A good start sets up beef-on-dairy calves for a strong finish: A case study

ZISK
Jul 7
1 min read

In central Wisconsin 50 years ago, the use of a beef bull in dairy herds was fairly common for some dairy producers to improve calving ease in heifers or settle a cow that would not conceive after a couple rounds of artificial insemination (A.I.) with a dairy bull. These resulting calves, like now, tended to bring a little better premium than a dairy calf at the sale barn and moved into the beef supply quite nicely, with the buyers of these calves coming back to buy more.

The interest today in making these calves is a bit more calculated with the availability of sexed semen and high feeder calf values. When fed aggressively, beef-on-dairy calves are hard to differentiate from native beef cattle by an untrained eye; however, these calves tend to be plagued with a fairly high incidence of liver abscesses, and this occurrence was the basis for our investigation.

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