Advantage Beef Programme
Speaking to Agriland at the UCD dairy calf education and research facility located at UCD Lyons Farm, Co. Kildare, Prof. Alan Kelly explained how early life weight gain is associated with overall dairy-beef animal performance.
He said: "Ultimately, what we're trying to do in terms of the of the dairy-beef scenario, we're trying to set up that animal from an early life point of view, to maximise early life performance, particularly for the first six months of the animal's life."
He said it is important to ensure the calf is on or beyond target during the initial phase of the animal's life.
"What we are looking for is a calf leaving this facility here somewhere in the order maybe 150-180kg at 16-17 weeks-of-age."
"To achieve that, we need a strong feed plan. The key point in terms of calf feeding and indeed early life performance is that there's no compensatory growth in that young calf under six months of the animal's life.
"You have to maximise live weight gain all the way through that and if you do that, it gives you a much greater chance to maximise carcass output in a designated slaughter age point of view.
"How you set them up has a lasting imprint on the animal.
"We're able to turn out our dairy-beef animals here at 17-18 weeks-of-age, at about 183kg of live weight - that's about 50kg ahead of where a normal calf would be. 85% of that differential is retained all the way through."
Commenting on how this is achieved at the UCD Lyons Farm, Kelly focused on how the calf is transitioned from the early-life feeding plan to pre-weaning management and feeding.
"What we're doing is looking at moderate to high levels of growth during that pre-weaning phase.
"We're talking about a calf having a minimum growth rate of about 700g/day to achieve that.
"The key challenge in calf rearing is how we integrate pre and post weaning feeding because post weaning is so important. During the post weaning phase, the calf is exceptionally efficient.
"We could have calves for an eight to 10 week period with the ability to grow 1.5-1.6kg of live weight gain per day at a lower feed cost.
"There's a huge feed-efficiency benefit during that phase there and the question is, how do we capitalise that in the scenario of a dairy-beef animal."