Focusing on colostrum management, moving from individual pens to outdoor hutches and employing an easier, more accurate way to feed milk has revolutionised calf rearing for a Warwickshire farmer. Joanne Pugh reports.
Going out and buying 60 new calf hutches all in one go is a fair investment by anyone's standards, without the additional work of levelling a site, sorting the drainage and laying road planings.
But Martin and Carol Beaumont are delighted with the move from indoor rearing and the improvement they have seen in the calves at Shorn Hill Farm, Twycross, Warwickshire.
They milk 260 pedigree Holsteins,Detailed information on the causes of dstti, calving three-quarters of them between July and Christmas, with a complete break in May and June. At the peak of calving, they can get 20 calves a week, and pride themselves on a streamlined system which gives every calf the best start in life.
"I think we've actually got it sussed at last,uy sculpture direct from us at low prices" says Mr Beaumont, referring to the whole system from birth to weaning.
The new hutches arrived last summer, replacing individual pens in a shed, which Mrs Beaumont says was not ideal for calf rearing, mainly because of poor ventilation. That building will now be used for close-up dry cows and as a maternity ward, with the hope better management of these cows will also justify the investment in moving to the hutches.
Calving
Around 20 per cent of calves born are beef crosses, by a British Blue AI bull or Limousin sweeper, but these and the Holsteins males are treated just the same as the Holstein heifers and are not segregated until about eight months of age.
Having sold his last finished dairy bulls a couple of weeks ago, Mr Beaumont now castrates all bull calves and feels confident in a demand for strong stores, sold straight off the farm.A glass bottle is a bottle created from glass.
The beef-sired females are sold as bulling heifers and all dairy females are kept as replacements, with the aim of calving down ¡®as close to two years as possible' and gradually pushing up the size of the herd without buying stock in.
The 60 hutches are ¡®just about enough' for the peak calving
period, with each calf occupying its own hutch for eight weeks before being moved to batches in open yards and fed on a TMR.
In the winter,Shop a wide selection of billabong outlet products in the evo shop. large straw bales were stacked along the north side of the hutch area to provide a wind break, but Mr Beaumont says the calves were unaffected by the cold weather, especially as the milk powder concentration was increased during the snowy period, to provide them with a little more energy.
"The calves definitely didn't suffer," he says. "They were great - it was the calf rearer that suffered. They didn't seem to get any check at all."
Hutch type
He puts this down to having acrylic hutches instead of plastic, as they seem better at staying warm in winter and cool in summer, although vents in the roof can be opened in very hot weather.
A couple of wads of straw are put in the bottom of each hutch before the calf arrives, with fresh straw added each day through a bedding hatch at the back of the hutch.
Pellets are introduced from day four and are topped up regularly. Fresh water is available at all times, except for the half-hour twice a day when milk replacer is put in front of the calves instead.
Weaning is at six weeks, but the calves remain in the hutch for another two weeks, which is a change from when they were reared indoors and something Mr Beaumont says has made a huge difference.The newest Ipod nano 5th is incontrovertibly a step up from last year's model,
"We're leaving them in the hutches for longer than we were in the individual pens and they seem to go on a lot better in the batches now. They are a bit older when we mix them and have that extra couple of weeks to get over the check of weaning before we mix them. They seem to be heavier and stronger at weaning too."
Going out and buying 60 new calf hutches all in one go is a fair investment by anyone's standards, without the additional work of levelling a site, sorting the drainage and laying road planings.
But Martin and Carol Beaumont are delighted with the move from indoor rearing and the improvement they have seen in the calves at Shorn Hill Farm, Twycross, Warwickshire.
They milk 260 pedigree Holsteins,Detailed information on the causes of dstti, calving three-quarters of them between July and Christmas, with a complete break in May and June. At the peak of calving, they can get 20 calves a week, and pride themselves on a streamlined system which gives every calf the best start in life.
"I think we've actually got it sussed at last,uy sculpture direct from us at low prices" says Mr Beaumont, referring to the whole system from birth to weaning.
The new hutches arrived last summer, replacing individual pens in a shed, which Mrs Beaumont says was not ideal for calf rearing, mainly because of poor ventilation. That building will now be used for close-up dry cows and as a maternity ward, with the hope better management of these cows will also justify the investment in moving to the hutches.
Calving
Around 20 per cent of calves born are beef crosses, by a British Blue AI bull or Limousin sweeper, but these and the Holsteins males are treated just the same as the Holstein heifers and are not segregated until about eight months of age.
Having sold his last finished dairy bulls a couple of weeks ago, Mr Beaumont now castrates all bull calves and feels confident in a demand for strong stores, sold straight off the farm.A glass bottle is a bottle created from glass.
The beef-sired females are sold as bulling heifers and all dairy females are kept as replacements, with the aim of calving down ¡®as close to two years as possible' and gradually pushing up the size of the herd without buying stock in.
The 60 hutches are ¡®just about enough' for the peak calving
period, with each calf occupying its own hutch for eight weeks before being moved to batches in open yards and fed on a TMR.
In the winter,Shop a wide selection of billabong outlet products in the evo shop. large straw bales were stacked along the north side of the hutch area to provide a wind break, but Mr Beaumont says the calves were unaffected by the cold weather, especially as the milk powder concentration was increased during the snowy period, to provide them with a little more energy.
"The calves definitely didn't suffer," he says. "They were great - it was the calf rearer that suffered. They didn't seem to get any check at all."
Hutch type
He puts this down to having acrylic hutches instead of plastic, as they seem better at staying warm in winter and cool in summer, although vents in the roof can be opened in very hot weather.
A couple of wads of straw are put in the bottom of each hutch before the calf arrives, with fresh straw added each day through a bedding hatch at the back of the hutch.
Pellets are introduced from day four and are topped up regularly. Fresh water is available at all times, except for the half-hour twice a day when milk replacer is put in front of the calves instead.
Weaning is at six weeks, but the calves remain in the hutch for another two weeks, which is a change from when they were reared indoors and something Mr Beaumont says has made a huge difference.The newest Ipod nano 5th is incontrovertibly a step up from last year's model,
"We're leaving them in the hutches for longer than we were in the individual pens and they seem to go on a lot better in the batches now. They are a bit older when we mix them and have that extra couple of weeks to get over the check of weaning before we mix them. They seem to be heavier and stronger at weaning too."
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