Farmer Focus: Calf losses harsh reminder to get basics right
© Steffan Hill With 45% of the herd calved since our start date 11 days ago, the holidays are well and truly over. Like any year, this hard launch into the season has thrown us some curveballs along the way.
No words are truer than the saying: “with livestock comes deadstock”.
See also: Benefits of feeding transition milk to calves
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Some mortality is inevitable during this time, but nothing is more frustrating than losing calves in ways that you can’t control – especially future replacement heifers.
It certainly humbles you very quickly when you lose animals, but as workload and fatigue only increase from here, it’s important to remind ourselves of what is essential to get right.
First, we ensure that our calves are receiving at least 3 litres of colostrum after calving. To reduce labour intensity, our colostrum is pooled together each morning.
However, by Brix-testing all the colostrum, we can be fussy about which incoming cows will be used, improving the likelihood that calves will receive more immunoglobulins and antibodies.
We have also gone back to last year’s strategy of what I call the “feed-to-fill” method. Feeding calves milk until they are full, which is usually 7-8 litres/day, is important to prevent any limits on growth from intake.
While we still have an average of five cows calving a day, there is enough transition milk from fresh cows to feed calves this way. We can then start to reduce the amount of milk fed to the calves once meal and haylage are introduced, to promote rumen development.
We are still only on/off grazing once a day with a top-up of restricted silage. A very wet winter and a run of intermittent rain showers has kept paddocks much wetter than desired, preventing us from letting cows out permanently.
As I write, we have about 10% of the milking platform grazed to residuals of 1,550-1,700kg dry matter/ha, with the spring rotational planner expecting us to hit 100% by 15 April.
I like to think of spring grazing like moving a car from stationary to driving, with buffer silage as the clutch, and grazing as the accelerator.
It’s a balancing act, where lingering on the clutch will slow the take-off into the season, but too much accelerating will cause you to stall the car completely.
Then again, it’s probably easier to just buy a car driven by a robot.