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Dr. Joe shared what he learned from his colleagues at the 2022 MN Nutrition Conference about dairyxbeef calf health. Big shout out to Dr. Max Thornsberry and Dale Woerner. Thank you for listening.
Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.
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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. This is your host, Dr. Joe Armstrong. This week, just like last week, it's just me, and I apologize for that, but between sick kids and Bradley being the chair of the search committee for a new dairy faculty member, Emily, just being her normal absolute boss, self traveling around the state and teaching everyone about farm safety, mental health, it's tough to get together. Last week, I was on my way to the Minnesota Nutrition Conference. Really what I want to talk about today is some of the things that I learned at that conference from some of my colleagues that also spoke there.
My house right now is absolute chaos. We've got a three-week-old at home who's doing well, mom's doing well but we're running on little sleep. We also have a two-year-old at home who is sick right now, staying home from daycare. As it stands right now, I am in the shop amongst the tools set up at the workbench, just trying to find a little tiny piece of quiet for 10 or 15 minutes while we can talk in The Moos Room. One of the big topics that was talked about at the nutrition conference was dairy beef cross calves.
As we know, we jumped into that game without really having a super great idea of what would happen with those animals and how they were going to perform at the pack, or how we were going to take care of them, how to feed them, what was different, what was the same, all those things. How do we treat those calves? Are they the same as a dairy animal? Are they same as a beef animal? Are they somewhere in between? It was a big topic, and I think there's a lot to get into on the nutrition side.
There's a lot of things we could talk about from the processing side of things as well, but today, I want to focus on health and management of these calves. One of the talks that was given was by Dr. Max Thornsberry, who's with Milk Specialties Global, works with these calves every day, has a tremendous amount of knowledge. Big shout out to him. I want to go over his talk today and what some of the things I picked out from his lecture about how do we take care of these dairy beef cross calves, especially once they hit a feedlot setting.
Before I get into the notes I have from the conference, one of the things that we should talk about briefly is what are we doing with these calves before they hit a feedlot setting, before they're weaned? How do we take care of them? How do we feed them? What do we do with them? Really, what it comes down to is that you treat them exactly like you would a Holstein calf with colostrum especially, getting them started right. All the things that we've gone over on this podcast before, there are tons of episodes that we've covered, how to take care of that whole scene calf that still on milk, and all of that applies to this dairy-beef cross animal.
They are the same, preweaning. We're going to talk about post-weaning and at the feedlot here in a second, but I encourage you to go back and listen to some of those episodes. Find the episodes that apply to a Holstein calf, and you can take those and translate them directly to this dairy-beef cross animal, especially when we're talking about colostrum, the amount fed, getting them started with a starter pellet or a starter feed right away, water availability space, all those things. Cleanliness, especially, when we're talking to the disease side, it all applies.
I encourage you to go find those episodes that we've recorded and get on that because that is exactly the same. All right, moving on. We're talking about dairy beef cross calves in the feedlot. What do we need to know? Well, one of the big things, and I really like this conversation because it applies to what we were just talking about with calves preweaning, is that we always have to remember that these calves are half dairy. Dr. Thornsberry was really, really adamant about talking about this.
When we feed these calves, when we look at how they're raised prior to us getting them in the feedlot, we really need to be treating them like we're feeding a Holstein calf. When we talk about feeding Holstein calves, the biggest influence on health and how they do in our feedlot is stress. We need to minimize stress as much as possible. Of course, we want to do that with colored cattle as well. It just becomes even more important as we talk about a dairy cross calf.
When we talk about stress and the things that influence stress, especially with Holsteins and dairy-beef cross calves, one of the things that appears to be very different from our colored cattle is pen size and group size. Of course, all the space requirements that we've talked about before apply. I think you need to have at least 40 square feet per animal when you're raising dairy calves or dairy cross calves. I think that applies here as well, but the actual size of the group also matters.
Dumping these dairy cross beef calves into a giant pen with 120 or 140 animals in it seems to not work well at all. If the only change you make is to just take that same size pen and break it into smaller groups, we see much better results when it comes to morbidity, mortality, and performance. Now, here's where we get into what is ideal pen size and what is practical pen size. Ideal pen size and this is not a ton of research behind this, but a lot of people in the field that have worked on this, telling me what the ideal pen size is, including Dr. Thornsberry, an ideal pen size is probably six, six calves in one pen.
Now, how practical is that in the real-world setting where space is limited, gates are expensive, all of those kind of things. Water, bunk space, trying to break that up. It gets expensive quick. Six is ideal, but is it practical? I don't think so. I think what's much more practical, especially in the immediate postweaning period and until those calves are really up on feed and looking good is in that 10 to 12 range, possibly 15 but I don't know if I would get much higher than that if you really, really, really want to be successful, especially with you got calves coming in under 300 pounds.
That seems to work really well still as long as you've got your other management things straight in the feedlot but if you get much higher than that, bigger group sizes, they just don't handle the stress of the social dynamics of a giant group the same as some of our colored cattle do. For me, pen size is a big factor in how these cattle do. Six being ideal, if you've got the means to do that, by all means, go for it. I think 10 to 15 is more practical and still plenty doable when we're starting these calves out.
Now, eventually, I think it is possible to get them into bigger groups as they're up on feed, much better, bunk broke, all these other things that we worry about but I still wouldn't get into giant group sizes. I really like the idea, especially with Holsteins and dairy cross beef calves of having pot-load-sized pens. If you can get enough calves at the same time and they're all looking very uniform and you can feed them well enough with enough bunk space, water space, all those things, a pot load pen size is a really good number for Holsteins and these dairy cross beef calves.
A pot load pen size would be somewhere between 30 and 35 head. I think that's really, really doable and can get you in the right number while controlling morbidity and mortality and maximizing the efficiency of your feedlot when it comes to having to put waters in and bunk space and dividing and gates and all of that kind of thing, because that can get expensive quick. I am totally aware of that, but I think that is the right number in my opinion, is to be in that pot-load size pen. Then you can clear out that whole pen at once, kind of an all-in, all-out on that pen, which can have some benefits for biosecurity as well.
Now, one of the other things that Dr. Thornsberry stressed, and he stressed this over and over and over again was proper ventilation. It's really, really difficult to keep morbidity and mortality low if you lock everything up tight and you don't have proper airflow around these calves. That leads to just another factor of the stress gain. More airflow is better with calves that are under 300 pounds or in that lighter weight. We still need a bunch of air movement around them. The more air movement we have, the less chance we have of having all these other pathogens build up in that airspace and/or other things that decrease the ability of the cattle's immune system to fight off an infection, like buildup of ammonia in the air or things like that that can damage our initial defenses that cattle have against diseases.
When it comes to health and managing stress and all these other things, on the nutrition side, I don't want to get into it too much. Basically, you're going to treat these calves exactly like you would a Holstein feeder and that is the best way to feed them. If you do everything the best of your ability, you can control stress, you have proper ventilation, you're working with these calves and treating them just like a Holstein, all things equal, these calves tend to have better health under 300 pounds. They tend to have better feed conversion over a thousand pounds. It seems to be that we see some of that hybrid vigor coming through for us if everything else is equal across the board.
If everything's equal across the board, we tend to see a little less disease. The diseases are the same though. There's no difference in the diseases we see. It's exactly like we see in Holsteins and other cattle in the feedlot. It just tends to be that we have a little less disease incidents compared to that Holstein calf in these dairy cross beef calves. If everything's equal across the board and you're feeding them well, you're treating them like a Holstein, I think it's very reasonable to see 80 to 90% choice in a closeout and 10% prime.
There's a lot of value in these calves. You're going to see some yield grade fives in that, just because they're still half Holstein. That's the way it works when we're going to get those numbers on the choice and the prime side. 3% to 5% death loss. I think is very manageable, but again, every group is different. Where they're coming from, how you source them, how they're treated before you get them is a huge factor in that, that's something that you need to be really careful where you're getting these calves and how they're treated and what kind of colostrum they had even before you see them, is going to impact how they perform in your feedlot.
When you're sourcing calves, I think one of the things you can do is really ask those questions and be knowledgeable on that side of how are calves raised and how should they be raised. You can look for those calves that are treated really, really well. What kind of classroom did they get? When did they get it? How much were they fed? Was it milk replacer? Was it whole milk? There's so many questions you can ask. Vaccine schedule as well. We've talked about before, there's a such thing as too many vaccines and that's just as bad as not vaccinating at all.
There's so many questions to ask to make sure that your calves coming into your feedlot have a really great chance of success. Then I think you can see that 3% to 5% death loss and really low treatment rates somewhere in the 10% to 15% for morbidity and treatment rates. Now, I think one of the other things that you should be looking for is horns and scars. If we're doing everything as best we can, the producers on the dairy side that are getting these cows pregnant with that dairy cross beef animal should be using a homozygous polled bull.
In my opinion, I think that's a good way to go. You don't have to worry about dehorning. You don't have to worry about missing one and having horns in the feedlot, which is an absolute disaster. Horns in a feedlot, especially when we're in a confined setting or a slap barn setting where we've got little less space, horns are an absolute disaster. You should be asking that question as well. Are you using a homozygous polled bowl? Simple question. The answer should be yes from your source.
Now, implants, again, you're seeing a theme here. When we talk about implants, when we talk about almost everything else we're saying, just treat them exactly like a Holstein. That is also true for implants. Somewhat complicated topic. It's definitely not a cookie-cutter topic and each group is different, each feedlot is different when we talk about implant schedule, but treat them like a Holstein. Use the TBA sparingly, got to be a step back from colored cattle on how aggressive we are to control riding in the pens and other things like that.
That's a question that you need to get the team together to answer your veterinarian and your nutritionist to talk about how are we going to implant these cattle. The key is to treat them exactly like a Holstein. The theme is, treat them exactly like a Holstein and you'll be successful. That goes for just about everything. One of the things that goes along with that, knowing that they're like a Holstein, is that we do deal with quite a high incidents of liver abscesses in these animals. That's nothing new when we talk about the Holstein side of things. That liver is super valuable for export. Condemning it brings down the value of our cattle.
We have a pretty good handle on the mechanism behind how a liver abscess develops. What we don't have a great handle on is why it's so different when we look at a dairy animal versus a beef animal. Lots of work going on to try to figure that out right now. Lots of work going on with non-antibiotic ways of trying to solve this problem. I don't know if you want my 2 cents on it or not, but I do think that this is a management issue most of the time, where we're looking at all the ways that would reduce stress and doing that as good as possible, managing nutrition in a way that we absolutely minimize acidosis as much as possible.
I do think there is a genetic component. That's not my idea. That's from talking to plenty of people that know much more about it than I do. There seems to be a genetic component just because of how big a difference we see between breeds when it comes to dairy versus our beef animals. It's just something you have to think about if you're going to raise dairy, cross beef animals or Holsteins, and you have to minimize stress and acidosis to cut down on the incidents of liver abscesses. There's products out there that can help you with that, [unintelligible 00:15:10] being one of them.
The absolute perfect scenario for creating liver abscesses in my mind is an overcrowded pen on a steer stuffer. A steer stuffer with too many cattle on it is the absolute perfect recipe for liver abscesses. That tells you, I guess, all you need to know, stress acidosis and you get liver abscesses. Minimizing those two things is the key besides also having adjunct medications that could help us reduce liver abscesses as well. Now, I want to end this conversation talking about something that I admittedly have not thought about enough and it's been brought up before, and I think we need to do a much better job of trying to figure out what we're going to do with these animals.
We're still producing half Holstein or half dairy cross beef calves that are heifers. There's a huge number of half beef, half dairy heifer calves that are produced. That's an animal that is really, really, really tough to market. Because of the lack of a margin on the back end with that animal, we have reduced the number of calves that have little value. Traditionally, we talk about that Jersey bull calf. That is our animal that we were trying to avoid producing, and we've done a good job of producing as few of those as possible, but we've now produced an animal with very, very similar issues.
That half dairy, half beef animal that's a heifer has very similar conversation around it as that Jersey bull calf. We need to be addressing what happens with these cattle. Same conversation in my mind is that Jersey bull calf. It's something that we need to be working on because those animals are going to continue to be produced. I'm hoping there's fewer and fewer and fewer of them, but it's still an issue that we need to be thinking about as an industry on what are the potential solutions for dealing with that animal.
All right. I think I've given you plenty to think about today. We're going to wrap it there. As always, if you have questions, comments, scathing rebuttals, they can go to themoosroom@umn.edu. Follow us on Twitter, @UMNmoosroom, @UMNFarmSafety. Follow Bradley on Instagram @umnwcrocdairy. Check out our website for more information, extension.umn.edu. I promise you won't have to listen to just me again next week. Thank you for listening. Have a great day. Bye.
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