The Long Winter's Affect on Raising Bottle Calves

Last year we decided to go from raising beef cows (the big cows had the babies and raised them), to raising Holstein bottle calves. Bottle calves, for those who don't know, are day-old calves diaries separate from the milking cows within hours of being born. Some feed the colostrums to the calves and some do not. This can make the difference in a healthy calf and one that needs extra attention or one that just doesn't survive. We ran into a lot of that last year. We had many that because of their treatment at birth (sent immediately to a sale barn for whatever they could get) died within weeks if not days of our buying them. I hate when that happens. I get attached very quickly to my calves and I feel it deeply when they don't make it. As a result of the pneumonia most of them acquired within days of leaving the sale barn, we had to keep them inside all winter, which turned out to be very long.

Our barn cleaner chain had not been used in years, so we were constantly repairing it and putting it back in the gutter. It usually slipped off its wheels when it was full, so getting it back on required a winch and a lot of time. Also, because we had not used the system in years, the pipe to the retaining slab from the intake pit was plugged with years-old dry matter. Once it got wet, it swelled and would not let the waste through. We had to call someone from 80 miles away with special equipment to use high pressure water jets to 'drill' the pipe out. Most farms that have been running constantly don't have that issue often. Hopefully, we won't either for a while.

In the fall, we did obtain some really healthy weaned calves that were not bought from a sale barn, but from a local farmer. That makes a huge difference, as they had given the colostrums to the calves for several days before putting the moms back on the production line. Now, those are the kind of calves you want. Since we had to take down our pasture fence to allow a combine into a soybean field, and the deer had done a lot of damage as well, we had no secure pasture for them, so they too had to be tied into the barn. Our barn used to be a dairy barn so we were using the tie stalls from the dairy cows and they all had to stay in for the winter.

Calves don't stay calves for long, in fact, healthy ones grow rather fast and they eat enormous amounts of hay. Farmer's control the amount of grain and hay cattle get, but while grain is fed in a few pounds a day, hay is fed in bales. The winter ran so long we ran out of the small manageable bales and had to put large round bales in the barn and roll them out, using a pitchfork and wheel barrow to feed the animals. They could go through a bale a day easily. These are four to five feet across and have to be moved by tractor, but since the tractor won't fit into the barn, they have to be rolled manually. It usually takes two people until it gets down quite a few layers.

Calves are also quite clever. They could teach magicians a few tricks in the escape arts. We used a variety of types of clips and they somehow figured out how to unscrew, unclip, or outright break the chains that held them in regularly. When you're all alone doing the chores that can be a lot of fun –not- getting them back to their stalls. First, you have to catch them, and they run really fast when they want to. Then, you have to get a rope on their heads and make a harness out of it. Next, since they were usually in the feed aisle, they had to be coaxed to go all the way down the aisle and around to middle walkway and back to their stalls, and stand still to be re-attached to the chain. Often I had to fix the chain before I even went for the cow.  This might sound easy, getting them back to their stalls, but let me tell you, when they are loose, they decide if they are going to move or not and you are not going to drag them. They will spread out their legs and hold their ground. Unless a calf is trained as a show animal, they cannot be lead. You have to get off to the side and tap them in just the right place while leading the rope as one would a horse. Usually when they decide to take off, it's at a dead run and you could get dragged rather than running alongside of them. It can be very dangerous, and they can in their sudden taking off dislocate your shoulder, which is also true if you try to drag them. A lot of people use a cattle prod, which is a long fiberglass stick with a plastic handle on one end and a taser-like device on the other end. These are very effective at persuading the cattle to move, but again, if they don't have a rope, you can't control easily where they will go, and once they are moving, it's hard to stop them, even if someone else is in front of them. Sometimes they stop with a skid, and others, they trample the person standing in front if they don't get out of the way in time. We roped them, got to the side and got them moving, and then jumped into their stalls and wrapped the rope around the pipe they had been chained to and sort of winched them in, or tied it off in a way that it could be loosed and pulled tight again easily and then got with them in the walk aisle and got them moving again until they jumped into their stall. This was usually if only one person was in the barn trying to move them. I have been known to tie the stubborn animal to a post and call for help from my brother-in-law or nephews. Then of course, once the animal is back in the stall, everyone is mad because they haven't been fed, but the feed aisle has to be cleaned of the manure and limed down to dry it up, and then they can be fed.

As they were not full grown and the barn was not stocked full to the brim with animals, the cold could be too much for the water system and then we had to torch the lines and each bowl to thaw them so the animals could get water. This had to be done several times a day when it was extremely frigid. At one point, it got so bad we opted to just shut the water down to them and go give them buckets several times a day until it 'warmed' up enough that it wasn't freezing the lines faster than they could be thawed. At one point, the cows were so anxious about the promise of spring, they started butting heads under the stanchions dividing them and they ended up banging the shared water bowl to a point they broke the line. That was fun! At least I had learned how to rebuild the water lines and was able to fix it myself.

One would think as anxious as the cows were to get outside; they would gladly leave the barn when we tried to put them out to pasture at last. Nope. It was hours to just get thirty cows out of the barn. They ran all over the place and into other stalls and knocked each other all over the place, and my husband ended up with several broken bones in his hands and feet and we both had bruises and cuts and scrapes, but we got them out. The next morning they had knocked the cattle panel gate over (the ground was too soft from the mud and the post didn't stay put) and several of them were back in the barn. It took another hour to get them back out where they belonged and we put up a sturdier gate and more posts to hold it.

Some lessons learned:

1.  Get a cattle prod!

2.  If you get calves at a sale barn (which is a really bad idea unless you have no other means) get them early in the week; if it's a Saturday, they are left over from the other days of sales and sale barns do not feed the calves. Day-old calves don't eat grain or hay yet and most of the barns will not go to the trouble of bottle feeding the calves. They're half-starved and sick by the time you get them.

3. Turn them out immediately upon weaning so that they don't get too big to handle in the barn. The bigger they get, the smarter they get and will figure out how to get loose from their stalls and are harder to put back!

4.  Get a cow dog that knows what it's doing. We have never been fortunate enough to get a herd dog that went for the heel as it's supposed to. For some reason they always went for the nose and turned the cows around the wrong way. I should quit getting puppies and get them already trained, but I suck at dog training. I'm great at dog spoiling!