Cows, calves and veterinary

Ambition: Eight bulls, six heifers, including a set of M/F twins


Idol: Six bulls, eight heifers, including a set of M/F twins



Achet: Eight bulls, two heifers


Red Ribbon: Thirteen bulls, seven heifers, including a set of M/M twins


Orbin: Five bulls, four heifers


Noontime: Eight bulls, six heifers


Charisma: Six bulls, thirteen heifers

The calf on the left is sired by the Angus bull I was running on farm, the two on the right are LIC AB Angus.

Most of the Angus calves I've seen from natural matings have been this red colour, two have been black and about three brown/black streaks (the ones from crossbred cows). They're small and thrifty and sweet-natured - of course I'm taking photos because I don't know when I'll see calves like this again. They're not your typical black Angus.

The only one of the above bulls associated with any calving difficulty was Achet, whose calf caused 106's calving paralysis. All of his other calves, large though they were, were born easily.

I assisted one Red Ribbon calf who thought it was too cold outside (correct presentation, no size issues, no good reason discernible for the fact he had failed to appear after several hours of labour) and two second-born twins who were heading out backwards - in the first case the mother (81) was probably exhausted. The vet assisted a malpresented calf from a natural-mating to Jersey. Every other calf born to my herd this year jumped out on its own. Of the five dead calves this year all but two (106's and the vet-assisted one) drowned after birth in lying water or mud owing to the unusually wet calving season.

Many years it's been a different story, especially in herds I've managed that have used large bulls (Friesian) on yearling heifers. I've seen dystocia rates in those animals of 30 - 40% and this is a major cause of heifer wastage as some of those heifers won't get back in calf that year.

Check the records. If your yellow notebook has every assisted calving, dead calf, RFM etc noted next to the cow's calving details it only takes a glance to pick out the 'at-risk' cows - at risk for low fertility. From last year's book, how many of those cows are not in the herd this year?

When looking at the numbers of calves born by each dairy bull, note that equal quantities of straws were used for all except Achet. The actual calves born range from 9 (Orbin) to 20 (Red Ribbon). I can't conjecture that there's a large difference in fertility between bulls, because they weren't used randomly and hence the resulting number of calves could reflect a difference in fertility between groups of cows in my herd (evidently, cows with bad udders which are selected for mating to RR are the most fertile...)