Blogs

Calving time can be the most intense period of a farmer’s year.

Keeping a close eye on first calvers, getting calves their colostrum, keeping a vet on speed dial and all the while sleep becomes scarce as you aim to flatten your labour spend.

What if there was a way to get more time?

Well sadly, you can’t. We all have 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week.

So the real question becomes how can you use your time better? Here are a few ways you can improve your time management in calving season.

As the beef and dairy industries get more competitive, farmers are finding it harder to maintain existing margins, let alone improving on them.

However, there are measures you can take, even as soon as calving, to greatly improve your calves performance.

Here are 5 ways that good calf management can help maximise your margins

Scours are the greatest cause of of poor growth and calf mortality in dairy and suckler herds, and for this reason farmers should always be on the lookout.

While scour in calves is curable, prevention is much better. Luckily, there are measures you can take to stop it from taking hold in your herd.

Bovine Neonatal Pancytopenia (BNP), or Bleeding Calf Syndrome, is a highly fatal condition that can affect newborn calves.

As the name suggests, the symptoms of this disease are bleeding from skin, mucal membranes, and sometimes the intestines.

It only affects young calves, who are under four weeks old, and mothers are usually completely healthy.

While it is deadly to the calf, the disease is carried by the cow, and the symptoms are contracted through her colostrum.

A thin cow or heifer can be a big problem if they’re due to calf soon.

It can lead to weak cows at calving time and less vigorous calves to boot, meaning an increased risk of mortality and a smaller selling margin later.

Here's our guide to stop that.

For many beef farmers, keeping cows and heifers fit and not fat is essential to have a smooth run at calving time.

While thin cows pose their own problems at calving time, fat cows come with their own set of problems.

If you do nothing to remedy the overweight cow’s condition before they reach calving, this can cause problems while calving.

Here's why:

Calves are at a relatively high risk of mortality as soon as they are born. When they hit the ground, and their navel cord [...]

Calving comes with risks at the best of times, but creating the best possible calving environment is a great way of cutting them.

Here are some tried and tested tips that apply in both the largest dairy farms and the smallest suckler herds.

It is good practice to be cautious around a cow directly after she has given birth. It is in these moments that her maternal instincts are kicking in particularly strongly.

What is less known is that cow attacks have surpassed bull attacks as the number one cause of livestock related deaths.

On top of this, Teagasc statistics show that livestock related accidents accounted for 22% of farm fatalities in 2015 and 33% of all farm accidents

Here are just a few things Teagasc say you should look out for to minimise the risk of an accident:

Bovine Respiratory Disease, or BRD, is a headache for cattle farmers around the world, especially those operating on slim margins.

According to shock statistics by calfmatters.com, a staggering 70% of cattle have lung damage at slaughter.

Some estimate that the lost lifetime growth potential from pneumonia-induced lung damage is as high as 74kg-a-year.

According to Farmers Weekly figures, calf pneumonia costs the UK dairy market £80million per year.

Here we explain what it is and how you can prevent it.