Calf Care Program
The future of your dairy relies greatly on a successful calf raising program. Our goal with the Calf Care Monitoring Program is to ensure that calves are not only receiving the best treatment available, but that employees are performing tasks correctly to have the calves continually growing healthy and strong to become high producing animals.
Key Components
Audits (calving assistance and new born calf management, colostrum collection and management, maternity pen and cow hygiene monitoring, milk preparation, disease detection and treatments (weekly);
Work organization and workers training activities (as needed);
Field trials and cost-benefit analysis for decision making (as needed);
Laboratory support (daily, 7 days a week: colostrum quality, total proteins in newborn calves to determine passive transfer of immunity, culture of colostrum and prepared milk, bedding culture, equipment hygiene, etc.)
Monitoring
Maternity
Calving management evaluation and training.
Newborn care.
Bedding culturing.
Feeding
Milk preparation.
Milk refusals.
Grain intakes.
Calf Health
Health scoring.
Morbidity and mortality.
Treatment compliance.
Treatment efficacy and cost.
Colostrum Management
Collection, storage, and feeding procedures.
Quality and bacteria count.
Serum total protein.
Hygiene
Housing.
Feeding.
Colostrum collection/storage.
Growth
Height and weight
Management
Work Organization
Activity flows.
Protocols.
SOP’s.
Labor Training
On-farm training.
Courses and workshops.
- Continuing education program.
