DAIRY GOAT RATIONS

The DAIRY GOAT program calculates the nutritional requirements of lactating and dry goats. Requirements are calculated according to the animal's weight, milk yield, condition score, rate of weight loss or gain, stage of lactation and/or pregnancy, the feeding system used, milk composition and predicted kid weight. Rations can be formulated by selecting from over 300 feeds with ration ingredients offered ad lib or in known quantities. Rations are assessed and compared to the animal's requirements for energy, fibre, protein, fat, starch, sugar and minerals with optional user defined requirements for the subsidiary ration analyses. Financial margins over all feeds, concentrates and purchased feeds are calculated on a per goat and per litre basis.

• Allows you to formulate rations to modern UK AFRC and French PDI standards without becoming involved in the complex mathematics.
• Can be run from within Windows NT, Windows98, Windows95 and Windows 3.1. Note that due to very low demand the goat program is still only available as a DOS program and will not run under Windows XP.
• User friendly, menu-driven design makes program easy to use for infrequent users. 'Command line' control allows changes to be make rapidly.
• Up to 360 feeds available to include in any ration, any one of which may be ad lib with up to 12 feeds in any one ration.
• Formulate rations specific to each farm's needs using farm-specific animal details, forage analyses, milk quality and payments.
• Ration and mix saving facility allows for later ration modifications with minimal effort.
• Tracks a wide range of trace elements comparing requirements with dietary supply after taking into account any trace element interactions.
• Integral make a mix facility allows you to formulate complete diets or pre-mixes from the animals formulated ration using up to 12 ingredients.

A set of support programs allow you to get the most from the package. The FEEDMAN utilities allow you to edit the feed file. Feeds can be added and removed from the database and moved and copied within the database. Sufficient analyses are stored to allow rations to be formulated to the latest AFRC and PDI recommendations and all entries can be altered as required. Feed costs can be updated as required and used to compare the relative values of feeds. The defaults alteration module allows you to alter the default animal descriptions, the use of 'flags' to highlight ration formulation problems and other program control features. Finally the ration file management module allows for the inspection, printing and deletion of saved rations.