How drinking behaviour in automatic milk feeders can be used as early disease detection
Healthy calves are the foundation in order to run a profitable diary production. Being healthy as calf results in a better start in life and good growth is expected to follow. Within dairy production it becomes more common to rear calves in groups and feed them by an automatic milk feeder. The milk...
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| Formato: | H3 |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés sueco |
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SLU/Dept. of Animal Nutrition and Management (until 231231)
2013
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| Materias: |
| Sumario: | Healthy calves are the foundation in order to run a profitable diary production. Being healthy as calf results in a better start in life and good growth is expected to follow. Within dairy production it becomes more common to rear calves in groups and feed them by an automatic milk feeder. The milk feeder enables for the calves in greater extent to ingest milk or milk replacer several times per day and they are also able to perform natural behaviors in greater extent. Group rearing of calves puts higher demands on the animal keepers to localize individual calves in the group pen, showing signs of illness. In group pens it can be harder to detect which of the calves’ suffering from disease compared to rearing calves in single pens. The aim with this master thesis is to detect calves with diarrhoea and compare their feeding behaviour in the automatic milk feeder with healthy calves. This also simplifies detection of upcoming illness at far level and simplifies the rearing of calves.
During the first 28 days in life faeces from 53 calves of Swedish Holstein (SH) and Swedish Red Breed (SRB) was examined. The faeces were scored at a four-graded scale (0-3) according to consistency and appearance. Grade 0 was considered as normal faeces (healthy calf) and scoring 1-3 included different grades of diarrhoea (diseased calf). The calves were weighed at the age of 1, 2, 4 and 8 weeks. In average the calves were moved from a single pen to a group pen, equipped with an automatic milk feeder, at the age of one week. When introduced in the group pen the calves had access to 8 liters of milk replacer, and after one week in the group box they had access to 10 liters of milk replacer.
From DeLaval's ALPRO system relevant data for the calves' consumption of milk replacer was obtained. Nearly all calves in the study were affected by different levels of diarrhoea. They were recorded with faeces score between 1 and 3 in average 3 of 4 test days. Because of the frequent occurrence of diarrhoea among the calves it was not possible in a greater extent to use data concerning milk consumption patterns to predict illness and health. Despite the high prevalence of diarrhoea, the growth of the calves was not affected. |
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