Pippa Piotrowicz (FCG WhiteAvon)

Visiting an event recently I heard the sentence ‘a lot of people concentrate first on their herd, then on their youngstock, because the herd is what makes the product. You should still be focusing on the youngstock as they are what will make the product in the future’.  This is true!  We should focus on our youngstock, but the question is how?

This should start with dry cow management. Good dry cow management will ensure the best chance of a healthy calf (and cow) when calved.  It will also assist in the quality of colostrum.  Ensuring you dry your cows off is crucial as cows which do not have a 50-60 day dry period only produce 75% of their milk potential.  Target for >12kg DM/cow/day feeding a bulky low-energy ration, with a 13-14% crude protein in dry matter.  Do not allow them to get fat so ensure they are at a 2.5-3 BCS from dry to calving.  Ensuring they have a feed space of 0.75m and lying area of 1.25m²/1,000 litres of milk/cow.  You can use the herd annual milk yield to calculate this.

Ensure good colostrum management, feeding 3 litres within the first 6-hour period (aim for 2 hours if you can) at a temperature of 38-degree.  The colostrum levels need to contain at least 50g/l of IgG and be stored correctly if using in the future.  You can measure this using a Brix Refractometer which is around £15 from Amazon.

Ensure your calf housing is adequately ventilated – check for cobwebs, bunching of calves, draughts, wet bedding etc.  The use of humidity and temperature sensors can assist with this.  Also, smoke bomb testing in the shed will help to see if there are any regions of still air.

Ensuring the minimal of stress in the weaning process and movement of the calves is crucial.  Where possible, you do not want to move cattle preweaning as the move will cause stress in addition to the weaning process itself.  This will impact on growth rates and calf welfare.

It is crucial to weigh throughout the calf rearing process.  To work out the weight targets you should be achieving, weigh a group of your 3^rd/4^th lactation cows at 100-120 days calved (assuming no major breeding changes have been made) to get your targeted mature weight.  The target weights for your youngstock from this are:

There are many other areas which could be discussed but for this article I have chosen a few.  If you would like to discuss other areas which are all as important, contact Pippa at pippa@fcgagric.com  or your local FCG Office.