Inside the rumen: Phages, feed and future dairy nutrition

Want to see how tiny viruses could reshape dairy nutrition? We sit down with Dr. Hugo Monteiro of the University of California-Davis to explore the unseen forces inside the rumen and how they tie directly to feed efficiency, milk production, and methane reduction. His work connects residual feed intake (RFI), microbial ecology, and host genetics into a framework that makes efficiency measurable and actionable.

We start by clarifying why RFI outperforms traditional metrics: it isolates true biological efficiency independent of milk yield and body condition. From there, we dive into the rumen as a dynamic battlefield where...