Effect of Milk-Feeding Frequency and Calcium Gluconate Supplementation on Growth, Health, and Reproductive and Metabolic Features of Holstein Heifers at a Rearing Farm

© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ; Simple Summary: Female calves are the future, in terms of production, in every Holstein herd. Therefore, optimum rearing enhances productivity. Rearing dairy heifers involves important aspects of their early life that can affect their future efficiency. One of these key issues is nutrition management. Appropriate nutrition management impacts genetic performance, calf growth, and future productive and reproductive outcomes, as has been previously demonstrated in the literature. Traditionally, the recommended feeding strategies for dairy calves stipulate two daily milk replacement meals in a restricted diet. However, studies regarding feeding times point out different results in terms of efficiency, growth, and health in Holstein calves. We studied the effect of increasing feeding times (three instead of two per day) but with the same amount of milk replacer daily. Moreover, we included a supplementation of calcium gluconate to study its impact on growth, health, and productive and reproductive indexes in calves. We aimed to enhance welfare and digestive health early in life, expecting to induce positive medium- and long-term effects in the heifers. In fact, we observed a “catch-up” in the growth of calves since weaning, where supplementation with calcium gluconate appeared to reduce animal metabolic stress. We indeed observed a decreasing trend in the number of artificial inseminations per pregnancy, by 0.2 points, in heifers fed with milk replacer thrice daily. Finally, we confirmed significant correlations between early health and growth and reproductive efficiency. Although the medium- and long-term effects of these novel strategies were relatively weak, these management schemes seem to be promising for heifer rearing. ; Abstract: We compared the effects of milk-feeding in ...