Calf care critical practices

For the past six weeks, my life has felt like that of a calf manager on a large dairy — or at least what I imagine that role would feel like. We are in the middle of what I’m calling the summer of calves. It’s a full-scale calvalanche. We’ll have 90 calves born from May to August; we have 110 cows. How we ended up with quite this many calves arriving is a topic for another column, but the end result is that my days have been filled with calves and so have my thoughts.

One recurring thought is about how much calf care has changed since we started this adventure 20 years ago. What follows is a collection of practices I wish I had known about back then and are now critical to raising healthy calves.

Pour water in their ear

Cold water poured into the ear can help resuscitate an unresponsive newborn calf. I can’t remember where we learned this trick, but I know it works. The first time I tried it was on a bull calf that had been born fully enclosed in the amniotic sac. I happened to be checking the close-up pasture for calves and found him right after he slid out. I popped the sac and found a mostly unresponsive calf. I pulled my milking glove off, filled it with cold pond water and poured it into his ear. The calf shook his head, gasped, and just like that, he was breathing.

Dan got to practice the cold water trick himself a couple weeks ago, but he didn’t have a milking glove, so he filled his shoe with cold pond water instead. He was out checking dry cows and ended up assisting a twin birth — our seventh set of twins in six weeks. He delivered the second calf breech and limp; the cold water worked, and we ended up with a perfectly healthy large bull calf.

Weigh the milk replacer

Weighing milk replacer on a digital scale improves consistency, especially when multiple people are on the calf feeding roster. I can only imagine how much the concentration of our prepared milk replacer varied when we were measuring by the cupful.

The scale also saves sanity. Before we started using a scale, I can recall multiple occasions where I lost count of how many cups of powder I’d added to the transfer pail and had to dump the powder back in the bag and start counting over.

Never esophagus feed a sick calf

Sometimes, I wish esophagus feeders had never been invented. I try like heck to avoid esophagus feeding colostrum to newborn calves. Those calves always seem to take off slower than bottle-fed calves.

However, I absolutely will not esophagus feed a sick calf. If a calf doesn’t drink, there’s a good chance its gut motility is impaired and/or it doesn’t have an appetite because it doesn’t feel good. Force feeding milk or an electrolytes solution only worsens the gut backup and discomfort.

So, if a calf won’t drink, I follow the three Rs instead: rest, relieve discomfort and replace electrolytes.

— Rest: We humans don’t feel like eating when we’re ill, so why do we insist that calves need to? Sometimes, our guts just need a rest. I’ll let a calf skip a feeding without intervening. Nine times out of 10, they’ll be back at the bottle holder at the next feeding and back to 100% consumption.

— Relieve discomfort: If a calf doesn’t drink for two consecutive feedings, then I’ll give it either an analgesic to relieve pain, kaolin pectin to soothe the gut or both.

— Replace electrolytes: All of our calves have access to fresh water and a small trace mineralized salt block. Calves off feed are frequently at both the drinking cup and the salt block, so I let them replace electrolytes and fluids as they desire. The combination of allowing calves’ digestive systems to rest and allowing them free choice access to salt and water helps most ill calves recover without any further intervention.

When I decide that a calf needs extra fluids or electrolytes, I’ll offer a bottle of electrolyte solution between milk feedings or provide a pail of electrolytes for them to drink free choice. I also add beef gelatin to the electrolytes solution — one tablespoon per quart of electrolytes. Gelatin helps repair the intestinal lining (and the small amount does not turn the electrolytes into Jell-O).

Two doses of scour vaccine

After a really challenging experience with calves and E. coli the year we started farming, we quickly discovered the benefit of a scour vaccine for dry cows. We now give two doses of vaccine — once at dry-off and another dose midway through the dry period. We’re also diligent about getting as many feedings of first and second milking colostrum into a calf as possible. While we still see some calves affected by rotavirus and coronavirus, most cases are very mild. Prevention really is worth a pound of cure when it comes to calves, especially when you have three times more calves than usual to care for.

Sadie Frericks and her husband, Glen, milk 100 cows near Melrose, Minnesota. They have three children: Dan, Monika, and Daphne. Sadie also writes a blog at www.dairygoodlife.com. She can be reached at sadiefrericks@gmail.com.