Calves

caseman said:
How soon can you put calves on the auto feeder,and is it only milkreplacer they can feed.
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They go on after at least 5 days when they are strong enough to suck. You can do whole milk but would need a tank beside it rigged up with an agitator.
 
bruceythom said:
We use Nettex 10% iodine, think its actually 8.4%. Have put it on their backs and have also put it on top of their feed once a month during the dry period. We go with 1ml per day so 30ml once a month. During lactating we mix up iodine, cobalt and copper in with soya in a cement mixer, this goes through a hopper that meters it in to the feed head for our parlour, cows can get a full rate of minerals here irrespective of meal amounts. We use this hopper for calcinated magnesite also. It is very accurate.

We have approx 140 calved here now, no held afterbirth and calving Jack hasn't been used at all.
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If your cows were short on iodine would they go mad for it?

We used iodine on calves navels but had to stop because cows were licking and biting the navels after application,only got me thinking when I read your post tonight.
 
scoffcruddle said:
If your cows were short on iodine would they go mad for it?

We used iodine on calves navels but had to stop because cows were licking and biting the navels after application,only got me thinking when I read your post tonight.
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I actually don't know if they'd crave it out of deficiency, but ours would do the same.
 
bruceythom said:
I actually don't know if they'd crave it out of deficiency, but ours would do the same.
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I'm going to stick some iodine on the drys with a spot on gun,I've been toying with going back to agrimin high iodine boluses but throwing a bit on them would be easier and cheaper.
 
We've a good few of the younger calves sick yesterday and today. Fecking wind in a strange place blowing through vented sheeting in the front of the shed. Blocking it up now.
 
20mm along the back of the sucklers this morning along with k99 and a vitesel mineral injection . Seems to work well with the sucklers .
 
Can you put iodine in the water for them.

Beastings and hygiene are 90 percent with calves then some luck.
 
Mf240 said:
Can you put iodine in the water for them.

Beastings and hygiene are 90 percent with calves then some luck.
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iodine tablets 1 per cow per week into the water trough 64 euro for 200, works well when they,re indoors but when they go to grass the tablets are forgotten when the cows are changed to a new paddock usually :blushing:
beastings bottled into them here as soon as they,re dropped and calves left with their mother every night for 5 to 7 days never have scour thankfully ( i,ll probably go out tomorrow and the place will be rotten with it :sad:)
 
Mf240 said:
Can you put iodine in the water for them.

Beastings and hygiene are 90 percent with calves then some luck.
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Hmmm, I would say dry cow treatment and beastings are 90%. See some lads with surgery-like hygiene getting all kinds of trouble whilst the ould bachelor down the road with the hygiene akin to a teenage boys bedroom getting away with murder. Plus feeding calves enough is so so important IMV.
 
So are ye using any pre calver minerals then or is it just the iodine ? Surely there is a high iodine bolus to cover cows,and are many of ye vaccinating against rotavirus ?
 
podge 23 said:
So are ye using any pre calver minerals then or is it just the iodine ? Surely there is a high iodine bolus to cover cows,and are many of ye vaccinating against rotavirus ?
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Yes using pre calver minerals. There is nowhere near enough iodine in any of the precalver minerals or boluses IMV. There is multiple times more got in to the animals by doing what we are talking about above. Iodine is a relatively safe product to use and Irish soils are badly deficient in it, the recommended parameters on blood tests are also too low and they seem to be lowering them rather than raising them.

Yes, we rotavirus Vaccinate the cows. For me now Its all about building immunity for the calf. I would rather put the money, time and effort in to immunity than be trying all sorts of potions and lotions on the calves when they are born. We test the colostrum here also, have been doing it for a few years now, feeding the soya pre calving makes a massive difference to the quality of it. Calves are fed transitional milk for 3 days after their initial feed of 3.5 litres of colostrum.

Spend some time looking at the level of iodine in high iodine boluses and compare to a standard one, you might be surprised. We are potentially offering 84000 units of iodine/head/day administering iodine the way we are, find an off the shelf product that comes near that and let me know because I want to go see it!,
 
The problem is that iodine is limited by the department in terms of I think 500mg of iodine per kg of mineral. Not sure what the rate is in a kg of meal. The reason for this is it's was showing in the baby milk or something in that line but was only really for the month of May/June. Some lads give the calf 2m under the tongue at birth.
Lads that feed plenty of mineral and meal how good colostrum programme seem to get on very well
 
Carrigogunnell said:
The problem is that iodine is limited by the department in terms of I think 500mg of iodine per kg of mineral. Not sure what the rate is in a kg of meal. The reason for this is it's was showing in the baby milk or something in that line but was only really for the month of May/June. Some lads give the calf 2m under the tongue at birth.
Lads that feed plenty of mineral and meal how good colostrum programme seem to get on very well
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You are 100% correct. 9
 
Fair enough but between the pre calver minerals (except for the iodine) and the rotovirus vaccine you would think a lad has nearly enough put into them for quality beastings ... what rotavirus vaccine do ye use ?
 
podge 23 said:
Fair enough but between the pre calver minerals (except for the iodine) and the rotovirus vaccine you would think a lad has nearly enough put into them for quality beastings ... what rotavirus vaccine do ye use ?
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Well with grass silage crops getting heavier and the use of fast growing perennial rygrasses, the supply of minerals available in forage is lessening while the requirements of cows is rising with increased output. Also, cows don't eat enough forage in the last 2 weeks of pregnancy to supply themselves with enough energy so are in negative energy balance whilst trying to manufacture the perfect colostrum.
 
bruceythom said:
Don't get too hung up on how or where it came from or why vaccines don't work or how its spreading, we got an awful doing with it here a few years ago, along with crypto, bloat, clostridia parfrigens, viral pneumonia and probably a whole load of other nasty bugs.
We were driven demented and the calf facilities were kept spotless with all the feeding equipment steam cleaned daily, heaps of bedding, foot bathing, dedi ated clothing to calf batches, colostrum management were top notch and testing was done on every batch. Halocur used.
It has taken me 2 yrs to eventually cop on and realise how stupid we were. The problem was in the immunity created by the cows during the dry cow period, there is never enough emphasis put on this, in fact, I would say there is almost nothing said about it, this is, to me, the single most important area in calf health. Pre calving minerals are shyte, we are now manually giving the cows iodine here, doing it this way means the cows are getting multiple times (and I mean multiple by multiple) the amount of iodine. 3 weeks before they calve, the cows are given 1kg of oats and 1kg of soya.

Colostrum management is as ever here, and calves are fed really well with Jersey Cross calves starting on 750 grammes and building up to over 1kg of powder a day.

I could go on for hours about this, (the more Ivve learned the last few years, the less I realise I know) but drenching new born calves with all sorts of hocus pocus medicines post partum is a practice that's on the rise and I believe its a fools errand if you haven't put in the work with the cows to start.

A good vet will treat and cure sick animals for a farmer, a great vet will prevent them getting sick.
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I saw calves on a farm one year get sick from everything you could think of. That year the cows were vaccinated for rotavirus and the following spring the calves didn't get sick.

I do believe that when grouping calves health problems can arise if not enough pen space is provided per calf. I have seen calves grouped in say 20 and about 5 calves will start to fall back. When these 5 are removed and put in their own pen there health can vastly improve in 24 hrs.
 
Boluses i used on heifers this year, what do ye think about the levels of iodine in them ?
 

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