This is the third article in a four-part series about three of UW-Madison’s Agricultural Research Stations. The pieces are by Chris Barncard, UW-Madison Strategic Communications. Photos by Michael P. King, UW–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
In Arlington, Wisconsin, only about 20 miles north of campus, Lautaro Rostoll-Cangiano, a UW-Madison assistant professor of animal and dairy sciences, is studying how differences in diet and environment affect the development of immune systems in dairy and beef cattle.
To keep producing milk, dairy cows need to give birth to new calves every year. For decades, farmers focused on using calves to replace milking cows and improve their productivity over time. But Heather White, a UW-Madison animal and dairy sciences professor who studies cow nutrition, says breeding has become so successful that farmers no longer need so many replacement calves to achieve those goals.
“But we still need to have calves for milk production, so the farmers went looking for other opportunities,” she adds.
Between record-high beef prices and some of the smallest cattle herd numbers in decades, dairy farmers have found the new and lucrative solution of breeding some of their less-productive milking animals — as much as half their herd in some cases — with meat-producing breeds like Angus cattle. Those crossbred calves, called “beef x dairy” or “beef-on-dairy” crosses, are sold for or raised as beef cattle. But the farmers are straying into relatively unknown territory.
“Right now, more and more farmers are breeding their dairy cows with beef cattle, but we don’t know much about the best ways to raise those calves,” says Rostoll-Cangiano.
Long-time nutritional research has led to optimized diets that look very different depending on a cow’s future “career” as a meat or milk producer. But, what to do with beef-on-dairy crosses? Should they eat what a dairy calf eats or what a beef calf eats? Or should they have a hybrid diet?
“The farmers have a lot of questions on how to raise these animals, how to feed these animals,” says Rostoll-Cangiano. “We want to know how to use that diet to best program their immune system to keep them healthy.”
His lab is studying a group of new beef-on-dairy calves, trying out a diet that includes beneficial microbes, called probiotics, to see how they affect microbial communities in the calves’ guts and shape their immune systems.
“It’s interesting to work in the lab, where the results tell us what’s going on,” says graduate student Martina Mancheno, who comes to the station to collect tissues samples for the study but analyzes them back on campus. “But I like to come out here and work on the farm more, to be with the animals.”
That, Rostoll-Cangiano says, is what makes Arlington — with its large herd of cows and centers for sheep and pigs and plant and soil science, to boot — an invaluable resource.
“We have tremendous facilities,” he says. “We may be the only university in the country that has this kind of access to animals and also the staff that understand both a research facility and a farm environment in a way that makes our research as useful as it can be.”
Stay tuned for Part 4, featuring the Hancock ARS.
