With only a week to go before calves start arriving, now is the time to put thoughts into action for a successful spring. Success comes in many forms and means different things to different people.
On a technical level, we can look at mortality rates, vet call-outs, percentage of the farm grazed, milk solids sold up to a certain date and hours worked per person as a measure of success.
At a softer, but nonetheless important level we should also evaluate the stress incurred on the people working on the farm during the spring. Anyone who achieves good technical performance with low levels of stress is definitely considered to be a success.
So, what are the things that are going to make success happen?
Animal health
There is nothing worse than having sick calves. It eats time, is totally demoralising and costs a fortune, in terms of both vet costs and losses. The cheapest and best defence against sick calves is to give enough colostrum. Yet many farmers struggle with this concept.
Letting the calf suck the cow is not good enough. The calf needs to get at least 3l of good-quality colostrum in as soon as possible. The fastest way is through a stomach tube, but some farmers prefer to get the calf to suck from a teat. This works well if the calf is fed within half an hour of birth. Because this is not always practical, you need to be able to feed with a stomach tube.
Anyone who achieves good technical performance with low levels of stress is definitely considered to be a success
There’s a lot of things the calf will withstand once it has had enough colostrum. Of course, good hygiene, good housing and vaccinations to prevent common diseases all help to ensure a trouble-free calf-rearing process. The quantity of milk and the frequency of feeding are of lesser importance compared to the things listed above.
On the cow side, health issues that can really affect performance include IBR and milk fever.
In the case of IBR, this can be vaccinated against. An outbreak is more likely to occur during a period of stress, so vaccinating in advance of calving is a good insurance policy. In terms of milk fever, the farms at highest risk are those that have fat cows at calving and are feeding silage that is high in potash. Managing body condition score (target is condition score 3 to 3.25 at calving) is important for fertility and to prevent metabolic disorders like milk fever and ketosis. Feeding a good dry cow mineral will help to prevent milk fever post-calving.
Stress
Calving is a stressful period for every farmer, but people deal with it in different ways. The spring of 2018 was probably the most difficult spring in most farmers’ memories.
How did you cope, or what did you do to help you get through that difficult spring? Some people like to get away from the farm to meet people, such as discussion group meetings, go to the mart, co-op store, etc. Some eat more food for stamina, while others prioritise getting plenty of rest, to give them enough energy for when they are working.
It’s also important to identify the things that make you stressed. Are there things you can do now to reduce the risk of that stress developing? Even if this costs money, such as buying extra feed or having extra help, it could be the right thing to do for your business, as it means the farmer, as the main decision maker, is thinking with a clear head.
Lean practices
In her book on lean dairy farming, Jana Hocken says tasks on a dairy farm can be divided into two categories: non-value-added (waste) actions or value-added actions.
She says farmers should look at the jobs that they do on a daily basis. Tasks like driving, moving, fixing, waiting, checking, adjusting, shifting, searching and correcting are all waste or non-value added tasks.
Tasks like milking, calving, building, testing, deciding, agreeing, supplying, counting, implementing and feeding are all value-added actions. The more of them you do, and the less of the non-value-added actions you do, the better.
Eliminating the amount of non-value-added tasks on the farm is a core principle of lean management. For a farmer working on their own, reducing and then outsourcing those non-value-added tasks to someone else should be a priority.
Eliminating the amount of non-value-added tasks on the farm is a core principle of lean management
The book also deals with flow on a farm. On most dairy farms, if you were to draw the flow of cows and calves at calving time, it would be like looking into a plate of spaghetti.
All of this movement takes time, adds to complications and increases the workload. Of course, the reason why the cows and calves go from A to B to C and so on is due to the infrastructure that is on the farm.
This article isn’t suggesting that that can change overnight, but a rethink of practices is suggested.
The use of individual calf pens, or moving calves to two or three other pens before they reach their final calf pen destination, is utter madness. Yet, it happens on the majority of farms. The book suggests that calves should move in a straight line and reach their final destination in as few steps as possible.
Christine Cummins and Amanda Dunn are technical managers with Bonanza Calf Nutrition. They have recently returned from New Zealand and the following is a summary of their findings on calf rearing there.
