Calf & Youngstock

With animal welfare becoming an ever-increasing concern for the consumer and becoming more prominent in dairy contracts. Recent research has highlighted the importance of physical enrichment for calves in their environment. Studies from University of Reading suggest that pen enrichment can promote natural behaviours, reduce stress and frustration amongst calves (Mason and Burn, 2011).  

Giving calves more choice in how to express natural behaviours, will boost their welfare as well as highlighting any potential calf health implications earlier, with calves in poorer health tending to not utilising enrichment methods as much; this ultimately leads to better overall health and performance. Offering choice accommodates individual differences in their behaviours, and can give greater insights into how to detect illness by observing changes in behaviour.

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.

Calving is a stressful time for both cow and calf. This can suppress a cow’s immune system and calves are born without any immunity leaving them both susceptible to infections. One of the key ways in which to minimise health risks and optimise health and performance (for both cow and calf) is to assess hygiene in and around the calving pen.

Whether cows calving in individual or group pens, good hygiene should always be mandatory for your calf pens. This will help reduce naval infections, joint ill and reduce risk of scours for calves as well as helping to reduce mastitis and uterine infections in the cow, allowing her to be more productive in the following lactation. 

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.

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.

Scour (Rotavirus coronavirus) in calves is quickly spread via the faecal-oral route, therefore removing sick calves from the group as soon as possible not only limits the spread of disease but makes them easier to treat. By leaving these clinically sick calves in the pen you risk the rest of the group suffering sub-clinically. These sub-clinical symptoms may not be as visible but will be an underlying contributor to poor performance. Isolated calves should remain separated from the main herd even after symptoms have subsided as they will still be shedding oocysts.

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.

Research trials have shown that feeding higher volumes of milk can lead to many benefits for calf, heifer and cow performance as well as the farmer. However, as we encourage higher litres there is often some reluctancy due to the following myths.

Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) or pneumonia causes inflammation of the lung tissue and airways.  Often, its damage is irreversible and you often cannot prevent pneumonia from having an effect later in life. Even mild cases of pneumonia can have an impact on daily live weight gain (DLWG) and feed conversion efficiency (FCE), increasing the cost of production.

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.