Research Note
The Power of DMI Consistency
A decade ago, exploring how nutritionists can help dairy breeders improve feed efficiency, Michigan State’s Dr. Mike VandeHaar predicted: “Someday we will… be able to select cows against feed intake.”
We’re well into that future already — the most recent Net Merit index (2025) from the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding (CDCB) reflects the higher economic value of feed efficiency, measured as residual feed intake (RFI).
Helping to power this shift is ongoing genomics research at key land grant universities. The University of Wisconsin’s Dr. Francisco Peñagaricano points out that selective breeding remains the most powerful tool to improve dairy performance, including feed efficiency: “Genetic change is incremental, cumulative, and permanent.”
Selecting for dairy feed efficiency, Peñagaricano says, enables cows to produce the same milk with less feed on less land and with less methane emission.
Recent research suggests a strong correlation between feed efficiency, dry matter intake (DMI) consistency, and “resilience”. Resilience is the cow’s capacity to bounce back from stress-inducing conditions such as extreme weather, feeding and management irregularities, etc.
One major study involved DMI records of more than 6000 lactating Holstein cows over 15 years at half a dozen U.S. research stations, concluding that “DMI consistency is heritable and may be an indicator of resilience.”
“Cows with lower variation in the difference between actual and expected daily DMI (more consistency) may be more effective in maintaining performance in the face of challenges or perturbations, whereas cows with greater variation in observed versus expected daily DMI (less consistency) are less feed efficient and may be less resilient.”
Moreover, this study also suggested that genetic selection of cows with more consistent daily feed intakes (less day-to-day variation) will favor more consistency in milk yield. However, the producer is more likely to note patterns in DMI first, which makes DMI consistency a better indicator of resilience and potential feed efficiency.
Looking ahead, Peñagaricano notes opportunities in both breeding the cow and adjusting her rumen microbiota for lower methane production: “Methane emissions represent energy loss — up to 10% of the cow’s gross energy.”
Back in 2016, VandeHaar reminded us: “How we feed cows today might have an impact over the next year, but how we breed cows will have an impact for generations.”
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