Farmer Writes: almost at the halfway point of intense calving

Calving is in full swing now in Clara with 10 or 12 cows calving most days. Most calves are thankfully arriving healthy, without too much trouble and the cows are reporting for duty in the parlour with very few health issues.

The focus for the next few weeks is to keep them all healthy and keep the workload under control.

The quickest way to increase the workload on the farm in the spring is to throw a few sick calves or cows into the mix. They just suck the energy out of the farm in spring time. To minimise the risk with the calves, all the cows were vaccinated with a scour vaccine three weeks before calving and all calves are stomach-tubed colostrum at birth.

The quickest way to increase the workload on the farm in the spring is to throw a few sick calves or cows into the mix

The calf feeders and houses are also washed out and disinfected regularly through the season and we keep a small hand sprayer in the wash area for disinfecting feeders, boots and overtrousers. The real pressure on calf health will probably come later in the season, when calf houses start to fill up.

For cow health in the parlour for the critical period, we are pre-foaming teats in our pre-milking routine.

We put the foam on the cows as they line up in the parlour and wipe it off 30 seconds later when stripping out the teats, before attaching the cluster.

The foam cleans and disinfects the teats. It also helps to prevent the spread of bugs between cows when stripping out milk.

The real pressure on calf health will probably come later in the season, when calf houses start to fill up

We will maintain this treatment for all cows for the first month of calving and continue with just fresh calvers and problem cows after that.

We also plan to use the footbath a lot more this spring to help prevent lameness.

We are making a conscious effort to go down the prevention rather than cure route over the last few years in an attempt to reduce the use of medicines.

The most obvious way to maintain a healthy herd through the spring is to keep them well-fed with good-quality feed.

We are making a conscious effort to go down the prevention rather than cure route over the last few years

The cows that have calved up to now have been out grazing most days and we’ve included a mix of grass and maize silage in the diet for the last week.

We have started them on 5kg of concentrate in the parlour and we will keep this under review, depending on grass availability through the spring.

We have about 120 cows calved now with numbers rising rapidly, so we should have half of the herd calved sometime next week. It’s intense for the first six weeks of the season but every cow calved is another one ticked off the list and, by the end of February, the list should be getting very small.

It’s intense for the first six weeks of the season but every cow calved is another one ticked off the list and, by the end of February, the list should be getting very small

The bull calves will hopefully start to move out of the yard over the next few weeks.

We have most of the early ones booked but we might bring some of the beef calves to the mart later in the season. It will be interesting to see how they go after all the worrying about them through the autumn.

The heifer calves are gone to the sheds with the automatic feeders. We will turn on the feeders this week and change them over to milk replacer. We had enough transition milk up to this to keep all of the fresh calves well-fed. Now, it’s time to get some milk into the tank and out the gate.

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