Incorporating Silages into Preweaned Dairy Calf Diets

Abstract

Supplementing forage to preweaned calves has shown some positive effects, such as stabilization of the rumen environment, limiting abnormal behaviors, and increasing starter intake. However, dry forages can be limited and cost prohibitive in some areas of the world. Contrastingly, ensiled forages are commonly found on most dairy farms and are low cost. Therefore, the objective of this review was to focus specifically on ensiled forages and how they affect preweaned calves. There are few studies that have focused on providing ensiled forages and most of them have used corn silage. Although impacts on rumen development and nutrient digestibility have been variable, feed intake and efficiency were not affected in most reviewed studies. Growth and health parameters were also either not affected or improved. Therefore, with careful silage feeding management, the supplementation of ensiled feeds may be used to provide similar benefits of dry forages to preweaned dairy calves.

Should Pre-Weaning Calf Diets Include Forage?

“…Recently, there has been increased interest in studies incorporating silages into pre-weaning calf rations because of their widespread availability on dairy farms and their lower cost as compared to dry forage (Kehoe et al, 2021). The majority of these studies focused on maize silage (Overest et al, 2016;Mirzaei et al, 2017;Kehoe et al, 2019), while others focused on alfalfa silage (Khan et al, 2020) and triticale silage (Castells et al, 2012(Castells et al, , 2013.…”