Calf management practices and associations with herd-level morbidity and mortality on beef cow-calf operations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this study was to investigate calf management practices on beef cow-calf operations and determine associations with herd-level morbidity and mortality of pre-weaned calves. A 40-question survey about management practices, morbidity and mortality was administered to cow-calf producers by distributing paper surveys and by circulating an online link through various media. A total of 267 producers completed the survey. Data were analyzed with descriptive statistics and multivariable linear regression models. Average herd-level treatment risk for pre-weaning calf diarrhea (PCD) and bovine respiratory disease (BRD) were 4.9% and 3.0%, respectively. Average herd-level mortality within the first 24 h of life (stillbirth), from 1 to 7 days and 7 days to weaning were 2.3%, 1.1%, and 1.4%, respectively. Operations that never intervened at parturition had 4.7% higher PCD than those that occasionally did. On operations using small elastrator bands for castration, PCD was 1.9% higher than those using other methods. For every increase of 100 cows in herd size, BRD decreased by 1.1%. The association between BRD and PCD varied by when calving season began. Operations that used off-farm, frozen colostrum had a 1.1% increase in stillbirths. Operations that verified a calf had suckled had 0.7% lower mortality from 1 to 7 days of age. Those that intervened when colostrum was abnormal or that used small elastrator bands for castration had 1.9% and 1.4% higher mortality during the 1st week of life, respectively, compared with other operations. Mortality from 7 days to weaning was lower by 0.7% when calving season started in April compared with January or February and was higher by 1.0% for each additional week of calving season. Operations that intervened with colostrum consumption for assisted calvings had lower mortality from 7 days to weaning by 0.8% compared with those that did not. For every 1.0% increase in BRD, mortality from 7 days to weaning increased by 1.0%. Stillbirths and mortality from 7 days to weaning decreased non-linearly with herd size. Factors related to calving season, herd size, interventions at calving, colostrum management and castration impacted herd-level morbidity and mortality. However, effect size was generally small and causation cannot be determined with a cross-sectional study design. This study identifies several common health management practices associated with calfhood morbidity and mortality that should be further investigated to establish evidence-based management strategies to improve the health and survival of beef calves.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".