Growing Beef Newsletter

August 2024,  Volume 15, Issue 2

Milk EPD and creep feed intake
Patrick Wall, ISU extension beef specialist, and Dacia Schoulte, IBC communications intern

Genetic trends for Milk EPD for most breeds have increased, although direct selection for the trait has not been a goal for most seedstock producers over the last few years. Creep feeding, however, has become a very popular practice for most seedstock producers to maximize animal performance and condition animals set for production sales.

A study at the McNay Research Farm in Chariton, Iowa, was conducted to track the feed consumption of calves being creep-fed relative to their dam's Milk EPD and to determine if creep feed consumption was heavily influencing Milk EPDs. Eighty-one cow-calf pairs, aged three to five years old, were used to monitor how cow and calf performance was impacted by creep feeding. These pairs were split into two groups based on the dam's milk EDP: High Milk (HM) and Low Milk (LM). Those groups were each split into three groups based on allotted creep feed to the calves: no creep, limited creep access (up to 2 lbs per calf per day), and ad-libitum creep access (up to 15 lbs of creep per calf per day.) Creep was delivered through the mobile Super SmartFeed™ feeder, and each calf had an EID. Calves had a two-week acclimation period to the feeder before the trial started, which lasted 75 days. The feeder was able to control animal intake per day, measured total intake per day, number of visits per day, and duration of each visit through the EID.

The results were surprising. Of the calves with access to creep feed, 73% of HM and 48% of LM visited the feeder. As one would assume, calves that had ad-libitum access to creep feed had the highest ADG (2.44 for the HM group, 2.28 for the LM group). The calves that either had no access or refused creep feed had the poorest ADG (1.72 for HM, 1.75 for LM). The weigh-suckle-weigh data indicates that the cows that offered the most milk were the LM no-creep cows (6.52 lbs), whereas the poorest milking cows were the HM cows with ad libitum access to creep (5.53 lbs). On average, calves from the HM group would have a 54-pound advantage over those that refused to enter the feeder or weren’t allowed, and the LM group would have a 40-pound advantage over those calves.

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