According to Gerard Roney, founder and managing director of Advantage Feeders in Australia, controlled creep feeding is a good way to develop a calf’s rumen, allowing for better uptake of energy and protein at an earlier age.

“We have a lot of control on how (the rumen) operates, and this is the most important thing we’ve got on our livestock farms,” Roney said at the Ag in Motion 2025 farm show near Langham, Sask., as part of a learning session presented by Huber Ag Equipment.

Follow all of our Ag in Motion coverage at the Western Producer.

Roney discussed how producers can help control the length of the papillae on the rumen wall, which pulls volatile fatty acids out of the rumen to be used as energy. Feeding starch lengthens the papillae, and the longer the papillae, the more energy the rumen can extract.

“It’s helpful to start at the beginning of the calf’s life,” said Roney, sharing an image of the undeveloped rumen wall of a six-week-old calf, which was smooth and without long papillae.

“All our calves are born with the sterile environment, so they don’t have any microbes in their gut to start with.”

He compared this to an image of the developed rumen wall of a calf of the same age, which had a greater surface area to allow for more energy uptake.

“The difference is this rumen had grain from the (start), so it’s really showing us we can get that rumen developed where they can eat pasture and digest it really quickly.”

While unrestricted creep feeding can lead to unnecessary feed expenses, he said, the idea behind controlled creep feeding is to allow for rumen development as early as possible before moderating for better feed conversion.

“What controlled creep feeding is, is providing that feed ad lib until that rumen starts to get going roughly that 100 days of age, so we feed them as much as we can early on,” said Roney.

“Once that intake starts going more than two pounds a day, for instance, we start using the feeding system to restrict intake.”

At this point in the calf’s life, pastures are usually providing more of the energy and protein they require.

“We’re just giving them a small supplementation, keeping that papillae long and getting really good growth rates.”

As an example, Roney compared an unrestricted creep feeding situation — where calves consumed 370 kilograms of creep feed per head prior to weaning — to a controlled creep feeding situation that reduced intake to about 120 kg per head.

“If feed is $0.40 per kg, it’s a $100 per calf saving,” he said.

“The younger we feed animals, the higher the feed conversion, so that’s really the best time to supplement an animal.”

Watch for more livestock-related coverage from Ag in Motion 2025 in Glacier FarmMedia publications in the coming weeks.

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“Johne’s disease is particularly challenging to manage because we have so few options,” says Dr. Cheryl Waldner, professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine.

To help beef producers make better management decisions about a disease with such uncertainty, the Beef Cattle Research Council (BCRC) created an interactive tool to analyze testing and management options for Johne’s disease. Waldner helped develop the tool.

The chronic disease causes weight loss, persistent diarrhea and death in cattle, resulting in numerous negative effects on beef herds. In addition to premature culling, these effects can include reduced slaughter value, replacement costs, lost gain in calves, loss of genetics and considerable veterinary testing costs.

ALSO READ: Prairie researchers at work on Johne’s vaccines

Because calves younger than six months are more susceptible to Johne’s, efforts to reduce the spread of infection on calving grounds — like those used to reduce calf scours — can help manage the disease.

However, as the beef industry consolidates, the risk of Johne’s entering a herd through new animals bears watching.

“The only way to find and get rid of those infected animals so that they don’t transmit to our calf crop is by testing and culling, and that sounds pretty straightforward, but it’s not. This particular disease is very frustrating because it has a long silent phase,” says Waldner. It can take two to 10 years between the time an animal is infected to when it shows clinical signs, she adds.

Even when animals are shedding the virus, this can be inconsistent and may not show up in tests. As well, the accuracy of available testing is limited.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in this, and because of that, it makes it really hard for producers and veterinarians to try to evaluate the cost-benefit possibilities of actually doing a testing and culling program in their herd. There’s a lot of information to pull together, and it’s easier if we can basically get the computer to do it for us.”

The Johne’s disease risk-reward calculator “pulls together what we do know about the disease, how it might progress in individual animals, how it might spread in the herd and how well the diagnostic tests work in Canadian beef herds,” Waldner says.

“The tool can be customized to fit individual herd sizes, replacement strategies, plans for expansion and a wide range of possible testing possibilities.”

Two versions of the calculator, basic and advanced, are available on the BCRC website. Instead of running the model once and showing one scenario, the tool runs it multiple times and factors in the uncertainties presented by this disease to provide producers with a range of management scenarios.

“It’s a little bit more complicated than a lot of the Excel tools that we typically use for these types of calculations, but given the level of uncertainty, we needed something that allowed us to actually factor that uncertainty into the calculations.”

A key part of developing this tool was incorporating data from Canadian herds into the risk model. “The important thing for us was having this tool reflect data from western Canadian cow-calf herds,” Waldner says, noting much of the existing research on how this disease spreads was conducted in U.S. dairy herds and not useful to this context.

The Canadian Cow-Calf Surveillance Network provided some of the data used to create the model.

Although it’s difficult to determine how fast the disease spreads through a herd, data collected by the Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association on this topic helped to inform the model for the calculator. The association has worked with producers who have dealt with Johne’s disease to help track the progress of the disease in their herds, and many of the producers anonymously shared their data with the project developers.

Waldner notes the tool can’t predict exactly what will happen in a herd, but it does provide producers with scenarios to analyze that may help inform their management decisions.

“What I am hoping is that individuals will be able to make better decisions about whether it makes sense to test in their herds and to come up with a testing protocol that makes the most sense for them.”

The Saskatchewan government, Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association and Alberta Beef Producers also funded this calculator’s development.

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