Colostrum Management and Feeding in Neonatal Calves

A healthy calf crop provides replacement animals for the future of the diary operation. Nutrition and management of neonatal calves has great impact on later productivity and longevity. Newborn animal is immuno-incompetent and dependent upon timely absorption of colostrum. It is important to understand that the neonate must consume sufficient colostrum as soon as possible after birth to achieve the needed passive immunity to survive the first few weeks of life. Apart from supply of high quality nutrients and immunoglobulins, colostrum also provides a number of hormones and growth factors necessary to stimulate growth and development of digestive tract and other organ systems. More intensive management of colostrum harvest and feeding strategies has to be adopted to improve passive immunity transfer and calf health. The success of colostrum feeding to neonates is built on 4 critical components viz., timing, quantity, quality and cleanliness. Next to colostrum, the calf should be fed nutritious and well balanced diets like whole milk, milk replacers to meet the nutrient requirements of calves and enable them to achieve their growth potential, foster improved mammary development and at same time be cost effective. Artificial colostrum should be fed to orphan calves and trained in drinking liquid feeds via nipple/bucket. The accelerated calf feeding programme enable the calves to achieve greater growth rates before weaning with increased efficiency, higher lean tissue and increases the chances of heifers reaching puberty at an early age.

Healthy newborn calves provide the foundation for profitable dairy enterprise. The goal for feeding calves is to keep them alive, healthy and enable them to grow well. Neonatal calf mortality is the major cause of economic losses in dairy production. Ideally calf mortality should be less than 5% with growth rates of 0.5–0.7 kg/d (Blood and Radostits, 1989). Neonatal calf mortality varies from 8.7 to 64% throughout the world (Khan and Khan, 1991). In the first month of age this accounted for 84% of the total mortality (Jenny et al., 1981) being particularly high in the third week of life (Umoh, 1982). A mortality of 10% in cow calves and 30% in buffalo calves was observed in India and most of it was observed in winter (Jain et al., 2008) and even a higher mortality of 50–60% was reported in dairy animals up to 2 months of age (Prasad et al., 2004). Diarrhoea is the major cause of death among calves throughout the world (Ambrosim et al., 2002) followed by respiratory diseases (Virtala et al., 1996) and both account for 70–80% of total deaths during that period. During the first few weeks of life, when calves are typically fed whole milk or milk replacer, calves experience episodes of diarrhea, caused by Rotavirus, Enterobacteriaceae, Escherichia coli, Cryptosporidium parvum or Salmonella spp, etc (Quigley, 2007). It is estimated that a calf mortality of 20% can reduce the net profit by 60% (Blood and Radostits, 1989). The failure to provide colostrum has often been implicated as one of the main reasons for neonatal mortality (Afaq et al., 1992).