Dairy calves are the future of your herd. In addition to excellent nutrition, high-quality facilities and veterinary care, give calves the greatest opportunity to meet their future potential by having the infrastructure necessary for employees to perform up to their potential.

Editor’s note: This article is part one in a two-part series on what to look for during a calf pen walk-through. Part two: Calf hutch walk-throughs: What you need to look for. Many times when I’m walking calves on a farm, an employee will ask, “So, what are you looking at anyway?”

Calves are routinely raised in single pens until weaning or even longer, but housing milk-fed calves in pairs or groups is increasing in popularity. This, in part, is due to the availability of automatic feeders and the potential of reducing labor requirements per head.

Cow 7250 delivered a healthy heifer calf yesterday. Cow 7250 looks good – her eyes look alert, she’s eating fairly well, and she shows no signs of discomfort. Her temperature is normal and, from all outward appearances, she seems ready to begin her next lactation without incident.

Check out scenes from the 2016 Dairy Strong event that brought more than 600 people to Madison, Wisconsin, Jan. 12-14.

As technology in the dairy industry expands, so do the abilities of producers to prevent disease and monitor herd health. In light of these advances, what role will the next generation of veterinarians serve on commercial dairies?

Raising replacement heifers is one of the most costly aspects of a dairy farm. Heifers don’t bring a return for two years or more until they enter the milking string. They are also the future of the dairy herd, and without them, the dairy wouldn’t last long.

The call to serve comes in different ways, but it came for Scott and Astrid Gottschalk through the telephone 20 years ago.

Lately the world is buzzing with talk of “climate change.” If the weather is too cold, it is global cooling. If the weather is too hot, it is global warming. The major flips back and forth in the weather has caused some debate in the scientific community. They can’t decide if it is global cooling or global warming, so they started calling it climate change.

Q: My water pump is slowing down, so I thought I would replace the impeller. How do I get it off? A:  (By regular contributor Brad Nelson) Most, if not all automotive water pumps have the impeller pressed onto the shaft. In easy layman’s terms, that means the shaft is just a smidgen larger than the bore of the impeller.