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The 2015 Joint Annual Meeting of the American Dairy Science Association (ADSA) and the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) took place in Orlando, Florida, in July.
For Kevin Souza, the importance of proper calf nutrition has been his biggest lesson in calf care in the past 18 years he’s spent as the managing partner at Victory Farms in Millbank, South Dakota.
Imagine an employee wearing gloves in a clean, dry pen skillfully administering high-quality colostrum to a calf born just minutes ago. The calf’s navel has already been dipped, the calf dried, and all information recorded in the logs.
Automatic calf feeding has become very popular in the U.S. in the past few years. The technology offers plenty of opportunities but also requires a refocus on management.
The decision of whether autofeeders fit your calf program needs to be made only after careful consideration of how the opportunities and challenges will play out on your operation.
Is it normal for a calf to scour between 7 and 14 days old? The answer is no, and the fact people think this indicates calf scours are pretty common. DCHA has published that up to 25 percent of calves scouring meets their Gold Standards.
Developing or improving your farm’s guidelines for cleaning and sanitizing calf housing might seem like a daunting task. Try looking at it from a different angle. As a dairy farmer, you are more than likely familiar with the careful, well-thought-out routine of cleaning and sanitizing equipment in your parlor or milk house.
With the advent of on-farm pasteurizers, more and more dairy producers and custom calf raisers are choosing non-salable waste milk as the primary source of liquid calf rations. In fact, industry estimates suggest nearly half of all dairy calves raised in the U.S. are fed a diet of whole milk for at least part of the pre-weaned stage.
A technology that has become a “norm” on European dairy operations, automated calf feeders have changed the system of feeding and observing calves in a multitude of ways. Seeing these results, U.S. dairymen can’t avoid the question: How could this technology better their operations and improve the health, growth and milk consumption of calves on their own farms?
Feeding programs for dairy calves vary widely between farms today, influencing both the behavior and performance of the calf early in life and potentially having longer-term effects on the growing heifer.
Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is commonly observed in dairy calves and has both acute and long-term effects on the performance of those calves. This disease is the most common and costly disease affecting the North American cattle industry. The key to preventing respiratory disease is to reduce stress and vaccinate animals against viruses and bacteria that cause disease.
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