Feed Today for Next Years Profits

Beef cattle producers are both some of the most patient people in the world, and some of the most impatient. When weather and/or market conditions get tough, some producers get so impatient that they immediately abandon their production goals and start cutting costs everywhere they can. Others may be just the opposite and start spending money in places they absolutely do not need. In either case, the nutrition program is often the first to suffer in terms of opting for cheaper inputs, or sometimes no inputs at all as entire portions of the program are cut out. An example of this would of course be a good mineral and vitamin supplement. Having enough patience with your program, if properly formulated, has many long-term benefits to your bottom line. Calf performance tomorrow, or even next year, will be affected by what you feed or don’t feed the cow today.

With the ongoing drought and lack of quality forage for cattle, the nutritional plane for much of the cow/calf herd has gone down dramatically. With any range-based nutrition program for cows or stocker cattle, feed supplements should be viewed to “bridge the gap” between forage nutrient quantity and cow/calf requirements. As forage quality declines, even in the middle of the summer when grass may be plentiful, that gap widens, and more supplementation is needed to maintain desired performance. By not providing that extra nutrition in the form of additional or revised feed supplements, both sub-acute and acute deficiencies can start to occur. For a beef cow, these are differences that may not be seen for many months to come as we are not monitoring the performance of a cow daily. These differences may only show up in whether she is bred or not, and that is something we may not know for several months. As a result, the nutrition program can be cut for short term gain, but long-term consequences are sure to follow.

If the nutrition program of the pregnant cow is lacking, it sets off a chain of often irreversible outcomes that will affect not only her performance and longevity, but also the same for her offspring. Calves experience 2/3 of their pre-term growth in the last third of pregnancy. If cow nutrient intake during this time is compromised or restricted, valuable nutrients are not passed on to the fetus to help prepare it for birth. In addition, cows start to produce colostrum the last 45 days of pregnancy. Inadequate nutrition for the cow at this time will result in lower quality colostrum being fed to the calves at birth. Calves fed this colostrum from nutrient restricted cows have shown to have lower serum immunoglobulin concentrations and thus, compromised immune systems.

The long-term effects of cows not receiving adequate nutrition while pregnant continues to show up in their offspring for most of those animals’ lives. This phenomenon is termed Fetal Programming and it can be expressed in both positive and negative ways. Protein and energy shortages in utero result in calves that do not gain as well, do not breed as well, and tend to get sick more often as they get older. It is also known that protein and energy restrictions during pregnancy negatively affect overall muscle and fat cell number and mass as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Effects of maternal nutrition on bovine fetal skeletal muscle development. Dates are estimated mainly based on data from studies in sheep, rodents, and humans and represent progression through the various developmental stages. Nutrient restriction during mid-gestation reduces muscle fiber numbers, whereas restriction during late gestation reduces both muscle fiber sizes and the formation of intramuscular adipocytes.

Aside from protein and energy requirements, minerals are also particularly important during fetal development. While macro minerals such as calcium and phosphorus are essential for skeletal and muscle development, trace minerals have also become widely known to be essential for optimum development and health of animals once born.

Research has shown that fetal trace mineral requirements have a higher priority than the dam, and nutrient partitioning suggests that the cow will pass on trace minerals to the growing fetus before meeting her own requirements for those trace minerals. Thus, if trace minerals are in short supply in the diet, not only will the fetus be lacking before birth, but the cow will also experience deficiencies as she is passing all that she can on to the fetus and leaving none for her own maintenance or production.

Furthermore, several of the essential trace minerals we use to fortify our feed blends and Fortigraze™ minerals are key to numerous cellular processes throughout the body, including immunity as shown below in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Essential trace minerals and some of their roles related to the immune system in beef cattle.

Mineral supplementation for both the cow and her unborn fetus is not only vital to immune function in unborn calves, but also extremely important to weight gain and performance of those same offspring. Work done in Oregon suggests that cows with restricted trace mineral intake during the last trimester of pregnancy have calves that do not gain as well throughout their entire lives.

Table 1. Effect of trace mineral supplementation to cows during the last third of pregnancy on weight gain in the subsequent offspring.

In this study by Marques and others at Oregon State University, they fed similar diets to cows while pregnant, with control cows getting no trace minerals during the last trimester while inorganic TM cows received sulfate forms of trace minerals, and organic TM received the same level of trace minerals coming from an organic source. They found that cows that were fed a compete mineral supplement while pregnant had calves that gained better throughout their entire lives compared to the offspring from cows that had their mineral programs restricted, even for just 90 days. In addition to this, the calves whose dams received the organic forms of trace minerals performed even better than the inorganics, suggesting that form and quality of trace mineral can also make a difference in animal performance.

When developing a nutrition program for your cattle herd, it is important to keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be permanent. There will be times when it needs to change based on a multitude of reasons. When this happens, patience will pay off when you take the time to calculate the end results of those changes. Some changes will pay off, and some changes may cost you money. Make sure you take the time, be patient, and evaluate your options thoroughly. Reach out to one of our nutritionists at LNC and we will help you make those decisions that are best for your operation.

By: Zeb Prawl, M.S. - Livestock Nutrition Center