Hannah is farmers daughter that has grown up on a beef and sheep farm, with a pedigree herd of Hereford cows. After completing a diploma in Agriculture at Walford Collage, she then went onto work on a dairy farm, milking and calf rearing a Jersey herd.
Hannah then visited New Zealand where she worked and travelled the country, including rearing calves, to working on a beef and sheep station. On returning from New Zealand Hannah worked for Genus as an AI Technician, she then went back on the Jersey herd as herdsman where she worked hard to improve fertility and calf growth rates.
Keeping teats clean on any feeder or the cows when harvesting colostrum is so important to reduce the build up of bacteria, this helps greatly with producing a strong, healthy calf. I always think that if you wouldn’t drink/ eat from it then why should the calf have to?
Residues from calf colostrum, milk or milk replacer are great places for pathogens to grow from. According to Dr. Sam Leadley, Attica Veterinary Associates, the goal of cleaning and sanitizing calf feeding equipment is to control bacterial growth by removing them from surfaces, killing any that remain, removing their food and water sources, and lowering the pH to prevent further growth.
It is important to monitor performance of heifers in order to meet goals to get the heifer developed and grown well to optimise lifetime performance. Calving at 24 months has been shown to be the optimum for economic and lifetime performance but it is important that heifers meet key targets at critical stages in the rearing programme.
Rearing dairy heifers from birth to first calving can be costly, but they are the future of the herd and it is important to get right. The aim is to inseminate heifers at 14- 15 months old to be calving down at 24 months.
In cattle, puberty is dependent on weight not age - with puberty beginning when a heifer reaches 40% of its mature body weight. Heifers which have shown heat at least twice before insemination for the first time at 15 months have the best fertility and the best chance of getting pregnant.
Calves are born with no immunity and rely on colostrum to gain immunity against disease, with colostrum being the first feed, cleanliness is so important. By following simple steps and putting hygiene protocols in place you can minimise the risk of disease in calves.
The weather is getting cooler and you don’t want your calves to experience cold stress. Calves' lower critical temperature is 15ºc, so you don’t want them to be putting energy into keeping warm instead of growth and keeping healthy.
Cold Stress in newborn calves significantly decreases the rate of absorption of immunoglobulins up to 15 hours after first feed of colostrum making them more susceptible to certain diseases. Also putting energy into keeping warm instead of growing results in lower growth rates.
Farmers are looking to produce strong, healthy, profitable animals, we know most of the development happens in the pre-weaning stage, this is an important stage that will set them up for the future.
Building strong immunity, maintaining good growth rates, high health and decreasing disease exposure are all the factors that go towards improving calf survival and rearing a calf that will be more productive in the herd. Calves thrive on routine, if there are too many changes and not enough consistency are your calves trying to tell you something?
Disbudding and castrating are painful procedures for calves. Recent research shows that calves experience a negative emotional response for up to 22 hours after for some time. However, these behavioural and physiological responses can be reduced greatly or avoided.
Cryptosporidiosis is one of the most common causes of calf scour. Calves are usually affected shortly after birth and develop scour at around 5-7 days. Infected calves suffer permanent damage to the intestinal lining which reduces their ability to absorb nutrients and water. It can affect growth rates and push back the age at first calving.
The calves natural feeding behaviour is to suckle off their dam little and often like an ad-lib system. Suckled calves would have around 10/15L of milk a day which is always fresh and warm, giving them more than 1.5kg of dry matter per day from milk. This is coupled with lower solid feed concentration intake and gradual rumen development.
An increasing number of studies are suggesting we should be feeding our jersey cattle and smaller stature calves differently to holsteins and larger breeds. As crossbreeding within the dairy industry is becoming more popular, the number of smaller stature calves is increasing.
