Dairy calves grow very well when diet is good—even minimizing natural gender-based growth differences.

If you’ve spent any time in elementary or middle school classrooms, you know that male and female humans have different growth rates, and different timing for their growth spurts. The same kind of thing is true for dairy cattle. Bull calves and heifer calves have different growth rates. Under lab conditions, bull calves have a higher sustained growth rate, but what about in actual production conditions?  That’s what the folks at the Cooperative Extension of the University of California-Davis wanted to find out. They measured the height of calves on a commercial California dairy, and weighed them on a platform scale. It turns out that on this particular farm, excellent quality feed led to high growth rates in both genders.

For further information visit animalscience.ucdavis.edu.

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