Guide to weaning and housing

WEANING can be a very stressful time for calves, and it is important that the level of stress involved is reduced down to a minimum.

Stress has a negative effect on the immune system; therefore, the calves can be more susceptible to diseases such as pneumonia or bovine respiratory disease.

Creep should also be introduced before weaning as it can help smooth the transition and is an extra source of nutrition once cows have been separated.

Given the wet autumn that we are after having, a lot of calves will have been offered some creep earlier this year as grass alone may not have been enough to keep calves thriving or cows may have been restricted to poorer quality grass or rough grazing.

Therefore calves may be used to consume creep before weaning time.

In any case, by now all spring-born calves should be weaned, and the next question is what should they be consuming indoors to ensure that they keep meeting the required weight targets for next spring and summer.

The other question is what market are you going to be targeting with these weanlings?

This will have an impact on their diet after weaning and going through the winter period.

If you are doing out a budget, you probably should be targeting a 120-to-150-day period for feeding.

The minimum target of a weanling diet is to achieve 0.5kg liveweight per day over the housing period and, realistically, the average daily gain per day should be double this at 1kg per day in order to achieve a margin over the winter period. If weanlings are gaining any less than 0.5kg per day, it will lead to a stunting effect on the animals, mainly due to their minimum requirements for protein, which is essential for growth and development, as well as the weight targets to improve their marketability not being achieved.

Good-quality continental weanlings should be gaining at least 1kg per day indoors.

If you are keeping your own replacement heifers, these heifers should be weighted now, separated from the rest and kept on a high plain of nutrition to ensure that they are heavy enough for their first breeding season.

Whether this is an autumn or a spring system is your choice, but being underweight at breeding should not be the determining factor to leave a heifer slip from spring to autumn breeding. Look at your ICBF euro star reports to select heifers based on their star ratings. These reports are an excellent guide to a heifers future breeding potential.

Obviously these reports are still only a guide and you have to be happy with the heifers on the ground also. So by combining a visual assessment along with star ratings and average daily weight gain reports, you should have enough information to make your choice on which heifers to keep.

Silage quality is the key determinant on the level of meal feeding required.

Where silage quality is good i.e. highly digestible silage with a good protein level, 1-to-2kg concentrates will be adequate for achieving moderate growth rates of 0.5-0.7kg per day over the winter.

Average quality silage is significantly less digestible than this, which leads to a high level of compensatory meal feeding to achieve the same dietary targets. The reality, to put it simply, is that a drop of five per cent in silage DMD can mean an increase of 1-1.5kgs of concentrate per head/day to achieve the same live weight gain.

It is very important, therefore, to test your silage.

We cannot change the quality of it once it is in the pit or bales, but we can plan what we need to feed in addition to it to compensate if the quality is low.

In contrast to this, where silage quality is good, there can be significant cost savings as you can afford to feed less concentrate to achieve the same targets, and you can also determine which animals get what silage as a dry cow’s dietary requirements will be less than that of a young, growing animal.