Count Calories For Newborn Calf Health

Count Calories For Newborn Calf Health

Susan Allen
Susan Allen
With your Land and Livestock report, I'm Susan Allen. Corale Dorn, a Veterinarian in South Dakota spoke at an Alltech symposium recently about the health of new dairy and beef cattle saying that when it comes to saving the calf it's not about just get the amount of milk replacer, it's calories:

DORN: Just a brief over view of the calorie side. I think Van Amburgh from the Cornell University here hit it right in his paper where he talks about " We need to stop thinking about how many quarts or liters of milk replacer they are getting". Calves have nutritional requirements just like our cows do and as we move towards that, we get a calf that instead of just surviving the first two weeks of life, actually thrives

She speaks about what she finds visiting farms.

DORN: I go out and to do an on-farm audit and they are telling me in the dead of winter when we might have one day that hits above freezing they are only feeding two quarts of 20-20 milk replacers every 12 hours than we are not hitting anywhere near the calorie requirements that we need. So we have curbs, we have bumpers.... there are lots of different ways to get those calories. But we look at that and we say if we are completely missing the mark we need for calories we can't hope to clean up enough and put enough medicine into calves to prevent a really nasty bug from spreading

Dr. Dorn has more information on Calf health at alltech.com

http://ag.alltech.com/es/node/3086.

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