 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Milk Replacer Feeding Programs During Cold Stress Cold weather places specific demands on calves to generate body heat to stay warm. A calf exposed to decreasing temperatures will use increasing amounts of energy just to maintain its body temperature. This additional energy must come from feed sources; otherwise the calf begins to utilize its own fat reserve. A young calf has very little stored fat and can rapidly become severely stressed at low environmental temperatures as it quickly depletes its body of fat. To provide additional energy, calf raisers often add a fat supplement to conventional milk replacers (20-20 formula) or increase the amount of milk replacer fed. Research was conducted at Merrick's Research Farm in Union Center, WI to evaluate the performance of calves raised on different intensive feeding programs during cold stress. The primary research concerns were to explore the possible need for nutrient supplementation during cold weather and the potential performance advantage of one program over another. The trial compared the performance of calves fed a 25% protein, 15% fat milk replacer program to calves fed a competitor 28% protein, 20% fat program during cold stress.
Trial Results: Total weight gain of calves on the Super Star 25-15 and the competitor 28-20 feeding programs were the same. Figure 1 shows weight gains for both treatments throughout the trial and Figure 2 shows weight gains at 6 weeks (time of Super Star 25-15 weaning), 7 weeks (time of 28-20 weaning) and at 8 weeks.
 Average Daily Gains (ADG) for the 8 week trial were the same for both treatments, with Super Star calves growing an average of 1.49 lb/day and Competitor 28-20 calves growing 1.47 lb/day. Figure 4. Super Star calves grew at a faster rate than 28-20 calves during weeks 6-8, with ADG of 1.76 and 1.49 respectively.  Conclusions | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
