5 months until breeding

Feed a balanced diet to ensure sufficient growth.

Other rearing dairy calves topics

Around calving

0-2 DAYS

3-49 DAYS

8-10 WEEKS

3-4 MONTHS

5 months until breeding

Most farmers feed according to a well-designed plan up to the first few weeks after weaning and carefully monitor the results. Once the calf reaches the age of 5 months and the transition to a diet including forage was managed successfully, there is a tendency to feed what is readily available, sometimes without a clear view on the needs of the calf and also to stop monitoring growth and development in a systematic way. After reaching the age of 5 months, a balanced diet should be fed to ensure sufficient growth without excessive fat deposition. A challenge can be to feed enough crude protein.

Check your checkpoints

From weaning to breeding it is important to keep a close eye on the checkpoints. Each goal for Age at First Calving (AFC) has its own measures. Here an overview of checkpoints (Table 1) for a cow-herd with a mature bodyweight (MBW) of 700 kg. This is a normal bodyweight for Holstein Frisian cows.

Other breeds of cows have a different mature body weight (Table 20). This table is set for an Age at first calving of 23 months, for different mature bodyweight:

table 1

Checkpoints @ 23 mm AFC - Holstein Frisian	AFC 23m	AFC 24m	AFC 25 m	AFC 26m
Bodyweight at 3 months	126	120	113	106
Bodyweight at 6 months	221	209	197	185
Bodyweight at 1 year	398	378	357	337
Avg. daily gain year 1	975	920	864	808
Age at first breeding	13	14	15	16
Age at first calving	23	24	25	26

table 2

Checkpoints @ 23m AFC - Other breeds	700kg MBW	600kg MBW	525kg MBW	450kg MBW
Bodyweight at 3 months	126	108	95	81
Bodyweight at 6 months	221	190	166	142
Bodyweight at 1 year	398	341	298	256
Avg. daily gain year 1	975	836	731	627
Age at first breeding	13	13	13	13
Age at first calving	23	23	23	23