FARMER FOCUS: Clinical milk fever has hit us

In September our vets arranged for us to host a heifer-rearing talk with calf specialist Kat Bazely. This was highly relevant to what we are trying to achieve with our youngstock as it was geared towards improving growth rates and fundamentally reducing losses.

Obviously, a lot of time was spent discussing colostrum management as it’s such an important factor; determining how the calf grows and therefore milks when she starts lactating. Our protocol is to get six litres into the calf within 24 hours, the first three litre feed will definitely be within six hours, but ideally within 20 minutes.

There was a lot of emphasis on the early growth as Kat has been busy weighing thousands of heifers and has concluded that for the first 30 days calves are generally not growing. This may be reflected in our own calves as the concentrate intake seems to jump after three weeks. This is only a hunch, but when we start weighing them we will know for sure.

The dwindling maize supply has forced us to withdraw the maize from the milkers diet to allow the dry cows to have a grass free ration. Instead they are getting some very palatable first cut silage, but we have noticed a significant drop in milk, with the cows certainly showing their discontent in the parlour.

In July, we turned the dry cows out and now we are paying for it with clinical milk fever on every third- plus calver. From experience, the worst thing with milk fever is that any changes you make will take a month to show through. Needless to say, the dry cows have returned to their cubicles.

Unfortunately, we have had a blip in mastitis after a very good run without it. Already we are fairly certain it is linked to our chemical doser that has been having problems since installation. We think this culprit has been responsible for around half of our mastitis.

Brothers Ben and Sam Foote farm 150 dairy cows plus followers on 125ha with their parents in Hampshire. Production stands at 9,000kg, but this is expected to increase alongside the total of number of head