Calves & Heifers

How to raise healthy calves. It’s a subject that gets beat to death – I know that. But what if we are making it harder than it needs to be? What we often fail to focus on are the foundational pieces of healthy animals.

Let’s take everything you know about feeding pasteurized waste milk and set it aside for a moment. There’s a lot of information out there, and I think we can all agree, it’s good to take a step back sometimes and reevaluate.

Houses. Relationships. Businesses. What do all three have in common? They all are built from a solid foundation, and calf hutches are no different.

When it comes to raising calves, Mohomed Elsheikh, DVM, feed department and calf manager at North Florida Holsteins, a 6,000-cow dairy in Bell, Florida, believes that proper management is the key to their success.

Since dairy calves are born immune-deficient, successful passive transfer of immunoglobulin G (IgG) is essential to protecting calves from any disease challenges they encounter early in life. Successful passive transfer of IgG is defined as when the blood IgG concentration of the calf is equal to or greater than 10 milligrams of IgG per milliliter from 1 to 7 days old.

Keeping calves alive means you have a successful calf-raising program, right? While it’s true that low mortality is a critical metric, in today’s economic environment many other parameters contribute to calf-raising success.