Taking advantage of natural behaviour of calves to maximise performance

Prof von Keyserlingk also suggested that how we house calves could have a significant impact on their behaviour and performance.

This was demonstrated in a practical situation when calves given their first access to a grain feeder took vastly different times to find it and start eating.

Those previously housed individually took 50 hours to find the feeder while those housed in pairs found it in nine hours.

She said calves which had been housed in pairs were calmer and quick to touch each other and explore their environment.

“This likely explains why they were so much faster to find the feeder,” she said.

Other impacts of the ‘social facilitation’ to come from paired or group housing included higher intakes of creep feed, faster growth rates and less distress at weaning.

Anecdotally, she said one farmer told her he found pair-reared calves were calmer and easier to train to milk in robots.

However, Prof von Keyserlingk warned that pressure on the farmer to allow the calf to express its most natural behaviour and suckle on its dam was likely to increase.

“I would love to say do not worry about it, but you do need to worry about it,” she said. “We need to show we care and that the practice of separating the calf from the cow is not an easy thing to do. In contrast, by saying the public does not understand the dairy business, we risk coming across as simply not caring.”

Some of her research has focused on understanding the values of the ‘thoughtful person on the street’.

“For many people not working in dairy, the important thing is that the industry continues to try to get better every day, not that it changes overnight,” she said.