Tag Archives: feeding calves

How Calf Care Changes

Amanda Brunker learning how to feed calves

We have sixty calves now and they are divided into a very neat thirty heifers (females) and thirty bulls. Last year we had 40 females and 20 males when we hit 60 but it ended up fairly 50:50 when calving was finished. As a dairy herd, we prefer heifers – partly because we are continually working on improving the breeding of our dairy herd and dairy calves will either go into our herd or will be sold to other dairy [...]

A Day in the Life of a Calf Rearer

‘Are you out doing a bit?’ he asked with a smile.

8:48am and I needed to be walking the kids to the school bus at 8:50 before I had a quick shower and dashed off to do a mentoring session, I had 9 more calves to feed. I’d been out for an hour and been delayed with a stubborn newborn. I was feeding a total of 120 calves. I felt the state of my waterproofs probably showed that I did more [...]

Did You Know Calves Can Get Nipple Confusion?

Did you know that babies can have nipple confusion? I didn’t until I was in the maternity hospital after my first and I was advised to feed him with expressed milk from a bottle occasionally before he reached 6 weeks or otherwise he might not be able to drink from the bottle if I wanted to leave him with someone while I got my hair cut etc. ?I totally forgot about it with my daughter and leaving her [...]

Compact Calving and Calf Feeding

95 calves in 23 days with 50 more to go. 2 losses (one was the c-section) but where there’s life, there’s a chance of death death! We’ve had 5 sets of twins, one set of bulls, two sets of heifer/bull, ?two sets of heifers (double bonus as a heifer born with a twin bull will almost certainly be infertile due to the male hormones in the womb – we did have one 4 years ago that was seen bulling and [...]