CALVES & HEIFERS

A newborn calf is the most vulnerable animal on a dairy. Born with an immature immune system, the calf can’t effectively handle pathogen challenges in the environment until 3 to 4 weeks old. In the meantime, young calves are bombarded with a host of stressors and disease-causing pathogens.

Extensive calf rumen development studies were done in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s at Iowa State University, Cornell University and the U.K. National Institute for Research in Dairying.

There are many topics to discuss when managing heifer inventory. Producers give careful thought to feed and labour costs, reproduction, semen strategies, etc. – the list can go on and on.

Have you ever bought a new tractor and wished you would have recorded all the little things the dealer rep explained and showed to you? Calf raisers might very well have the same experience when installing autofeeders.

Dairy herd management is very data driven with exceptional progress made in the use of data from areas such as feeding, parlour operation, milk production and herd health to make timely decisions influencing dairy profitability.

Fat is an energy-dense nutrient that is a major component in calf milk replacers (MRs) and dry feeds. Over the last 15-plus years, there have been an array of studies looking at MR formulas with different crude-protein-to-fat ratios.