The Moos Room™

 Welcome to the Moos Room. We are done with corn silage. It is actually September 11th today, so Friday, and we covered our pile today. We have a bunker full. We have a few bags. So we are done with corn silage. Not quite sure on the yields yet, but actually we were sitting pretty good here in western part of the state.

We had some rain, so it was right in that 68%, somewhere in there, maybe a little bit drier on some, a little bit wetter on others, but about perfect. I know there were other farms that didn't have that much luck and were chopping really dry corn, and it's been a struggle, especially only an hour away from here towards the central part of the state, they were chopping pretty dry corn.

So it's been a challenge around the upper Midwest here with not so much rain. However, I was in Ohio the last week, and they were chopping corn silage, and oh man, the grass and the lawns looked like it was spring out, it was so green there. So they've had so much rain. But it was kind of interesting to see across the upper Midwest here what the crop conditions look like and...

But alas, we keep going. We're grateful that we have a lot of feed, we have a lot of hay, a lot of corn silage to help with our cows, and we're into calving season. I think we have about five calves on the ground so far, a few dairy heifers, some beef on dairy crosses. No Angus embryos have been born yet. I think those are coming next week, so we should have a pile of purebred Angus coming from our dairy cows to do our research study that we'll certainly be discussing a lot more into the future.

So we're well into calving and trying to figure out calf rearing programs. And I just saw this new research paper that came out from the University of Florida, and it was to look at how early life socialization worked for first lactation survival, milk yield, and resilience. So what does early socialization mean?

Well, they compared calves that were individually housed, pair housed, or group housed, and compared them through first lactation. So we'll kind of define what they did in the study. So this was done at the University of Florida, so nice hot environment in Florida where they had, again, individually housed calves, pair-housed calves, which were two calves.

They had 120 of those, 90 individual housed calves, and 80 calves that were group-housed, and they were housed with 10 calves each. So the individual calves were manually fed with a teat bucket. Uh, the pair-housed calves, obviously they were fed with the same manual teat bucket. They had a shared pen where they had full physical contact, so two calves together could play and do whatever they wanted, touch each other, lick each other, you name it.

And the group-housed calves were housed in an automatic milk feeder. And obviously they had a large space, lots of social group interactions, you name it. So they had eight-week weaning, so 56 days, and then they had post-weaning pasture management. So all calves were co-mingled into a standard pasture management after week eight.

So really the only difference between these animals was the first 60 days of life and how they were housed. Otherwise, all the management was the same, and we'll talk about that in a bit.

So they kind of had some differences that we see in average daily gain So body weight at 60 days of age for the individual calves was 166.7 or 75 kilos. The group housed 180 pounds or 81 kilos, and the pair-housed calves were in the middle, 174 pounds and 79 kilos. So the calves that were in the group housed were 14 pounds more than the individually housed calves as far as body weight at day 60.

So if you look at it from an in-- average daily gain, average daily gain for individual housed calves, 1.39 or 0.63 kilos. Pair-housed, 1.52 pounds or 0.69 kilos. Group-housed, 1.61 pounds average daily gain or 0.73 kilos. So the group-housed calves did much better on an average daily gain basis compared to the individually housed calves.

So really this social facilitation of feed intake really drives immediate physical growth in both the pair and the group environments. So we saw better average daily gain So what about after weaning? What happened? Well, obviously everything was raised together from six to 24 months of age. They had a pre-calving culling rate, which was about 25% across all groups, which I think is really high for not before breeding.

That's a, a lot of animals that were lost. Age at first breeding was about 389 days, so about 14 months or so across all of the groups. There was really no difference, a couple days. So no statistical difference in age at first breeding for these animals. And age at first calving was about the same, 700 days in the individuals, 698 and 697.

So no difference in age at first calving at all. So really from weaning to calving, all of the sort of physical metrics, we talk about growth rate and survival rates, they all normalize. So they stated that really to the naked eye, a socially raised heifer and an individually raised heifer looked identical as they got close to calving and put into the milking herd

So transition, what about the transition period? So from 30 days before calving till after 30 days? Well It kind of the individual housing, so this lack of early socialization made things a little more stressful in those animals, which really suppressed their immune function. Whereas the animals that were group housed or pair housed, they had kind of this early behavioral competence, which allowed the cows to adapt a lot easier, compete for feed, and really kind of deflect some social stress, which really preserved things, preserved energy, dry matter intake for immunity.

So they were much healthier, and they didn't have this big issue with transition when they moved into the freestalls in their herd

So what about culling? Well, what happened to culling? If you look at culling, so pair-housed calves were sixty-five percent less likely to be culled during first lactation, and the group-housed calves were fifty-two percent less likely to be culled during lactation compared to the individual ones. So their survival was much higher for pair or group-raised animals than individuals.

The biggest reasons for culling were mastitis seventeen percent, metabolic eight percent, and respiratory three percent. So mastitis obviously is the biggest challenge, and we see that in many dar- dairy herds. But really this socialization in the first sixty days of life really prevented some stress-induced immune failures that really probably drove first lactation culling in the individual calf-housed animals.

Okay, so what about production? Well, there was a big impact on first lactation milk yield. The baseline obviously is the individually raised house calves, and they were at twenty-three thousand nine ninety-seven, about ten thousand eight eighty-five kilos. The pair-housed calves were sixteen hundred and seventy-eight pounds more, so about seven hundred and sixty-one kilos more in first lactation.

Group-housed calves, sixteen hundred and sixty-two pounds more, so about twenty-five thousand six hundred and sixty pounds of milk compared to the individually raised ones. So the pair and the group-housed ones didn't have any difference between each other, so they were both about sixteen hundred, almost seventeen hundred pounds more of milk or about seven hundred and fifty kilos more milk compared to the individually housed calves So they really had the greatest production average when it really mattered the most, and they looked at post weeks, and that was really from week two to week fourteen.

So kind of in that peak lactation when there should be milking the most. That's where the pair-housed and the group-housed calves did the best, so kind of at peak. Towards the end of lactation, you know, the individuals kind of tried to catch up a little bit, but it was really in that week two to week fourteen, so ninety days in milk really, where those group-housed animals really shined So why do we see this increase in yield?

Well, really, the average daily gain, so pre-weaning average da-daily gain only accounted for maybe about 15% of the potential for milk yield. So it accounts for some, but only about 15%. But really, the pre-wean social housing really accounted for 85% of the difference that they saw in yield, and really that was all about behavioral resilience.

So those animals that were raised in groups or pairs had faster adaptation to the milking parlor, so they had less fear and they had less milk withholding, so they didn't hold their milk. They were better suited when they had social regrouping, because obviously when you're regrouping animals in a freestyle barn, you have to establish those social structures all over again.

So those animals were better to cope with that, and they had improved competitive ability at the feed bunk. So they were more competitive at the feed bunk. So dry matter intake drives production, less stress, better to cope with change, eating more, you get more milk production out of those group-raised calves

So it was kind of interesting. You have this individually housed calves, they had high early yield but high stress, which meant they had a higher risk of involuntary culling due to health crashes. Whereas the animals that were pair-housed or group-housed had also high early yield but low stress, and that sort of protected them against calving and really not burning out in the first 305 days.

So really for those individually reared animals, high early production really exacerbated the health failures. And for the socially raised calves, pair or group ones, high early yield was a predictor of lifelong herd retention

It didn't really find much difference in other issues. If you look at mastitis, uh, other health problems, they were all pretty close to the same, so really not much of a difference in health. It really come down to stress and milk production. So if I kind of sum all of this up, the individually housed calves had about seventeen percent more health culling, or about seventeen percent of them were culled for health issues after calving, whereas only three percent of the pair, eight percent of the group housed.

Total lactation milk yield, again, about seventeen hundred pounds greater for those pair-housed and group-housed calves, and it really comes back to the early growth in life. Those pair-housed calves were about ten percent more compared to a individual housed calf, and the group-housed animals were sixteen percent more average daily gain early on in life.

So the pair and the group housing, they're not just early welfare interventions, they are really kind of the foundation for this investment in behavioral resilience that we see. So less stress at calving, more competitive at the feed bunk, and it just helped out, and you have higher yield and longer lifespans.

So I thought it was quite an interesting study to look at and, and see, and I know there's a lot of people studying pair-housed and individual-housed and group, and we've done that as well. We didn't really find any difference in milk production in our herds, uh, with individual, group, or housed, but we're more of a lower input environment.

But it is interesting, and I'll have to look at it more. I can certainly look at culling and, and probably have somebody do a little bit more investigation than just look at production. But hopefully you learned a little bit about that and to see if, you know, as we move probably away from individual-housed animals for lots of different reasons, uh, I don't think we're gonna see any reduction in yields or increased health problems.

So with that, uh, we'll leave it there today. If you have any comments, questions, or scathing rebuttals, feel free to contact me at The Moose Room. That's T-H-E M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M @umn.edu, or find us on the web at University of Minnesota Livestock Extension, or UMN WC ROC Dairy. And with that, I hope you have a great week.

Bye.