In this demonstration, we’re going to use the feed blend window to create a milk extender. We’re going to add milk replacer and water to whole milk to extend the amount of material we have available. I’ll begin by going to the ‘manage feeds’ menu option on the main menu, and select ‘make a blend’.

From here, I can arrange the window to make it a little easier to see and we’ll begin this way and get rid of a few of these things I don’t really need by left clicking on the column header. And now I’m going to change the categories to calf liquid, since that’s what we’ll be working with exclusively in this example. So, there I have my calf liquids. Now I’ll begin by scrolling down and finding whole milk, which will be our base for this milk blend. Next, I’ll add some water. I want to keep the dry matter relatively constant at about 13%, and then I will add some calf milk replacer, use a basic 20/20 to begin, so these would be my three ingredients. I don’t need the extra colostrum, so I’ll move up here and remove that, to have only the three ingredients that we need. Now I can make adjustments to the nutrient composition as I need. So for example, my dry matter after milk is a little higher and I have about 4% fat on a dry basis. So I’ll use my calculator by right clicking on the column header and say 4% divided by my dry matter to get 13%.

That’s actually 30.77 so I can paste that into the cell. So now we’re ready with the nutrients. Now I need to determine the grams fed. So I can do this in a ratio method or I can just use my regular feeding, so I know I want to feed about 250 grams. In about a total of 1 liter of water. So now I have 4 liters of milk, 750 milliliters of water, and 250 mils of half milk replacer. It this gives me a total of 5 liters that is going to be at about 15%. The protein level will be about 21% and the fat level about 25%. But I can make changes to these as I wish to make the composition a little bit different. And I could also increase the volume of any of them to produce the amount of feed that I want to produce during the day. Once I have the composition. I can look at any of the nutrients, I can extend the number of nutrients available here to look at, look at different parameters. I don’t need to look at ADF or NDF or starch or ligaments since none of those would be in a liquid feed. But then I can also look at the amino acids, vitamins and minerals etc. Once I’ve finished, then it’s time for me to change the category and the name of the plan that I’m going to create.

So, this is naturally a calf liquid, and I’m going to make this blend called the milk extend. Milk extender 6 liter since that’s the volume that I want to create. So once I enter the name and the category I have my composition. Click OK and the blends will now be saved to the feed library. So now I can go to my milk feeding program, and, If I choose I can use this feed blend.

By going to the feed library and usually these values will now be in the food library, there’s my milk extender 6L, and here’s the composition. And now I’m ready to go. 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.