Abstract

Introduction: There has been recent interest in feeding sodium butyrate (SB) to improve the performance of young stock and reducing crude protein (CP) content of concentrates due to increasing price of protein feedstuffs. Therefore it is suitable to investigate these areas to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of calf rearing, which is the most expensive period in beef production (Moran 2002). The objective of this experiment was to investigate the effect of supplementing calf milk replacer (CMR) with SB and concentrates with either 160 or 180g/kg CP on performance of artificially reared dairy breed bull calves to 12 weeks.