The key to rearing healthy beef calves

The first three months of a calf’s life are critical. The growth rate achieved in this period will affect the lifetime performance of the animal. Optimising nutrition and minimising morbidity is essential to ensure the calf has the best possible chance of achieving its full genetic potential for growth and feed conversion efficiency.

Calf-rearing systems need to recognise that early life events have long term effects on the performance of the calf and capitalise on them.

Set targets for your calf rearing enterprise

Buying or rearing calves, whether to sell on again or as part of your beef enterprise leaves tight margins. Objectives must be set for the enterprise and protocols should be designed to ensure the objectives are achieved.

The critical targets for rearing dairy beef calves up to 15 weeks of age are as follows:
Minimal mortality:
Target per cent per cent mortality with a maximum of five per cent.
Minimal morbidity:
If the calf suffers setbacks from poor health, feed intake and average daily gain will be affected. Low morbidity will also minimise treatment and medication costs per calf.
Optimal daily liveweight gain:
Calves should average 700 – 800 grams / day up to 15 weeks

Source of the calf

Most beef enterprises depend on the calf being purchased rather than the calf being born on the farm. If possible calves should be purchased where background information including disease status, colostrum supply, and feeding regime prior to purchase are available. This information will be beneficial to help ensure calves are of optimum health at the time of purchase. Calves should preferably be purchased from farms which have control programmes in place against economically important diseases such as calf scours, BVD, and IBR.

Purchased calves should be inspected thoroughly, and calves that are dull or listless, show signs of diarrhoea or have discharges from the eyes, nose or mouth should be rejected. Calves should be lively, have a shining coat, bright eyes and a clean moist nose. Consistent batches of calves purchased from the one source is the ideal as mixing calves from various sources

Calves should not be moved from the farm of origin until at least seven days of age and preferably not until they are three to four weeks of age as this will reduce the high risk of scours and stress in the young calf aged less than three weeks.

Purchased calves should be isolated from resident calves for one week to allow them to be monitored for any disease problems and ensure they do not carry or spread infection to the remainder of the herd.

Calves being purchased which have not had the absolute minimum amount of good quality colostrum (three litres within two hours of birth from the first milking) are going to be potential disease risks on farm. Good quality colostrum not only helps to protect the young calf against disease but it also has a major effect on the development of the intestinal tract leading to improved intake, growth and long term performance.

A good relationship between the purchaser and provider will be beneficial, since knowledge of the source, disease status and colostrum status of purchased calves is vital.

Feeding the calf

Due to cost, availability and ease of management, milk replacer will be the choice of the majority of calf rearers, focused on beef from the dairy herd. The quality and quantity of proteins in the powder is vital – it should have a minimum of 20 per cent protein and preferably 23 per cent to support good frame growth. Protein concentration below 20 per cent will reduce live weight gain and will impact on the compaction of weight gain. Protein quality can be an issue, particularly in the first month of life so it is important that the milk replacer used has sufficient (contains mainly) milk derived proteins during this period.

Fat levels should be 18- 20 per cent with sufficient minerals and vitamins. Fat levels of 18 – 20 per cent will encourage early intake of concentrate ration.

Traditionally, economics drove the feeding rates with a target of 1.25 / 1.5 bags of calf milk replacer targeting 6 – 8 weeks old at weaning. Research now shows that achieving the targeted gain of 700/800 Grams and 120 kgs at 15 weeks is the key. The total amount of milk solids fed / day, as opposed to the milk volume is the key. To achieve 700/800 grams / day of growth, the calf will need to consume 650 to 700 grams of good quality milk powder / day. The amount to feed will however depend on the number of days on farm, calf entry weight, dry feed intake, and the target growth rate and exit weight.

Feeding systems

Provided calf health, husbandry and housing are correct calves can be successfully fed using a variety of systems, including cold ad libitum, warm ad libitum, bucket fed once or twice a day and computerised feeding systems.

The system used must be suitable for the labour and housing available, and irrespective of the feeding system, it is important to ensure that the energy and protein content supplied/calf/day is enough to support the target growth rate. Calves need to be fed twice a day with milk for at least the first four weeks of life to satisfy their nutritional needs. But by four weeks of age, the calf starts to eat increasing amounts of solid food, and will be able to start digesting it.

If the calf is consuming adequate dry feed at four weeks of age, the amount of milk offered can be reduced to encourage solid feed intake. Feeding twice a day for at least the first four weeks of life also allows the rearer to check drinking speed, volumes consumed and general demeanour of the calves.