What kind of hay to feed young calves?

[Ben H]

I forgot to mention that accelerated growth needs to have the term lean tissue growth attatched to it. If you're protein/energy balance isn't correct then you get fat animals. Too much fat gets deposited in the mammary reducing yields when the lactation starts. Research focuses on how much weight you can put on heifers early on without reducing milk yields and get them in lactation sooner. We're talking like 18-20 months. In an accelerated program the answer is NOT more milk replacer, it's specially formulated milk replacer with more protein. Seeing scours with too much is expected. What your seeing is homeostasis. lets say you pour salt into a bucket of water, that salt is going to distribute evenly through the bucket. If you feed too much milk replacer it tries to balance itself in the gut and literally sucks the moisture right out of the body, that's what they call nutritional scours, totally unreltated to bacterial or viral, also much easier to fix.

Here is a link to VanAmburgh's profile
http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/faculty/vanamb.html

Here is a link to an article by VanAmburgh and Jeff Tiffofsky on what accelerated growth is all about


http://www.wcds.afns.ualberta.ca/Proceedings/2001/Chapter 07 Van Amburgh LR.pdf

 

[CattleRMe]

We feed 4 pints of mixed milk replacer at a feeding. Like I said check into consolidated nutritions we have been very pleased with the results. From the time we start them calf pellets are offered to them in a pan. We also always have hay in front of them free choice. Plus some alfalfa out to them from day one.

We also have a salt block out for them to mess with.

We basically figure one bag of milk replacer per calf. Feed them around six weeks. Once weened they get calf pellets free choice in a creep feeder. They also are turned out onto a small meadow and graze.

The local consolidated feed man suggested we use a calf grower pellet on them at 7 bucks a bag but due to wanting a larger profit we stuck with coops calf creep feed with two bags being for around 9 dollars. The calves look great I don't know if the difference in cost could have made that big of difference in how the calves looked but would in the profit.