Future-proofing your calves

25 March 2019

With the summer weather hanging around in many areas, it’s easy to be lulled into complacency. Yet the start of the new dairy season is only months away and so is the busy calving period.

Now is a good time to start considering your calf-rearing strategy for the coming season. Giving your calves the best start possible will set them up to be healthy and productive members of your milking herd in two years’ time. And one thing that’s absolutely essential to a good start is feeding colostrum; clean, good-quality colostrum, preferably from the mother’s first milking.

Unlike in humans, a cow’s placenta does not allow for important protective immune factors to cross from the mother’s blood to that of the calf she carries. This means calves are born without any immune protection and are very vulnerable to diseases and bacterial infections from the moment they hit the ground.

The good news is colostrum provides high amounts of the necessary immune factors (called immunoglobulins) to protect the calf. But the bad news is the level of these life-saving immune factors in colostrum drop very quickly during the first 24 hours after calving. What’s more, the calf’s ability to absorb them also declines rapidly during its first 24 to 48 hours of life.

Timing, therefore, is crucial. To be on the safe side, make sure the calf is fed colostrum for at least three to four days. This mimics the timeframe in which colostrum changes to regular milk in the udder.

After the colostrum changes into normal milk, that milk provides all the necessary nutrients for the calf to grow up and fully develop.

Unfortunately, it is often neither practical nor economical to leave the calf with the cow after birth and this is where a good quality calf milk replacer (CMR) such as Ancalf^™ comes into play.

A quality whole milk-based CMR is specially formulated to mimic cow’s milk and to provide good curding and all the necessary nutrients (fats, proteins, sugars, minerals and vitamins) for calves to thrive.

Some farmers want to use the excess colostrum and milk available at this time to feed their calves from four days onwards. In principle there is nothing wrong with doing this, provided the colostrum/milk is stored hygienically to reduce the risk of disease and diarrhoea.

But one problem with this practice is the solids content (the nutrient content) can vary considerably from day to day and this means the young calf may not consistently receive optimal nutrient levels.

A good way to address this is to enrich your excess colostrum/milk with a good quality CMR such as Ancalf™. Not only does the calf gets additional minerals and vitamins, they will also get a coccidiostat, which is very important.

Time and labour savings are additional benefits; building up the solid content to one feed a day may be enough for calves older than 10 days.

For example, adding 300 grams (g) of Ancalf™ to two litres of clean excess colostrum/milk can provide the cow enough solids to allow once-a -day feeding. NB: if the calf is currently fed excess colostrum/milk twice a day, introduce the once-a-day enriched practice gradually over several days, by slowly increasing the amount of added CMR and decreasing the amount of colostrum/milk from four to two litres. As usual, with once-a-day feeding, always make sure she has plenty of clean water available to drink during the day.

Whatever your calf-rearing strategy, remember to start your calf’s life with three to four days of high-quality colostrum, starting within hours of her being born. If fresh colostrum is unavailable, consider a powdered alternative such as JumpstartTM before switching to a good quality, curding CMR.

By Dr Kerst Stelwagen, a nutrition expert and consulting dairy scientist at SciLactis

Article supplied by NZAgbiz