Impracticality and cost of existing pain management strategies during surgical castration of beef cattle have limited their widespread implementation on-farm. A farmer-applied topical anaesthetic formulation, originally developed and used commercially to mitigate the pain of mulesing in lambs, was investigated for its potential use for managing pain in surgically castrated calves. This formulat...

“To creep or not to creep?” That is the question that many Mississippi beef producers wrangle with in managing calf nutrition. Producers often have several arguments for either allowing calves creep supplementation access or for keeping creep access off limits. A 1996 survey conducted by USDA’s National Health Monitoring System reported that 19.5% of cow-calf operations in the Southeast utilize...

Early weaning is a management practice that reduces grazing pressure on pastures by decreasing the nutrient requirements of cows. Calves that are weaned early are relatively efficient at converting feed to gain, and can weigh as much, or more than, calves allowed to remain with their dams until a conventional weaning age is reached. Balanced diets with excellent physical, chemical, and palatabi...

BACKGROUND Vaccination of young calves against Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) is desirable in dairy and beef operations to reduce clinical disease and prevent spread of the virus among cattle. Although protection from clinical disease by multivalent, modified-live virus (MLV) vaccines has been demonstrated, the ability of MLV vaccines to prevent viremia and viral shedding in young calves po...

These results support the earlier findings by Dr. Bill Kunkle and his research involving limitcreep supplements based on cottonseed meal and salt mixtures. Calf performance responses, as measured by the added gain realized by creep supplementation, are highly variable and cannot always be described by amounts of creep feed consumed. This variability has large and direct impacts on the cost effe...

F beef cattle management practices are more cost effective or have a higher return on investment than properly used growth promoting implants. Growth promoting implants are pellets that are implanted under the skin of the ear of growing calves. These pellets release extremely low concentrations of various hormones, which improve average daily gain 7 to 17 percent and feed efficiency 4 to 12 per...

Calfhood diseases have a major impact on the economic viability of cattle operations. This is the first in a three part review series on calf health from birth to weaning, focusing on preventive measures. The review considers both pre- and periparturient management factors influencing calf health, colostrum management in beef and dairy calves and further nutrition and weaning in dairy calves.

Growth implant efficacy may be affected when administered to nutritionally stressed calves, whereas the procedure may alter health or the humoral immune response to respiratory vaccination. The study objective was to determine the effect of different administration times (d 0, 14, or 28) of a growth implant containing 200 mg progesterone and 20 mg estradiol benzoate on health, performance, and ...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of different breeds and breed crosses on age (AC, d), BW (kg), price (PR, $/kg), and market value (MV, $/calf) of purebred and crossbred calves sold for veal and beef production. The Kovieh wholesale cattle organization (Bolzano, Italy) grouped calves from several dairy herds located in the Trentino-Südtirol region in Italy and sold them by pu...

Introduction The profitability of beef production is as many other production systems, a function of a balance between inputs and outputs. Outputs can be more easily defined than inputs and can be simplified as pounds of beef sold in one way or another: carcass, replacement heifers, yearlings, weaned calves. However, inputs can be more challenging to define and vary greatly with different produ...