A clean-up bull is good to have to make sure all cows are serviced in time for calving season.
During the calving process, this animal showed signs of strong labour, but the time used for calving took over 2 h after the rupture of the allantochorion.
If mated late during the season, this affects the time of calving for heifers the subsequent year, and may also explain lower carcass weights in calves harvested from young females [ 11, 27].
This study shows that providing adequate environmental conditions for estrus behavior is imperative for reproductive efficiency and after herd management factors and time from calving have been accounted for.
Furthermore, increasing average herd sizes, which most likely gives less time for supervision of calving, might result in a larger proportion of difficult calvings being recorded as stillbirths.
Cows that have a BCS of 4 or greater need to be put on a low-quality diet so that they will lose weight in time for breeding and/or calving season.
The time from calving to first service was shorter for cows fed monensin before calving.
Associations between herd size and disease were also found in other studies and have been explained by increased stocking density and less time for individual care of calves [ 8, 9].
The time spent feeding per meal was much higher than that reported (22 to 44 s) for maternally reared lambs (Hess et al., 1974) and two times lower than that reported for calves (Appleby et al., 2001; Gorgulu et al., 2012).
Preconditioning calves is a great method to adopt to reduce stress for calves at weaning time.
