Calf Rearing: Laborious fun!

Today's post is all about rearing calves. Undoubtedly the most labour intensive task at this time of year!

Calf rearing at Tre Abbot

Now to start off I think I should admit I'm not an expert calf rearer. We run a simple system that suits our facilities and circumstances. There are many ways to rear calves and ultimately if you're happy with your calves and eventual heifers, then you're doing something right!

What I would say, however, is that I've seen calf rearing go wrong and have had to learn quickly which things can have the biggest positive effect on stock-person and animal.

With this in mind, here are my ground rules for calving in order of importance:

1) Colostrum: Every heifer calf is stomach tubed with 4 litres of colostrum within 6 hours of birth. Bulls with 2.5 litres. This is singly the most important thing you can do to improve calf health and mortality rates. Some may prefer to bottle feed, we stomach tube to keep the protocol easy and consistent for staff.

2) Cleanliness: Calves should always have clean bedding, clean forage to pick at, and if fed once a day, clean water to drink. This seems obvious, but fulfilling these requirements first requires good facilities. In the picture above you can see we use our silage clamp to house the calves. Straw bales are used to divide pens, encouraging calves to eat the clean straw walls, instead of soiled bedding. This space also provides good drainage and ease of access for bedding and feeding. In the past I've wasted a lot of time and energy trying to keep substandard pens clean.

3) Static groups: Calves should be grouped with similar aged animals, and not moved from their starting pen. It may be tempting to identify a "slow drinker" early on, and move it to a different group. But in doing so you run a risk. If that calf is burdened by something contagious, like scours or pneumonia, then you can quickly end up transferring this problem to a new group. We prefer to persevere with "slow" calves, and invariably they will eventually catch up.

Their are many other rules I could add to this list, but these are the essentials. My goal is to turn a fragile, milk dependant calf, into a cheap to keep weanling capable of growing well on grass. With this in mind here is a description of our rearing system:

Ad-lib concentrates with a coccidiostat offered throughout.

Day 0: 4L of colostrum

Day 1-10: 2.5L twice a day of whole milk

Day 11-Weaning*: 2.5L once a day, 500g CMR

*Calves can be weaned at 65Kg for a Friesian, but should be kept on ad-lib concentrates and straw until 85Kg.

Start weighing calves from 6 weeks old, if you can weigh a sample once a week it will have the added bonus of encouraging staff, as they can quantify their progress and see that "the end is in sight". 

Weighing this week has shown calves are growing at 1Kg/day, with the eldest group consuming 1.5Kg/day of concentrates.

Every herd will have its own challenges and health status. But I'm a great believer that keeping things simple and repeatable will give consistent results!

Emlyn

Residuals

Pre (3400KgDM) and Post (1400KgDM) Grazing heights in paddock 4

Grazing conditions have been excellent for the last 4 days. Cold winds have dried the farm, allowing cows to graze paddocks very well. Judging by the post grazing height, almost too well.

The two most important grazing rounds are the first and the last. In the first we try and graze out all the old winter growth, and the earlier we do this the better. Over winter grass enters a dormant phase where growth slows to a minimum, grass drymatter will increase, but overall herbage mass is static. Defoliation wakes the plant from this state and kick starts growth. Low residuals in the first round are particularly important, as any dead-matter in the sward is removed, maximising future growth and quality for subsequent rounds. If ever there was a time to treat cows a little meaner and graze harder, now is that time.

The exception to this rule is the above scenario, where residuals are under 1500KgDM. Here supplementing your grass with concentrates (or whatever you have locally) will have a high milk response and higher profitability than the decision to feed at other times. This is because:

1.) Cows grazing below 1500KgDM are telling you they are close to being underfed, they are close to their physical limit of grass utilisation. It stands to reason then, that feeding them more of a high quality feed will suddenly provide them with a higher net energy(ME) intake, and increase milk production.

2.) Lifting residuals to above 1500KgDM will result in faster regrowth as the grass is left with a higher reserve of sugars, from which to grow.

So this weeks grazing decision is obviously to supplement the grazing. Cows are being fed 4Kg of a 13ME, 14% Protein concentrate, along with roughly 1KgDM of average quality silage (10.5ME).

In a future post I'll discus energy intakes for grazing cattle, and how to think of grass purely as an energy source!