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Newly Received Cattle

Whether the animals are going into a back grounding situation or going into the feedlot, you have to receive them from somewhere, right? A common disease associated with newly weaned calves and calves that have been moved is bovine respiratory disease (BRD). And this results in about 1% mortality in weaned calves and plus some percent morbidity which is not clearly defined. There are two factors that are associated with bovine respiratory disease. One is the stress of weaning suppresses immune function. Second is that these animals generally have very low intake, usually about 1.5% of body weight, for the first two weeks after receiving. Do you think feed intake affects immune suppression? Do you think leukocytes, white blood cells, need energy to engulf bacteria, fight off disease? Yes, they do. And so the two are probably interrelated. There are some stress that is just associated with weaning that suppresses immune function, but you also get a suppression in intake which also leads to less energy available for the immune function. Some things that have been shown to reduce the incidence of BRD is actually vaccinating the animals on the farm before shipping and, of course, better nutritional management, especially managing intake, managing low feed intakes of the animals when they come into the feedlot.

What would you think you are going to feed animals when you receive them? Concentrate. We have at least one person in the class that is at least reading the slides. Calves do prefer concentrate. Remember, they have low intakes. You need to feed them something that is going to stimulate appetite and calves do prefer concentrates, so you should offer them a total diet of something greater than 60% concentrate. Free-choice or a limited quantity of good quality hay, about two pounds of hay per head per day. For protein, diets should be formulated to contain about 14% protein and some of this can come through good quality legume or grass hay and the remainder of it can come from soybean meal. What are some other protein sources that are available? Cottonseed meal, canola meal, brewer's, distiller's. Remember, intake is low at this period and so animals will not be consuming as much in grams per day of trace minerals as they would if they were on high levels of intake. There are a few minerals related with stress and also immune function that should be increased in receiving diets. One is potassium. The others are trace minerals that are related with immune function, zinc, copper and selenium. The one macromineral, potassium, the three trace minerals, zinc, copper and selenium, should be increased in receiving diets because intakes are very poor during this period.

Feed additives. You will usually see ionophores in most beef diets. An ionophore takes care of coccidiosis, but it also takes care of a few other things. What else do ionophores do? They suppress growth of certain types of microbes in the rumen. Do they have any benefits on performance? Do you ever see rumensin or lasalocid, have you ever heard of those? Increases feed conversion also. Not only does it help prevent coccidiosis, it’s actually a coccidiostat, but also increases feed conversion of the animals. Antibiotic additives. Tetracycline, so it could be chlor, oxy, whatever, has been shown to reduce bovine respiratory disease. You have a number of choices to incorporate this, you can put it in the feed, you can put it in the water, you can treat animals with history or farm histories of having problems. And so animals that come from a particular farm may have a history of having trouble with BRD and these animals can be treated. Or you can treat animals individually as diagnosed.

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