Targeting, bargaining, feeding, charting, recording, sorting. Auctioneers yelling, calves bellering, grass hardening, clock ticking, daylight burning. Take action, take control, take a gamble, take a dollar.
Although it will keep you busy, the truth is markets can sap away your time with excitement and uncertainty, whereas the need for a solid feed program is unchanging. Playing markets and feeding beef calves without the foundation of a program is like taking the family on a four-day road trip through new territory without planning your destination, fuel stops, alternate routes or snacks for the kids. Calves dropped 50 cents? Dang, didn’t bring a spare tire. Running low on silage? Whoops, you forgot the extra set of keys.
Planning which road you will take may sound like a risk, and locking onto one route may feel like it removes the flexibility to take a different, better road along the way. Likewise, making a feed plan may sound like it removes potential for course alterations. Keep in mind every good plan has built-in contingencies – “profit taker” or “stop loss” strategies, if you will. Also, keep in mind, the most profitable option for marketing your calves may not be the quickest.
Working backward from your target sale date and market weight, you get a rough idea of required average daily gain (ADG). Next, your required volume of feedstuffs can be planned, sourced and priced. Current nutritional practices and management decisions are optimized for profitability, and nutrition tweaks can manipulate your required ADG and the composition of that gain to meet your targets. During the time in the feedlot for a beef calf, their bodyweight gain is largely in a rapid gain phase, characterized by maximized muscle deposition and slight fat deposition internally and subcutaneously (beneath the hide). Nearing the final stages, during finishing, the calf begins to deposit more carcass fat as rate of muscle deposition decreases. So where is the availability for a detour?
During the backgrounding and growing phases, rate of gain can be manipulated to delay the date you plan to market the fat calves or to manipulate the rations based on the availability of your feeds. Ration manipulation may mean feed restricting, such as decreasing the energy content by feeding more forage, or by feeding a higher-concentrate ration at a reduced rate, thereby limiting the energy intake of the calf while avoiding feeding more forage. From a feed energy intake and calorie perspective, if you consider that the ration a calf eats provides them energy for bodily function and growth, the deposition of muscle is less efficient than fat since fat itself contains more energy than muscle. However, if you consider the weight gain of a calf, fat deposition is only 25% as efficient as muscle deposition. This is because lean muscle tissue incorporates a high proportion of water, whereas fat contains no water. Since lean tissues incorporate water, and the rapid growth phase is characterized by large amounts of lean tissue growth, these are the most cost-efficient pounds for a calf to gain in feedlot. So why slow that down?
Say an unforeseen event causes you to question the availability or price of grain a month from now. Maybe weather conditions have severely delayed harvest, or maybe drought conditions (like those in 2020 and 2021) have resulted in importing grain being more economical, and you are waiting for delivery.
Research shows that limit-feeding a high-grain ration so that weaned calves are limited to gaining 1.2 kilograms per day (or even down to 0.8 kilogram per day) for the first 100 days in the feedlot will increase the time it takes for them to finish compared to calves that had access to all the feed they could eat. That is not surprising. But even though it took those calves more time to finish, it did not increase their total dry matter intake during their time in the feedlot, nor did it affect ribeye size, carcass weight or marbling score. What it did do is decrease the backfat thickness at the end of those first 100 days in feedlot and, of course, decrease the ADG at the end of those 100 days.
If we zoom out from that study, we can piece together that after the first 100 days in feedlot, calves fed the high-grain ration without restriction had increased fat thickness compared to calves that were limit-fed the same ration. This shows we can alter the rate of fat deposition with the ration being fed. This is just a straight-up delay tactic that has been shown to not increase the total feed consumed by the calves – rather, it can slow down the rate of consumption. Another note is that this did not increase the total feed bill for these calves. However, other management costs such as yardage obviously increase if calves are in pens longer.
Zooming back in, by tweaking the ration, we can also manipulate where the fat is in the body of the calf. There are different fat zones within the calf, and by limit-feeding a high-grain diet, we can decrease the amount of subcutaneous fat, which is relevant because this zone of fat acts as an energy buffer zone due to its ability to accept a large amount of energy and store it as fat. Calves that have been feed restricted experience increased rate of gain called “compensatory gain” when given as much as they can eat of the same high-grain diet. This is largely driven by the increase in feed intake and results in these calves gaining both muscle and fat faster than calves that were not feed-restricted. If feeding calves to gain more slowly, it is important to have a record of their program so you can be accurate when estimating where they are in the finishing stage with regard to total body fat content. Body condition scoring a few calves would be beneficial. Compensatory gain will fill the body fat reserves, but, like other feedlot calves, intramuscular fat and marbling are the last fat zones that fill in during the finishing phase.
A solid nutrition plan is imperative for animal performance. Although in many ways, building a feeding program is straightforward, it is definitely not one-size-fits-all, and the devil is in the details. No matter what external events or decisions occur, there is always an alternate route if your plans allow for flexibility. Knowing how feed programs can manipulate the performance of feedlot calves provides an additional variable to be used to your advantage.
References omitted but are available upon request by sending an email to the editor.
