Cows, calves and veterinary

2007 line of heifer calves

edit 17/3/08: A number of google hits over the last few days have been people searching for a recipe for home-mix electrolyte. Skip to the bottom of the post - I've added the one I use. This, and similar recipes should be easy to find via google but there are also posts aplenty to inform would-be calf savers that only the name-branded products will do - no; electrolyte is electrolyte, whether you mix it at home or buy it from a vet. Either version can save a scouring calf. [/edit]


This year's calves. There are a few late-born ones still getting milk, at this stage. These are the weaned group, born between mid-July and the twenty-second of August.
Meridian gave me two heifers out of fourteen calves born :-( All handsome calves, mostly first crosses out of Jersey cows. No calving problems.
Nighthawk swung the run of bulls round towards the end of calving with seven heifers out of twelve calves. He's marketed as an easy calving Friesian - but he wasn't on my farm. Out of those twelve calves one gave his mother calving paralysis, one heifer was a minor assist and a good number of the other calves were well-sized at birth. I wouldn't use him over Jersey cows again.
Hunize threw three lovely big, curly-haired grey bulls and one heifer. I was concerned about the size of the bulls, although two were born with no difficulty. One was assisted, and died during calving - there may have been something else (like milk fever) going on there, as in theory he wasn't *too* large for the cow. This year, I'm treating the Brown Swiss bull as more or less equivalent ot a Friesian with a calving difficulty of 3 - in other words, he's only being used on cows that I'm very sure can manage a large calf.
Taylor died before mating last year, and the straws I ordered were among his last. Since then, his BW has declined significantly - I think he's sitting around 166 right now. He gave me seven heifer calves out of thirteen, some with a distinctive grey tinge to their coat.
Noontime presented me early in the season with a heifer born with a BW of 222 - possibly the highest BW calf I'd ever handled at that stage (her mother is a high BW second calver, smart looking cow but very pathetic milker. The calf looks just like her mother - let's hope she milks a bit better.) With Taylor's proof crashing, Noontime was the only very high BW sire in the line-up. He threw five heifers out of eleven.
Red Ribbon was selected especially for the heifers and cows with very poor udders - especially wide front teats. His BW last mating was no higher than the average of the heifers - about 155 - but he's since climbed to a respectable 178. He throws strong udders and is an extreme type bull, low on production but good size and stature. Give it a couple of years and I might be able to tell you if such correctional mating works in my herd - a few of the cows he was mated to had to have the milking cups held in place for the first few weeks after calving, until their yield started to decline and two of those spent the whole season with the cups sqeaking on badly angled teats. In my system, the choice is between mating them to an extreme type bull like Red Ribbon, or mating them to beef sires.
Five of his fourteen calves were heifers.
Patrick is a bull I would never have chosen, with high BW and very poor management traits. With a late and slow calving pattern last year, I used a large number of CIDRs to synchronise some of the later calvers. They were due to cycle for the third time just a few days after the Angus bull went out, and I corssed my fingers that they'd spread out over two or three days.
As it turned out, not only did they *all* come on heat at once, but conception rate to the second cycle had been appalling - about 25%. So the very exhausted bull was put into another paddock to recuperate before morning milking, and a phone call was enough to organise an AB technician - and since the few straws of nominated semen I had left were back in storage, I instructed him to use the 'bull of the day'. That was Patrick - and one Nevvy, for a cow with an inbreed warning against Patrick. "The Jersey will beat the Angus" the technician said. I decided I would believe *that* when I saw it.
About sixteen cows cycled that day, and the technician mated fourteen of them. Ten of the fourteen held to that service. Four heifers and three bulls to Patrick resulted, plus one heifer to Nevvy. The Angus bull made up for it slightly because one of the earlier mated ones that I didn't ask the technician to do had twin Angus bulls.
Nevvy is the proud sire of 133's heifer calf.

There's a heavy Jersey bias in the group, which had some effect on their feeding. In theory, two litres twice a day would be too much for a Jersey calf, many of which are hovering around the 20 kg mark at birth. Given that they start off at that rate on colostrum, which it's almost impossible for a calf to over-indulge on, there were no problems with feeding them at that level. Once they were in the rearing shed I gradually altered their feeds so that they were getting up to four and a half litres in a 3/1.5 split and finally four - four and a half litres on once a day at aroudn three or four weeeks old.
New calves get only the fresh colostrum appropriate to their age, transitioning to cold, whole milk at around five to six days. Once a group of them are ready to go to the rearing shed, they're taken over there where they have access to water, meal, hay and will be fed a 50/50 mix of stored colostrum and whole milk.
This year I went back to NRM Moozlee transitioning to NRM Grow-up around the time they went outside and had no problems convincing them to eat the meal - the group has used around a tonne and a half of calf meal, at about half a kilo per calf per day for most of their young lives (it's ad-lib until about a kilo a calf; the half-kilo is how much they choose to eat).
When the oldest calves were about four or five weeks old rotavirus streaked through both sheds. Most of the calves had mild scours, a few were a bit more seriously ill but there were few worries among the rearers - the biggest concern was the bobbies who, once it had got into that shed, were at a 100% infection rate and taking at least ten days to recover. So I stopped using that shed and left the calves outside with their mums, and thus was able to continue selling strong healthy bobby calves at five days old.
I use home-mix electrolyte in place of milk as soon as a problem is seen. And since encountering rotavirus the first time, I'm inclined to treat scours as a pen problem - so if one calf in a pen is scouring, I may isolate and treat that calf, but if two are, the sick calves stay put and the whole pen gets treated for scours. Home-made electrolytes are cheap. The kitchen scales moved to the dairy for the duration of calf rearing.
The basic programme is to wait at least four hours after a milk feed (since it's probably at feeding time when scours are seen, when it's too late to whisk the milk away from them) and offer two litres of electolyte per calf. Of course anything that didn't drink the milk must be offered electrolyte immediately - but unless the calf is obviously dehydrated or sick, I don't mess around with stomach-tubing.
Very mild cases can simply have electrolyte in place of their normal three or four feeds, then offered a small feed of milk, followed by electrolyte again in the next feed, gradually increasing the milk but only cutting out the electrolyte between feeds, or at alternate feeds, when I'm certain the calf is no longer at risk of dehydrating.
More severe cases need electrolyte every four to six hours until they're stabilised.
Rotavirus destroys the calves' guts. In spite of prompt action and good care, I don't especially expect them to stop scouring in the way a calf with nutritional scours would recover in 2 - 4 days. Even when my calves were happily drinking their full quota of fluid as milk, I continued to offer them electrolyte last thing at night until about three days had passed in which every calf in the pen maintained a dry tail. I don't remember now how long that was - might have been a fortnight, three weeks.
There may have been some negative effect on their growth from the outbreak - it's hard to tell. The calves were so healthy at the point where it had been going for about five days and had jumped sheds (indicating to me that it was infectious and not nutitritional) that the vet I passed scour samples to had to be persuaded to send them to the lab since everyone at the clinic insisted "if it was any of the common infections they'd be really sick."
The first calves were weaned off milk near the beginning of October - I drafted off everything down to five kilo under the target weight and halved their milk to 2 litres for a week before weaning them, then simply drafted off everything heavy enough and at least eight weeks old into the weaned group, once a week. I'm weaning Jerseys at seventy kilo, crossbreds at eighty this year, and average weaning age was probably ten weeks.
They stopped eating hay about a week ago (their choice) and I'm cutting the older group down on meal, and will stop their meal completely in about another ten days - but keep the younger ones on it for a little longer.

This is the sole Brown Swiss heifer. Her coat colour has been changing almost daily, over this last week or so - from a Jersey-type yellowy fawn to the dark grey.

Home-mix electrolyte (added 17 March 08)

5 grams iodised salt
10 grams bicarbonate of soda
30 - 50 grams glucose or ordinary sugar

Mix to two litres of warm water

This is one feed for one calf - about 40 kg (5% of calf weight is the usual requirement for fluids at a single feed, for a calf fed twice daily).

Because I treat scours as a whole pen or shed problem if more than one or two calves are scouring, I may mix enough for ten to thirty calves at once - in which case I multiply up the base ingredients and use kitchen scales to weigh them out, then mix into a bucket of warm water - just under forty degrees for baby calves used to warm milk, a little cooler if the calves are adapted to cold milk feeding.

The salt and water replace salts and fluids lost via scouring; using iodised salt is the only easy way to add potassium iodide to the mix, and I suspect it's there in barely worthwhile quantity (potassium iodide is the only ingredient of a basic commercial electrolyte not easily bought off a supermarket shelf).
Sugar provides energy, to keep the calf 'ticking over' while it's sick - glucose or dextrose are considered superior to ordinary sugar, but I've used all sorts of sugars (as calves always seem to fall sick at the weekend or busy times just to ensure you have to use every variety of sugar in your cupboard).
The baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is the 'electrolyte' part of the mix, working to reverse acidosis and all sorts of other stuff which I wouldn't be able to tell you without checking a pile of books.

Commercial products can have some pretty decent 'bells and whistles' - convenience of a pre-mixed powder, flavourings for palatability, a few minerals, sometimes antibiotics, or clay (kaolin) to help firm the dung. There are times when I'll buy a basic premix, or 'scourban' (a fancy thick pink mix including antibiotics), but for general use they just don't make electrolytes in big enough bags to tackle a shed problem, and the expense multiplication makes it a costly exercise to offer electrolytes at the least indication that they might be beneficial.

posted by nellta holdings @ 3:25 PM