Cows were scanned a week ago and all but one are in calf. Not to sound like a complaining farmer, but this has scuppered my plans slightly as I intended weaning the empty cows first and start to feed them, but instead I decided to wean all my bull calves.
The calves were not being fed pre-weaning so I decided to house cows and calves in adjacent pens for a few days. The calves can see their mothers but can’t suckle them and it makes it easier to get them started to feed, instead of trying to get them coaxed from one end of a paddock to a trough.
All my calves got fed before they went out in the spring, so getting them started again is not usually too difficult. I sometimes find that calves once weaned can become flighty and nervous and hard to handle, especially heifer calves. So, I like to walk through them a couple of times a day in the pen so they can get well used to me.
I put the trough on the slats so that I’m in the middle of them when they are getting their meal, I think it can leave them quieter and easier to handle when they go back outside by themselves. The calves will stay in for probably four days and then go back to grass. How long the cows stay in will depend on the weather but we’ve been having torrential downpours for the last week and ground has become fairly soft again so I’ll just wait and see.
I would usually feed the cows straw, but it's jut too expensive this year to be feeding dry cows so they’re getting two-year-old silage bales that are just of average quality. I weighed the calves just before I weaned them and I was slightly disappointed with the weights. The heaviest calf was 400kgs, the average daily gain from birth was 1.2kg/day and the average daily gain from the last weighing was 1.25kg/day. I would normally be getting over 1.4kg/day for bulls. I’m wondering is it just down to breed? 75% of these bulls are Salers where I’m usually working with Charolais and a handful of Simmentals. The few Charolais bull calves that I have this year did average close to 1.4kg/day.
There was very little roaring to be heard when cows and calves were split, leading me to believe that the calves had themselves fairly well weaned before I intervened at all. The calves were getting top-quality grass all along but at this time of year a couple of kilos of meal are needed to keep up weight gains. I thought I was gaining by leaving them on the cow for longer but this does not appear to be the case!
Every day’s a school day!
Farmer writes: a year without constant weather torture is nice