Prevalence and effects of management practices around calving on the health, behaviour, and productivity of Holstein dairy calves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an investigation of the prevalence and impacts of different management practices around calving, with a specific focus on the effects of early systematic obstetrical assistance and the addition of gut-active carbohydrate to colostrum replacer, on Holstein dairy calves. The first study examined the analysis of a survey conducted on 236 Canadian dairy farms to gather information about the management practices currently used around calving on farms representative of the Canadian industry. A key finding was that 27% of the producers surveyed assisted all of their cows at calving. The second study was a randomized clinical trial conducted on a large commercial dairy farm in western Wisconsin, USA, to evaluate the effects of systematic obstetrical assistance provided early during the second stage of calving. The impacts of this practice were evaluated during the perinatal period in all calves, and until weaning for heifer calves. The main findings of this study were that the vigor scores of calves born from early-assisted calvings were better than those from calves born from unassisted calvings, and there were no significant negative impacts on the calves when their dams were assisted early during the second stage of calving. A second randomized clinical trial was conducted on the same large commercial dairy farm in Wisconsin to evaluate the effects of adding gut-active carbohydrates to colostrum replacer on dairy calves’ passive immunity absorption, health, and growth. The key findings of this study were that immunoglobulin absorption was not improved by the addition of gut-active carbohydrates to the colostrum replacer, and no significant effects were found on health or growth of the heifers to weaning. The findings described in this dissertation provide new information on the prevalence and effects of specific calving management practices and post-calving colostrum management on the health and behaviour of calves, and highlight areas for future study and enhanced knowledge translation and transfer concerning the management of dams and their calves during the perinatal period.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".