Canola and Environment

Replacing soybean meal with canola meal improves productivity and efficiency in dairy cows. New research supports use of canola meal over soybean meal in dairy cow diets. Research teams at Broderick Nutrition and Research, the University of Nevada and the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that canola meal can replace soybean meal and improve the productivity of dairy cows. But Carson Callum, canola meal manager at the Canola Council of Canada tells me there is another benefit to canola: "They found that these canola meal fed cows, had improved nitrogen utilization. So they use that protein in a more efficient way than soybean meal and the improved nitrogen utilization allowed the cows to perform at a high capacity even when the diets were formulated for canola protein and this also resulted in less nitrogen excretion into the environment. Less urinary nitrogen and more goes into the milk."