Health_Nutrition

Nutrition Reception

In Part 2 of this series, our authors focus on the nutritional aspects of receiving stocker cattle.

Successful stocker operations have a plan that requires preparation before the cattle arrive. The receiving plan should include a focus on facilities, nutrition, health and care. In this article, our authors take a look at the nutritional strategies for managing newly received calves.

The U.S. livestock industry adjusts to FDA’s veterinary feed directive rules.

In January 2017, the Food and Drug Administration issued new rules requiring veterinary feed directives, or VFDs, for feed products containing “medically important” ingredients such as tetracyclines. Many antibiotics for food-producing animals changed from over-the-counter to prescription-only status.

That’s changed the way the U.S. feed industry does business.

With warm weather around the corner, now is the time to vaccinate for anthrax.

The state veterinarian of Texas encourages livestock owners within and near the area of last year’s outbreak to have their animals vaccinated against anthrax this spring. To be effective, the vaccine must be administered two to four weeks before a normal outbreak, usually in early spring. The vaccine is available for use in swine, equine, sheep, goats and cattle. There is no approved vaccine for use in deer.

Vaccination programs for preconditioned calves.

When selling feeder and stocker calves, many producers vaccinate and precondition those calves to obtain a higher price. Ron Gill, professor and livestock specialist at Texas A&M Agrilife Extension, says some buyers may not want to spend extra money to purchase weaned, preconditioned calves, but many buyers do prefer calves that meet the guidelines of programs like the Value Added Calf (VAC), vaccinated and weaned 45 days (VAC-45), VAC-34 or even VAC-24 (vaccinated at branding time).

Stocker managers should control performance thieves.

Internal parasites are the performance thieves you can’t see. Nematodes, with many subsets of specific pests, are one of the biggest nuisances to the cow-calf industry. These parasites siphon nutrients from a calf. To make matters worse, the parasites create a physiological effect that tells the calf it’s not hungry. Mitch Blanding, associate director of beef technical services with Zoetis, offers some tips on fighting these parasites.

Preconditioning can add value to calves.

Most cattle buyers have certain preferences regarding the health management of calves when they take delivery from the producer or purchase calves through a marketing program. These prerequisites generally include certain vaccinations and preweaning.

Bulls developed on distillers’ grains are indistinguishable from bulls fed traditional corn.

Cattle feeders choose distillers’ grains in feedyard diets as an inexpensive alternative to corn and soybean meal. Until now, no one had studied the effects of the common feed ingredient on bull development and fertility. With bull fertility to blame for a significant portion of reproductive failures in cow-calf operations, University of Illinois researchers decided it was worth a look.