A successful livestock operation accounts for expenses occurring at the farm. The entire profit potential of any successful operation revolves around the foundation of sound and economical calf rearing programme. Rearing young calves is a labour intensive and costly segment. From birth to weaning, milk shares highest cost of feeding along with the health issues associated with hygiene and sanitation of milk feeding utensils. These items, if done improperly, can lead to severe consequences; like higher cost of milk feeding, increased incidence of scours and drenching resulting in both time and economic loss.
Pakistan is blessed with a huge population of cattle and buffalo (36.9 and 32.7 million heads, respectively). However, majority of livestock farmers are currently using conventional practices which are inefficient, higher in cost, and result in higher mortality rates. Conventionally, buffalo calves are kept with dam, fed on seasonal forages, and weaned around one year of age. Inadequate milk feeding and poor husbandry practices result in high mortality rate (85.2 percent), and lower body weight (60 to 80 kg). Further, conventional rearing of buffalo calves is higher than cattle whereas, market price of a weaned buffalo calf is lesser than the cost of milk feeding. Therefore, farmers have developed a wrong concept that rearing of young calves is not profitable enterprise and prefer to sell milk instead of feeding to calves. With increasing meat prices, livestock farmers are adopting new strategies to improve calf performance at a lesser cost of production.
To reduce the cost of feeding, early weaning from milk is practised. Recently, we weaned buffalo calves from milk at 12, 10 and eight weeks of age. We reported that early weaned (eight weeks) calves grew at the same rate, consumed less milk and reduced the cost of feeding by 22 percent to those weaned later. Results might help to mitigate issues like poor growth and low returns associated with traditional calf rearing practices. We concluded that buffalo calves can be successfully weaned off milk as early as eight weeks of age without negatively affecting growth performance and significantly reducing the feeding cost. Results suggest that adopting early weaning strategies might be useful to reduce the age of puberty in buffalo heifers, which at the moment is around 3-3.5 years. Further, better growth rates of male calves can improve the supply of quality bulls. The investigation will help us to mitigate gaps between conventional rearing systems and modern feeding strategies.
MUHAMMAD AFZAL RASHID,PROF DR TALAT NASEER PASHA
UVAS, Lahore
