Back at the start of 2023, the acronym ‘CALF HEALTH’ was chosen by the calf and youngstock team to base their newsletter articles on. Each letter represented a topic that contributed towards improving calf health.
Lambs are born with an immunological disadvantage due to immunoglobulins being unable to be passed through the placenta to the lamb during pregnancy, making them particularly vulnerable to diseases. During the first two hours of life the gut is 20-30% efficient at absorbing IgGs, but the capability of the gut declines to 0% after 24 hours. Consequently, it is crucial that lambs receive colostrum soon after birth in order to absorb sufficient antibodies to reduce the risk of disease and mortality.
Optimising calf and heifer growth rates enhances both the environmental and economic efficiency of dairy farms. Heifer rearing on a dairy farm accounts for over 20% of total farm costs. Feeding calves the required levels of energy and protein through feeding a good quality milk replacer and concentrate will boost their weight gain and development, which ultimately leads to more productive cows.
When environmental change occurs, it can have a short and long term negative effect on calf health and performance, however there are periods of time where change will be inevitable and out of our control such as humidity, air speed, temperature etc.
Although we cannot eradicate the risk completely, we can implement cost effective management strategies within the housing environment to help minimise disease incidence, reduce stress, and promote feed intake during the rearing and weaning period.
Calves have little to no immunity when they are born and therefore rely on colostrum in order to obtain immunoglobulins to fight pathogens they may encounter. If calves have little immunity it means that they are more susceptible to picking up diseases and becoming ill. In order to ensure that there is minimal risk of bacterial infection and to keep your calves healthy, we must pay attention to cleaning and sanitising equipment, ascontaminated feed can be a major risk to young calves.
Automatic calf machines are becoming an increasingly popular option for rearing calves, and although they are a great option when it comes to saving labour, there are some manual tasks that must be carried out in order to achieve optimum calf health.
Minerals are crucial part of any animals diet, whether they are macro minerals which are required in larger amounts, or trace minerals which are required in smaller amounts. Both these types of minerals are equally important and all add up to maintain health and performance. All minerals are available in natural feeds, however in order to achieve the optimum rate of minerals per day, a lot of this natural feed would need to be consumed.
