Symbiotic‐Glyconutrient Mixture or Pasteurized Colostrum as a Strategy to Increase Health and Performance during First 30‐d of Birth of Calves Reared in a Dairy Farm with Good Management Practices

Eighty Holstein calves born in a dairy farm with good management practices were used to evaluate the ef-fect of treatments on calf-starter intake, growth rate, and incidence of gastrointestinal disorders during the first 30 days of birth. Calves were fed during first 6-h of birth with 4L of with unheated (RAW) or pasteur-ized (PST, pasteurized during 60 min at 60 °C) colostrum (IgG>50 g/L), followed by supplementation with or without symbiotic glyconutrients (GLY) dosed at 5 g/calve/day in the liquid diet consisting of 4 L/d of unsaleable raw whole milk during all the study. Treatments were: 1) RAW, 2) PST, 3) RAW + GLY, and 4) PST + GLY. All calves had >5.5 g/dL of total serum protein read at 12 hours of birth. Calves were assigned to individual cages. All animals had ad libitum access to water and chopped high-quality alfalfa hay, from the fourth day, calf-starter was offered ad libitum. There was no mortality nor infectious diarrhea during the experiment. Pasteurization did not affect the quality (density, pH, and IgG concentration) of colostrum. The overall noninfectious diarrhea frequency was 53.7%. A lower diarrhea frequency was noted to calves that were fed with PST when compared to RAW treatments (45 vs. 62.5%) without differences in the number of times (1.05 vs. 1.26) needed to receive treatment to stop diarrhea. Supplemental GLY did not influence the reduction of diarrhea frequency and did not improve performance. Colostrum pasteurization increased (P<0.05) starter intake by 28.5%, the average daily gain by 35.8%, and live weight change of 9.6%. We concluded that offering pasteurized colostrum during the first hours of life is a positive strategy to increase starter intake and growth during the first 30 days of birth in rearing calves. On the other hand, using the mixture of symbiotic/glyconutrients as feed additive did not show any advantage when offered in this type of farm.