By John Lovett
Despite the United States’ long and storied past with cattle ranching, long-term research on health, nutrition and management is rarely wrangled, hamstrung by budget constraints and the segmented nature of the industry.
Most feedlot finishing in the United States occurs in the Great Plains region, while cow-calf operations focusing on grazing are largely outside of those locations, said Daniel Rivera, an associate professor of animal science for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. He is also director of the Southwest Research and Extension Center in Hope.
This segmented nature of the industry makes it challenging for university research outside of the Plains and Midwest to follow the cattle from finishing to slaughter, Rivera explained.
As part of an effort to better evaluate how pre-weaned calf and stocker calf treatments influence feedlot performance, Rivera and Paul Beck, a professor and extension specialist for beef nutrition with Oklahoma State University’s department of animal and food sciences, published a summary of research on the topic.
The review article, titled “Perspective and Commentary: Summary of the Special Issue on calf stocker performance effects on feedlot performance and thoughts on future research,” was published in a special issue of Applied Animal Science, the American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists’ official journal.
“The goal of this special issue was to identify and address some of the knowledge gaps imposed on the segmented nature of the beef industry, which leads to segmented areas of research on cow-calf, stocker and feedlot operations,” said Rivera, one of journal’s associate editors.
“One of the more evident things that we found in our call for papers was that there’s just very few data out there on long-term studies, starting on the cow-calf side and carrying it all the way through to what ends up on the plate,” Rivera said.
In their paper, Rivera and Beck break down results from seven original research articles and two review articles into three topic areas: health, nutrition, and production and management.
Research highlight roundup
The health section highlighted two studies looking at effects of vaccinating for respiratory pathogens like bovine respiratory disease, or BRD, on calves and their mothers.
One of the studies hypothesized that the lack of response from vaccinating 60 to 90-day-old calves may have been because the cattle were “well managed and not leaving the home area, which would reduce the exposure to pathogens.” Likewise, a study on vaccinating 30-to-60-day-old calves suggested that while “recent research has demonstrated some benefit to vaccination while maternal antibodies are still present no long-term effects were noted.”
Another study in the health section showed that “increasing colostrum quality and quantity may be a benefit of vaccinating the dam against BRD, with some data suggesting that it might affect morbidity and mortality at the feedlot.” Colostrum is a nutrient-rich, milk-like fluid produced by cattle after giving birth.
A review article published in the special issue looked at data from multiple studies across three states between 2008 and 2023, noting that average daily weight gain of stocker cattle during grazing and at the feedlot decreased as the treatments for BRD increased before the stocker phase.
Supplementation for better nutrition
For the nutrition section of the special issue, research was gathered looking at supplementation strategies on cow-calf production and how they might affect feedlot performance.
Since no effects were detected in a three-year study on supplementation rates, the research surmised that flex supplementation, or adjusting supplementation strategies based on real-time factors, instead of a full supplementation rate, may be an efficient management tool for the winter months to reduce costs. However, this study’s authors noted that these types of studies have inconsistent results.
In a separate four-year study, researchers compared the effects of wet distillers grain with a soybean-milo mix versus no supplementation, to gauge performance of beef steers grazing rangeland late in the grazing season. Despite greater weight gain on pasture, no effects carried over into the finishing period or affected carcass characteristics, the authors noted.
Source : uada.edu