Some Udder Thoughts: Another bite of niacin.

Introduction.

Any March Madness fans out there? I hope so! As a proud South Dakota State University alum, I’m looking forward to cheering on our women’s basketball team again this year. Go Jackrabbits! Wishing good luck to all the student-athletes competing—but sending a little extra luck to my fellow Jacks!

What’s new in dairy science?

You’ve heard a bit about niacin already through this blog, and I am going to share a bit more because the story has clarified further. Recently, I was part of a collaboration with @Mutian Niu and @Usman Arshad to investigate niacin for dairy cattle—both protected and non-protected forms. We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate how both rumen-protected and non-protected niacin affect milk production from lactating dairy cattle.

Within both rumen-protected and non-protected niacin groups, the data was split between experiments that fed niacin both pre- and postpartum and experiments that fed it in the postpartum period only. For this brief article, I am going to focus on the results of rumen-protected niacin.

During the transition period, supplementing rumen-protected niacin did not affect feed intake, milk yield, or energy-corrected milk yield. However, when rumen-protected niacin was fed during lactation, the responses were different. Feeding rumen-protected niacin increased feed intake and milk yield and tended to increase energy-corrected milk yield.

Read more about the results here: https://doi.org/10.3168/jds.2024-25902

Leadership, growth, and development.

In my opinion, one of the most undervalued skills—and one we need to discuss more often—is reliability. I listen to and read many leadership experts; they’re always talking about big-picture things like vision, courage, and influence. But I think they spend too little time talking about everyday skills we all should build, like being reliable!

Sit back and reflect—how often do you casually offer up something in a conversation like, “I’ll send you that in an email” or “I’ll check in on that and get back to you”? Now, here’s the next question: how often do you actually follow up on these statements? When you follow up on these small commitments, you quickly build trust and influence within your teams and organizations. If you efficiently and effectively follow through on these small promises, it signals that you take your comments and commitments seriously—and that the other person is valuable to you as well.

There’s a saying that “The way you do anything is the way you do everything.” Being reliable in the small things demonstrates that you’ll be just as reliable when it comes to the big things. So next time you make an offer, make sure you do what you said you would do!

Final Thoughts.

Niacin might be an opportunity worth exploring for your dairy farm or your clients. The data is promising, and I encourage you to dig deeper!