Health and behaviour of dairy calves reared with milk from bucket versus mother during four months

Summary

Early separation of cow and calf is still common practice on dairy farms. In recent years, interest in mother-based rearing practices has increased. They are seen as more in line with natural behaviour, labour-saving and healthpromoting for the calf, but also pose challenges, e.g. in terms of the cow’s willingness to let down milk or the pain of separation after established social bonding. We tested the hypothesis that calves allowed dam suckling (DS) twice a day would benefit with regard to weight gain, health related traits, and show less oral manipulations compared to bucket fed (BF) group mates. Therefore, we conducted two on farm trials with local German Friesian Cattle (farm 1: n=18 DS vs 17 BF) and Swiss Fleckvieh calves (farm 2: n=12 DS vs 11 BF) until the age of 122 days between autumn 2018 and summer 2020 within the CORE Organic Cofund project ProYoungStock. On farm 1 average daily weight gain (g/d) did not significantly differ between feeding groups (DS: 815±46 vs BF: 807±42 SE g/d, P=0.90).
By contrast, calves of primiparous cows on farm 2 benefited from mother bound rearing (DS: 1,133±73 SE vs BF: 714±88 SE g/d, P=0.002), but no statistical difference was found in calves of multiparous cows. Feeding groups did not differ on neither of the farms in terms of clinical findings regarding vitality, body condition traits, indicators for diarrhoea and respiratory disorders, although levels differed between farms. This was also true for number of medical treatment cycles (farm1: DS: 3.06±0.42 SE vs BF: 2.72±0.39, P=0.56; farm 2: DS: 1.00±0.32 SE vs BF: 1.08±0.30 SE, P=0.85). Number of oral manipulations of pen mates was consistently higher in bucket fed calves across both farms (farm 1: BF: 1.34±0.15 SE vs DS: 0.92±0.12, P=0.02; farm 2: BF: 0.24±0.06 SE vs DS: 0.13±0.03 SE, P=0.02), while objects were not manipulated with different frequencies between feeding groups. We conclude that restricted access to the mother alone does only have very limited effect on the traits investigated, while differing overall management conditions between farms show high impact on calf health and behaviour.