Raising Beef Calves from Birth on Synthetic and Whole Dried Milk with and without Oxytetracycline

Abstract

The results reported in this paper are from a project which was born of necessity—the necessity of elimanating an infection of Johne's disease in the beef cattle herd at the State College of Washington. Because of the extreme susceptibility of young calves to this disease, it seemed highly desirable that they be raised in strict isolation from their dams from the moment of birth. A considerable amount of work has been done using synthetic milk instead of whole milk fed to calves (Wiese et al., 1947; Arrington and Reaves, 1948; Williams and Knodt, 1950; Wallace et al., 1951; Brumbaugh and Knodt, 1952; Stein et al., 1954). The synthetic milk that was fed consisted of skim milk with other supplements added to make it equivalent to whole milk. It was also found that animal fats homogenized into skim milk were superior to plant oils (Gullickson et al., 1942; Wiese et al., 1947; and Stein et al., 1953). Copyright © . .