updated configured sample interface and a wider wavelength range, enabling scanning of a greater area and better reproducibility over non-homogenous samples such as silage.

‘Our nutritional results are available within 24 hours, with individual result reports for each sample,’ continued Mike. ‘This fast turnaround enables our customers to utilise results as soon as possible to help adjust rations and take variability of nutritional quality within a clamp into account. We also provide our silage analysis kit free of charge as part of our package. This fast and easy service is very important for our customers, who often require rapid turnaround of results to help them diagnose problems on-farm, such as a reduction in milk output, so they can adjust rations accordingly.’

This new service with additional interpretation is suitable exclusively for grass silage. Sciantec also offers a variety of other forage and silage testing services, including fresh grass, maize silage, whole crop, alkalage, lucerne silage, hay, haylage, and crimped cereals. These analytical packages help customers determine the nutritional quality of forage and silage to allow herd nutrition, crop nutrition, and fertiliser programmes to be tailored for improved animal welfare, productivity, and profitability.

‘This investment in new analyses and state-of-the-art instrumentation is part of our commitment at Cawood Agriculture to continuously improve our services for our customers,’ said Sean Stevenson, Commercial Director of Cawood Agriculture. ‘The team has worked very hard to develop these improvements, continuing to cement Sciantec as one of the UK’s largest providers of specialist forage and animal feed analysis.’

For more information, contact us today.