Predicting male dairy calf live weight for use in calf management decision support

Abstract

The growing awareness and scrutiny of the management of young dairy calves, especially male calves, necessitates a support tool to aid in the planning of resource allocation on dairy farms. There is a desire among some vendors for a minimum calf weight when purchasing young dairy bull calves. Hence, the objective of the present study was to investigate whether live weight of young calves (approximately 10–50 d old) can be predicted using readily accessible animal-level features, especially features that may be available in advance of birth. A multiple linear regression mixed model was developed with the live weight of 602 dairy bull calves aged between 10 and 42 d as the dependent variable; the age at which an animal is predicted to reach a predefined live weight was then estimated based on the model regression coefficients. Fixed effects included in the multiple regression model were dam parity, gestation length, and parental average genetic merit for relevant traits available in Ireland; namely, birth weight, birth size, and carcass weight. Herd of origin was included as a random effect, with all calves having been sold directly from the farm of birth. Live weight data were recorded at the point of sale when calves were, on average, 26 d old with a mean live weight of 56.6 kg. Animals were randomly assigned to 10 separate (i.e., folds) cross-validation data sets without replacement (i.e., each fold consisted of a different 10% of the data to test the model, with the remaining 90% of data being used to train the model) to quantify the accuracy of prediction. Across all data, the correlation between actual and predicted live weight was 0.76; the regression coefficient of actual live weight on predicted live weight across all data was 0.99. The root mean squared error of prediction varied from 4.40 to 6.66 kg per fold. Across all data, the root mean squared error was 5.61 kg, implying that 68% of live weight predictions were within 5.61 kg of the actual live weight. Given the potential availability of all model features in advance of birth (gestation length can be predicted from ultrasound examination of the pregnant uterus, although substituting parental average genetic merit for gestation length had minimal effect on model performance), predictions can be integrated into a dairy farm decision support tool to aid in the management of labor and infrastructure resources to achieve minimum live weight specifications before sale.