Several factors affect the Heifer´s growth and development, the newborn calf´s feeding of co-lostrum during its first hours of life is one important factor. The colostrum contains higher amount of immunoglobulins and insulin growth factors compared to matured milk. A high intake of immunoglobulins from colostrum results in a high blood concentration of immuno-globulins until the age of eight months. This leads to a lower incidence of diseases that can affect the growth and development negatively. Diarrhea is the most common disease in calves younger than 30 days.

Heifer?s growth may be divided into three main phases: calf period, puberty and pregnancy. When the Heifers are about three months old a critical period begins. This period ends when the Heifer reach puberty and have her first oestrus at around 9-12 months of age. In the critical period the mammary gland starts to grow at a fast rate and Insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) transport the growth signals to the mammary glands.

In this essay I have summarized important factors for an effective, but also successful, way to raise and house Heifers. This study can be used for other dairy farms to use as guidelines in their process to raise Heifers. To let outside Heifer growers house, feed and have the Heifers pregnant before return, can save a lot of work. But also moneywise, when the care and individual programs makes them strong and increases the growth.The result is a faster breeding and an earlier time for their first calving.In Sweden the Heifers tend to be older if you compare with Denmark or United States where the custom Heifer raising is well known and growing. One reason can be the Swedish laws regarding outside grassing for all cows during the summer months.

This master thesis is about the collaboration between the custom dairy Heifer grower and thedairy producer.The custom dairy Heifer grower is a rather unusual strategy of reproductive management inSweden compared to other countries like U.S. and Denmark where the specialization withindairy production gone much further. In these countries the research also has reached muchfurther within this type of industry. However in Sweden there has been research made in thearea of collaboration, but then only within collaborations in the industries of crop production,dairy production and pork meat.The down going trend of profitability within dairy production together with poor profitabilityin the beef industry could partly remedy if more collaborations around Heifer contractingwould arise. But since the industry still is of a rare kind in Sweden the knowledge about howthese types of collaborative arrangements works and their contracts are put together is poor.By that the aim of this master thesis is formulated as follows: "how is usually thecollaborative arrangement between the dairy producer and custom dairy Heifer growerdesigned".

Automatic milking systems (AMS) are part of a growing trend in Sweden and the number of milk-producing farms is decreasing rapidly. One main reason for the AMS is its ability to facilitate work for the farmer. The effects of introduction prior to calving have not been documented earlier and farmers are not in agreement, however they seldom see a problem with the introduction. The aim of this report is to find differences between two groups of Heifers, where one group is trained i.e. introduced to the AMS before calving and the other group is introduced after calving.

When cows in Sweden are inseminated the heat strength is reported to the Swedish milk-recording scheme and AI scheme. Cows that show strong signs of estrus are desirable and the trait is included in the Swedish breeding goal. A strong heat makes it easier to inseminate at the right time and to avoid long and expensive days open. Since ten years the heat strength is scored from one to five by the farmer and reported to the milk-recording scheme and AI scheme. Earlier the score was from one to three and the decision was made by the AI technician.

Most of the beef production in Sweden has been integrated with milk production. Since the 1990:s, the number of dairy cows has decreased. A specialised beef production has developed in purpose to compensate for this decrease. The consumption of beef have increased in the last decade, but the Swedish production has no followed this trend. In 2004, the percentage of beef self-sufficiency in Sweden was 60 %.

In Sweden, there has been a continuous increase in the volume of housing construction for dairy cattle. Since 2004, the number of new, rebuilt and extended dairy cow houses undergoing preliminary inspection by the authorities has grown. The livestock farms have mostly focused on cow units instead of calf and Heifer sheds; which has led to a need for information in this area. The purpose of the study was to improve advisors? knowledge about bovine building construction and function; to enable them to provide more qualified advice to conventional and organic milk producers who sustain larger herds.

This work is a literature review along with interviews from nine suckler herds. How to reducecalf mortality in the cow herd is the focus of this paper. To get profitability of a herd, it isimportant that you get a live calf per cow and year. Good fertility of the cows thus is veryimportant. During the years 2007 - 2008, approximately 5.5% of all calves born by beef cowsdied and about 8.5% of the calves born by Heifers died.

The aim of this study was to compare activity, lying down and getting up behaviour, weight gain and cleanliness in Heifers in cubicles versus on deep-litter. The study was conducted from autumn of 2005 until autumn of 2006 in a commercial organic dairy herd with 340 cows. In 2005 the farm rebuilt half of the young stock accommodation from deep-litter pens to cubicles. The experiment used 150 Heifers of the breeds Swedish Red, Swedish Holstein and crossbreeds between these, all born on the farm. The animals were divided into three blocks based on breed and within each block they were sorted after increasing age. The youngest Heifer in each block was randomly allocated to one of two groups, cubicle or deep-litter pen.

Difficult calvings and stillbirths are problems in Swedish dairy production that result in large expenses for the farmers and welfare issues concerning the animals. A common opinion is that the live weight of SRB and SLB is increasing, and whether increased weights have caused the increase in calving problems has been discussed. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the relative birth weight (calf/cow) and calving difficulty and stillbirth, respectively. The importance of breed and parity for the relative weight has been investigated, and comparisons with previous studies have been made to evaluate whether the relative weight has changed over the last decades or not. The study was based on 807 calvings, registered during the period 1993-2003 in the experimental dairy herd of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Jälla).

The milk production per cow has increased considerably during the last 50 years and due to the breeding for higher milk production also brings decreased reproduction efficiency. In a Swedish study 1996 it was shown that on average only half of all estruses were detected. Every time a farmer fails to detect oestrus it costs the farmer about 1200 Swedish crones and the need of means of detecting oestrus is therofore large. With this study we wanted to investigate if heart rate respectively crystallisation of vaginal mucus (arborisation) could be useful means of detecting oestrus. We monitored two oestrus cycles in four Heifers.

Oestrus in dairy cattle has changed over the last decades, the duration has decreased and the intensity of oestrus has declined. A possible explanation can be their high and increasing milk production. Heifers ability to show oestrus is probably not affected to the same extent. The aim of this study was to estimate and compare oestrus duration and strength in Heifers of the Swedish Red and Holstein breeds. Standing oestrus has been the primary oestrus sign during many years.

Since long, Sweden has had exceptionally low calf mortality compared to most other countries. The tradition has been to keep calves in individual pens. With increasing number of cows per herd there is now a larger interest in more efficient and economical group systems for housing calves. However it has been noticed that bigger herds have more health problems and higher calf mortality than smaller herds. The early signs of disease are harder to detect when the animals are not fed manually.

This study is based on an earlier interdisciplinary study made by Redbo et al., (2000), Extensive cattle production systems ? out wintering, which lasted over two winters, 97/98 and 98/99, with two groups of Heifers indoors and two groups of Heifers outdoors raised in different environments, indoors or outdoors during their second winter. Both indoor and outdoor Heifer groups were fed grass silage ad libitum throughout the experimental period that lasted from October until May. The objective of this study was to evaluate the long term effects of being raised in these two environments. This study includes data collected during the period lasting from the start of the experiment of Redbo et al., (2000) until the Heifers had calved a second time and the results mainly deal with the performance of the animals after the experiment during their first two calvings and their first lactation.