P2e: Calf husbandry

The early life performance of a calves on dairy farms is strongly associated with lifetime productivity in the herd. Calves reared on dairy farms may include both female calves for replacements and non-replacement calves reared for dairy beef or other markets.

Improving calf care reduces antimicrobial use, lowers mortality rate, improves dairy business profitability and helps maintain social licence.

There are two elements to the project:

•  Automated calf rearing.
• Rearing Holstein steers for dairy beef.

Research Approach

The aim of this research was to determine the factors affecting calf growth and if there’s an opportunity to intervene to improve lifetime performance.

This research was ‘farmer-led’ in that the project arose from the farmer’s observation of a relatively large, unexplained variability in the size of calves at weaning. Despite uniform management and adherence to best practice standards, there was concern that calves with problems were not always identified early enough for intervention or prevention of issues. The impact of this variability on lifetime productivity and profitability was not known.

Real-farm data underpinned the three studies in this research. On-farm records and the automatic feeders provided a rich data set including birth dates, weights at various ages, health indicators and feed intake.

The first and second study followed a cohort of 1,440 calves on reared automatic feeders.

The third study involved modelling, drawing upon a dataset of more than 14,000 calves.