In this demonstration, we’re going to make a homemade calf milk replacer using base ingredients. I’ll begin by going to the ‘manage feed option’ in the main menu, and selecting ‘ make a blend’. You can also use ctrl + B as a shortcut. Now I’ll arrange the window to make it a bit easier to manage, changing the width of the columns by dragging the column edges. And we’ll get rid of some of the unnecessary nutrients that are not really important to us. The category I’ll be using is calf liquids, so I’m going to go ahead and change each of the inputs, each of the feed ingredients to calf liquids to make it a bit easier to manage. Now I have access to some very cheap dried skim milk and so I’m going to find skim milk powder and go ahead and make that my first entry. You’ll notice that cost is not a normal category that’s shown as part of the feed blend, but I can right click and then show the drop down list for all the nutrients available, if I right click on that again. I’ll alphabetize this and I should be able to Scroll down and find the cost shown here. OK, so here’s my cost and I can make changes to any of the nutrients that are that are in the library, and change the cost as well. Now I’m going to find some dried whey, and scroll down and find driveway. Some fat source. In this case I’m going to use the 7/60 dried fat powder, and I also want to look at using some soy protein concentrate, and we’ll add some wheat gluten as another ingredient. And I need to change the category to liquids and then I can Scroll down and find this ingredient, wheat gluten. Then I will use a simple calf CMR premix.

OK, so here are the base ingredients that I’ll use to create my own CMR mix. Note that the feed blend does not do any type of least cost formulation, so this is a completely manual process. So I will begin by making some basic assumptions about the inclusion rates that I need to use to enter the various components. OK so here I have, I’m now at 105% so I’ll need to reduce one of these so I look I see that I’m 25% protein, 19% fat and 7% ash. So I think I can reduce the amount of 7/60 dried fat to create a 26/17 on a dry matter basis; so that would be about a 24/16 or 25/16 on an air dry basis. So here we are at 100%. I can manipulate the various inclusion rates. I can increase the amount of weeds and decrease the amount of soya to create various different compositions, different costs, etcetera. And again, this is a manual process since the program doesn’t do any type of least cost formulation. Once we’re finished, I am going to change the category to calf liquids, and then give this a unique name. So I’m going to call this: home, CMR, soy and wheat. There.

So now that I have the composition, I have the inclusion rates. I have a unique name and category click OK and the blend is successfully saved. Now if I go to the liquid feeding program, I can add another feed and I should find my home blend CMR soy wheat, there in the ingredient library.

So here we are. We have the composition in and we can use this in now in our feeding program. Well, that will do it for this video. Feel free to visit other parts of the GPS knowledge base to learn more about using the program.