Intensified Pre-Weaning Calf Feeding Programs: Impacts on Growth and Behavior

There are a range of viewpoints on how best to feed and manage dairy calves early in life. Traditional approaches to rearing dairy calves have focused on stimulating early solid feed intake through restricting intake of milk or milk replacer. A conventional milk feeding rate is approximately 10% of a calf’s birth weight, an amount that translates to between 4 and 5 L/day, supporting under 0.5 kg/d of weight gain (Appleby, 2001; Jasper and Weary, 2002). This conventional approach to feeding calves facilitates early weaning and has been viewed as economically appealing due to reduced feed costs. However, there is increasing on-farm adoption of alternative feeding programs which provide a higher plane of nutrition. Feeding programs which provide greater milk allowances support greater growth relative to outcomes of conventional restricted feeding, and thus are typically referred to as “intensified feeding,” or “feeding for accelerated growth.” These feeding programs provide quantities of milk that more closely resemble intake levels of a suckling calf, and allow “biologically appropriate” growth rates (Drackley, 2008), which fall between 0.75 and 1 kg/d (Tedeschi and Fox, 2009; Appleby, 2001).