What is holding back improvements in youngstock management?

An exclusive Farmers Weekly survey has revealed that poor farmer to vet engagement and monitoring could be preventing beef and dairy farms from lowering disease and improving performance in calf rearing.

Some 90% of farmers, who responded to the survey, said that they wanted to make changes to improve the future sustainability of their youngstock management in the next year.

Farmers Weekly questioned 739 dairy farmers, suckler producers and beef rearers to find out the biggest challenges affecting their calf management – and how they would like to improve it.

The survey revealed that priorities for making progress varied depending on the type of farmer, with most people wanting to lower disease and improve growth rates.

Yet only 33% of farmers said that they had a routine disease prevention plan in place with their vet.

Furthermore, only 23% of farms were weighing calves to track performance and 7% said they did not plan to make improvements to youngstock management.

Among the latter group of farmers, the leading reasons were that it was too expensive to make changes, prices for milk and beef were too volatile or low, and there were no incentives from beef buyers.

Animal health

The biggest cause of mortality in calves was pneumonia across all groups of farmers.

It was even more prevalent on farms with more animals: 68% of beef rearers with 100-plus animals said it was their leading cause of death.

The joint second highest causes of mortality on dairy farms were born dead on arrival (DOA) and calf scour. By contrast, DOA was much higher on suckler farms.

Unsurprisingly, 75% of respondents were using antibiotics to treat pneumonia, and most likely to be vaccinating against pneumonia, followed by bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD).

Larger beef rearers were more likely to be vaccinating against pneumonia. In fact, the penetration rate of vaccination among beef rearers with more than 100 animals rose to 74%, compared to 57% among rearers with fewer than 99 animals.

Dairy farmers were most likely to have a routine disease prevention plan, followed by beef rearers; suckler farmers were least likely to have one.

Monitoring and measuring

Both 44% of beef rearers and dairy farmers admitted to never weighing animals, despite growth rates being highlighted as a key improvement they would like to make.

Of those weighing, 33% of beef rearers and dairy farmers said they were not using the data to inform management decisions.

In contrast, 49% of beef rearers and dairy farmers, who did weigh, said they were using that information to build trends and a further 52% were moving smaller calves to allow them more time to catch up on growth rates.

When it came to recording KPIs, more than 33% of farmers were still using paper records.

Dairy farmers and larger herds were most likely to be using a software program and suckler farmers were least likely.

Dairy genetics

Most dairy farmers were using AI bulls (84%). When selecting bulls, dairy farmers ranked health and fertility as their number one priority (72%), closely followed by calving ease (63%) milk production (62%).

Only 25% of dairy farms were working with their beef buyer to select suitable bulls, with most dairy farmers using mating reports from their semen provider to make sustainable mating decisions.

Calf nutrition

Most dairy farmers were measuring colostrum quality using a refractometer (47%) or colostrometer (15%), and more than 50% fed 2-4 litres of colostrum within the first three hours of life.

About 66% of beef rearers and dairy farmers were feeding six litres of milk daily with a broad range of whole milk, skimmed and whey milk powder being fed.

In comparison, 25% of dairy farmers and 10% of beef rearers were feeding 8 litres of milk daily and 5% of dairy farmers and 7% of beef rearers were feeding more than 9 litres.

Dairy farmers said it costs £1,320 on average to rear a heifer to calving. Whereas suckler and beef farmers estimated it cost £1.90 and £1.50 a day, respectively, to rear an animal to 120kg.

Meanwhile, 28% of beef rearers and 34% of suckler farmers were not sure of their youngstock feed costs.

Reaction

Commenting on the Farmers Weekly survey, vet Katie Fitzgerald from Bishopton Vets, said that vet and farmer engagement was key to delivering change.

“If you want to make meaningful progress, you need to set goals and have a dialogue with your vet that happens regularly, because things change over time.”

Recognising the value of weighing stock and monitoring performance play vital roles in making progress, she added.

“Weighing is one of a few really key ways of assessing that calf performance is on track. But it is a job that requires you to invest your time and [money] in weighing infrastructure.”

She said many farmers might be reluctant to weigh in case the stress of handling caused a growth check, but combining it alongside other jobs could negate this.

Katie pointed out that farmers should also capitalise on government productivity grants to help fund weighing equipment. “Monitoring is the cornerstone of measuring, managing and assessing the impact of the changes you are making.”

Katie said it was encouraging to see that information about the importance of early life nutrition and colostrum had penetrated through to farmers.

However, she said clearly more needed to be done to prevent difficult calvings, which can have a detrimental impact on dam fertility and performance.

“Having to help with a pull [at calving] can knock milk production by 200 litres [in your next lactation]. Cows assisted at calving are also more like to have uterine diseases.

“Farmers should select bulls that produce low birthweight, high growth rate calves. As an industry, it is important we demonstrate sustainability and having dead calves at birth is a huge waste.”