Editorial: Planning for the next generation in UK dairy herds
- Autores: J. A. Jennings
- Localización: Veterinary Record, ISSN-e 2042-7670, Vol. 176, Nº. 24, 2015, págs. 623-624
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
AS dairy farmers see their margins eroded further by the currently tumbling milk price, it becomes harder to plan for and invest in the future. Youngstock may be the first to suffer from such austerity because any investments made will not be seen for another three years, as cows are not thought to turn a profit until their second lactation. However, the future of all dairy herds rests on rearing healthy, productive and long-lived heifer replacements.
It is widely understood that early life experience has long lasting and even intergenerational effects on health; the Dutch Famine Cohort Study (www.dutchfamine.nl/index_files/study.htm) offered a grizzly but elegant human example. Back on the dairy farm, it has been demonstrated that management during the neonatal period and early life is crucial to the future success of dairy heifers. The risk of respiratory disease has been shown to be increased in calves with low levels of maternally derived immunoglobulins (Windeyer and others 2014), and a substantial 32 per cent of mortality in the first 16 weeks of life can be attributed to failure of passive transfer (Tyler and others 1999). Another less dramatic and more insidious effect of poor absorption of colostrum is lower growth rates to three months of age (Windeyer and others 2014). With good evidence available for the benefits of calving heifers at 24 months of age (Wathes and others 2008), this loss of growth will have hangover effects when selecting heifers for service. Apart from the impact that these losses have on individual farms, the livestock industry is under increasing pressure to reduce its impacts on the environment and to limit its contribution to the evolution of antimicrobial resistance. A recent increase in awareness of the rules against the use of chlortetracycline in calf feed is a good example of this (McDonald 2013) and acts as a reminder that we must not rely on pharmaceuticals to manage disease.
