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I have been fascinated with calf barn ventilation for more than a decade, to the point where I have made its study the focus of much of my professional career. Calf raisers around the world often have the same questions when it comes to ventilation, and this article will discuss the three most common calf barn ventilation questions I receive.
Thousands of dollars are invested in every heifer from the point of birth to her first calving. With this in mind, a 100-cow dairy will invest nearly $112,000 a year, and a 1,000-cow dairy will put down over a million dollars.
It’s common knowledge that feeding adequate volumes of high-quality colostrum benefits the health and growth of the calf. It’s also known that calves that receive good-quality colostrum right after birth carry those benefits throughout their lives as heifers and even into the lactating herd.
Imagine that your car will go 60 miles per hour in the summer but only 30 mph when the temperature is freezing, and it will not run at all when the temperature falls to 0ºF. This is an accurate illustration of how cold temperature adversely affects rate of gain in calves.
As I travel around the country and go from farm to farm, I see a good trend beginning to take hold as dairy producers are understanding the value of carrying extra heifer inventory.
As more research is being done on calf health, it is being discovered that common calf management practices that introduce antibiotics during critical development periods might be doing more harm than good.
Just as more is less, bigger is not always better when it comes to the growth and development of dairy heifers. The nature and growth of dairy cattle has vastly changed from decade to decade, and as traits have been genomically bred out of cattle, often the idea of “bigger equals better,” has become a misjudged trend.
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