Notes from under the bonnet — how Lukra models milk, energy and profit, and how we check it against the published science.
What Lukra is — and why it plans for profit, not just enough feed
Lukra is a profit-maximising feed-budget planner for pasture-based dairy. It plans the whole season at once, with real nutritional modelling and an explicit profit objective — not just matching intake to the feed wedge.
Checking Lukra against the textbook
We re-derived the milk a cow should make from her feed using two independent industry standards — NRC 2001 and NASEM 2021 — and compared them to what Lukra predicts. Across nine New Zealand scenarios spanning three breeds and both parities, Lukra lands within a few percent of one of the two standards in every run.
How much can she eat? The intake model behind every Lukra ration
Before a ration model can tell you what to feed a cow, it has to know how much she can physically get through in a day. Here is why Lukra predicts that with Zom's satiety-value system, how substitution rates fall out of it rather than being fed in, and how we corrected for the one thing the model deliberately leaves out — body weight.