Calves & Heifers

Healthy calves and a successful group of youngstock teammates (employees) can set the tone for morale across the entire dairy. When the calves are happy, the owners are happy. Happy, healthy calves tend to transition into healthy springers and then into productive lactating cows.

A newborn calf is the most vulnerable animal on a dairy. Born with an immature immune system, the calf can’t effectively handle pathogen challenges in the environment until 3 to 4 weeks old. In the meantime, young calves are bombarded with a host of stressors and disease-causing pathogens.

One question commonly asked by dairy producers is: Which forage sources should I use when beginning to feed calves a total mixed ration (TMR) after weaning?

When temperatures dip into single digits and below, dairy farmer Stacy Jauquet up-levels her calf care program to maintain a zero-mortality rate, even through winter’s extremes.

Note: These tips are in response to a question posed on the Progressive Dairy Twitter account. To submit questions for future Ask a Vet columns, please click here to email inquiries, with subject, “Ask a Vet.”

Extensive calf rumen development studies were done in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s at Iowa State University, at Cornell University and at the United Kingdom National Institute for Research in Dairying. R. G. Warner in 1991 addressed rumen development in calves from a historical perspective. Key conclusions were: