Calving out a living
Provided by New Zealand Lifestyle Block, incorporating Growing Today, magazine August 2010 issue. Written by Nadene Hall.
Profit is hard-earned when you're rearing calves, and it takes more than just dedication to get the job done well.
Who: Errol and Diane Brown
Where: Ohau, 90km north of Wellington
Farm: 6ha (15 acres)
Livestock: calves for rearing, Galloways, Highland cattle, Suffolk sheep
Don't be fooled into thinking calf rearing is a quick and easy way to make money. Errol Brown and his wife Diane rear calves on their 6ha lifestyle block at Ohau, a few minutes south of Levin, and this spring plan to take their numbers from 40 a season to nearer 100.
Errol says it's easy for an estimated profit to come unstuck.
"You start buying in calves at $120-$150 each, they'll need two bags of milk powder (by weaning) at $70 a bag, and two and a half bags of pellets at $27 a bag.
"All of a sudden that little calf is going to owe you about $350, and if you can only sell them at $360… the margin is so tight, and it can be wiped out overnight, there's been some spectacular failures."
All it takes is one bad run of scours which can quickly result in mortality rates being unacceptable and seeing sick calves is very distressing to the Browns, who love their little herd. So why keep doing it?
"The reality is I'm a pensioner, 66 years old, what am I going to do otherwise?" asks Errol. "I still feel too young to sit around here all day and stare at the sky. I can't go cruising around the world all the time, and calf rearing can be a challenge and very satisfying. While we're not making a vast amount of profit, I enjoy working with animals. They are less complicated than people!
"When they're on two feeds a day you know you're working, but the rest of the year you're coasting."
Shelter
If you're planning to raise more than a few calves, a well set-up calf shed makes life so much easier says Errol. It should:
- have easy vehicle access
- have good drainage
- be well ventilated with good air circulation
- have no drafts
You may be wondering how it's possible to get good air circulation and yet have no drafts, says Errol.
"Ours is entirely open on one side, so it's definitely well ventilated. We have pens with sides 1.6m high, but the boards overlap on each side so air will circulate through, but there's no direct wind."
Each pen holds 10 calves and has a floor of gravel topped with untreated sawdust, or untreated wood shavings if available. No treated sawdust or shavings are used because calves like to eat and suck things including their bedding, and if they eat a lot they could suffer from poisoning. There are no sharp edges that animals can catch themselves on and nothing protrudes into the pens.
"We bought a Totalspan five bay shed, there was no mucking about, they put it up in four days flat.
"The only problem with a metal shed is that cats can't climb the walls so the birds build nests in the roof trusses and then foul everywhere with their droppings, you've got to keep on top of that. Their droppings carry bugs that cause stomach upsets and we attribute the death of a pedigree calf to this cause. An expensive lesson."
The clean test
If you wouldn't drink out of a container or bucket, don't expect your calves to do so and thrive. Some calf rearers leave things to get a bit crusty says Errol, but for him and Diane, cleanliness is next to godliness.
"It's got to be clean, everything they touch is washed down immediately, we don't wait 20 minutes, we do it then and there. We use cold water, or I might even get the water blaster out, then good old Lux dishwashing liquid -anything that they're going to be drinking or eating out of."
The pens are mucked out and the bedding topped up each day, and the whole barn is sanitised before new calves come in.
"If you're getting batches of calves coming in it is easy to bring in diseases, especially if you've got calves living in close quarters. Intensive rearers spray out every 3-4 days, I've got away with it so far just spraying the pens out at the start of the season, then usually about halfway through.
"If a pen starts getting really dirty, wet-looking or smelly, or a calf is not looking good we clean the pen out, take out all the sawdust down to ground level, water blast everything - not just the floor but all the sides, all the woodwork too. Then it's out with the Virkon (a broad-spectrum disinfectant). By this stage it usually means do the whole shed."
Work with your vet
A supportive vet, especially if you're new to calf raising, is a key relationship.
"We've got a very good vet," says Diane. "He talks to us about the quality of the milk powder, lots of things. You'd think it would be a straight-forward thing but the milk powder isn't always good quality."
The Browns say learning to look for signs of ill-health and acting on it quickly is a key to their success.
"We're pretty successful, we don't normally lose any calves, but it's all been a learning curve. We rely on our vet but we also realise that calves, when they do get sick, it can be a bit hit and miss because there's so many things that can go wrong.
"Vets do their very best, and take samples and tests, and our vet would be the number one person we've relied on."
Find the right farmer
One key piece of advice from the Browns' vet wasn't about animal health or facilities, but about the kind of farm relationship to nurture if they were going to rear on contract.
"He told us "lifestylers" don't always see eye to eye with farmers, so you need to get hold of a farmer who was sympathetic to you," says Diane. "We do have a farmer we can rely on and he's been great with advice, we've been really lucky. When we ran out of hay one year, it was so nice to know there was someone we could get help from."
When the Browns first started rearing calves for themselves they kept a careful check on all their expenses so they could go back to the farmer and be confident about the price they would negotiate. Errol says that, and the removal of the risk of calves dying or unexpected expense of something like a vet visit, makes being a contract calf-rearer worth their while.
"The contract price is for your time, so if you're poorly organised it's going to take six hours a day to look after 25 calves, but if it takes you 2 hours a day, it's going to be better."
Little details count big time
Noticing a calf that is beginning to struggle can be the difference between life and death for that animal, and it means keeping a careful eye out for little changes. These include:
- Any calf that is slow to come to the drinking containers;
- One that does not drink rapidly or only has half a meal;
- Ears are down, not up;
- Dull coat and eyes (coat and eyes should be shiny and clear).
At the very least these symptoms indicate a calf with a gut ache, and it can be a slippery slope says Errol.
"It takes a while to get your eye in but once you do it stands out so clearly when a calf is not looking happy. They can look good in the morning, at night time they're hanging back, the next morning they won't get up and by night time they can be dead."
While the Browns pride themselves on raising dozens of healthy calves over the past four years, they have had losses says Errol.
"The worst we've ever lost was three in two days. We think these particular calves came off their mothers too quickly, they hadn't got a good feed of colostrum so they didn't have resistance to anything. We mixed them in with our calves and they picked up something.
"With last year's calves, we didn't have a problem from day one, they were about a week older so had been stabilised with the farmer, rather than coming to us fresh off their mothers and having had little or no colostrum. They were a delight."
Transporting calves
This might seem a small thing but transporting young calves needs to be done with care, and Diane is a stickler for transporting young stock in a safe and secure manner.
"When you're loading calves on and off you do it with a bit of care. If I see someone stirring them up I just tell them."
"Calves are very prone to pneumonia," says Errol. "You should have a trailer that protects them from the wind with sides on it, you can chill them really quickly.
"And if you're using a crate, make sure it's well anchored to the trailer. You can come to a stop sign, stop, then put your foot down to accelerate... calves are long-legged, they lose their balance, and when you accelerate they all go to the back, lean on the back and the whole crate can rotate off."
Tips from Farmers Brown & Brown
1. Start small
Having a small number of calves - just four in the case of the Browns in their first year - can be a lot of work when you've never had calves and haven't perfected your own management systems. Start small, and don't make big jumps in numbers of calves that you rear. Build up numbers as you gain expertise, as it's very easy to get wiped out if your systems aren't up to scratch and a disease takes hold.
2. Get the right calves right from the start
A calf must have at least its first two feeds of its mother's colostrum. If you can, get calves at four days of age that have been well fed on colostrum, or they're just not going to grow like a good calf should says Diane.
"If they haven't had colostrum, they just put their head down and go. If people (also) look for dry navels, a good clean eye, they're going to survive."
3. Develop the rumen
While calves rely on milk in their first few weeks, rumen development starts immediately, so always have hay and pellets/muesli available right from the start in clean containers so calves are not picking at anything on the floor.
4. Avoid big paddocks
Once calves know you, big paddocks aren't too much of a problem but when they are small they can get confused about where to go. It's best to keep them in a small paddock for a few days until they get used to their routine or you can experience "considerable frustration" trying to round them up says Errol. In the Browns' case, their calves are kept inside at night and access to paddocks during the day.
5. Wean at the 1kg mark
When calves are eating 1kg of pellets per calf per day, they are ready to be weaned off milk. At this stage they will be eating large amounts of pasture and hay as well, but the amount of pellets is easiest to measure. Pellets, hay and pasture are much cheaper than milk powder.
6. Have enough feeders
Some calves are pushier than others so when you are feeding out pellets there must be enough room for every calf to be able to get its share.
7. Get good scales
Avoiding problems such as nutritional scours brought on by incorrect ratios of milk powder to water are easy to avoid. Always measure out powder carefully using scales, and use buckets with litre graduations marked out.
"Weighing platforms for the calves are highly recommended," says Errol. "I would love a set, but their cost is out of the question for my small scale operation. Measuring tapes have to do."
The mysterious case of calf 33
Calf 33 was a slow drinker, and always had a bit of grass sticking out the side of her mouth. That's not necessarily unusual as the Browns' calves have access to hay and pasture from day one, but it was unusualthat it was always there and that she was so slow at drinking, so Diane decided to investigate.
"We opened up her mouth and she had a ball of grass and hay in there. Apparently there are some who have problems with the way they swallow, so we kept an eye on her and cleared her mouth every day."
"It wasn't regurgitated cud," says Errol. "It was well into the back of her mouth and you had to dig it out with your finger, quite difficult to see. Once I removed a ball about as big as my fist, then she would suck away at full speed and after about two weeks she came right."
"We often talk about 33," says Diane. "She was a great calf, good bones, good feet, you just need to keep a close watch for unusual things."
If a calf is slow, getting bossed away from her teat and/or not developing as quickly as her pen mates, says Errol, always take it as a warning sign.
Scouring is an emergency
From Paul Muir of Ngahiwi Farms, www.ngahiwifarms.co.nz
Days 4 - 14 are critical in a calf's life, and it's this window when scours is most likely to be a problem. A calf with scours, be it from stress, a nutritional upset or a disease, is in need of urgent attention.
While most cases of scours don't require antibiotics to fix them - antibiotics can often make a case of scours worse - it is very important to speak with a vet as soon as possible. You may be approved to use a product such as Scour-ban (a vet-only product) and it's critical to use it exactly as instructed.
Scours is dangerous because calves quickly become dehydrated and go downhill fast.
Taking a sample of the diarrhoea so your vet can test it can also be vital when you have large numbers of calves, so you know what you're dealing with.
Rehydrating the calf will be your first priority, and your vet will prescribe electrolyte solutions that must be given in place of milk (never combine the two).
Causes of nutritional scours
Stress (transport, chill), incorrect feeding (over or under-feeding, irregular feeding), sudden changes to milk replacement powder, incorrect milk temperature, poor quality milk powder.
Always treat sick animals after healthy ones so you reduce the risk of spreading the disease, and keep sick animals separate from healthy ones until they have recovered.
Signs of impending scours can be:
- dry muzzle, thick mucus from nose
- very firm faeces/constipated
- refusal of milk
- tendency to lie down
- high body temperature (over 39.3°C)
This article was provided by NZ Lifestyle Block, incorporating Growing Today magazine.
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