If the future health of a calf is to be assured, natural rearing on a foster mother is imperative. A cow giving 6-8 lb. milk a day is sufficient for calves of all breeds and is the best means of rearing a calf well, both for the health and growth of the calf and the most economical use of milk. Nearly double the quantity is required to give similar results from bucket feeding; but failing a nurse cow and only in such an emergency would I permit it, feed as follows from a bucket:
Milk fresh from the cow Hay and/or
per day Dry Food Silage Water
( Good
week quarts quality)
1st 4 -- -- --
2nd 4 -- -- --
3rd 4 -- -- --
4th 4 Offered -- --
5th 3-1/2 Then give Offered Offered
6th 3 from 1 lb. to Ad lib. Ad. lib
7th 3 1-1/2 lb. Ad lib. Ad. lib
8th 3 daily as Ad lib. Ad. lib
9th 2 cleaned up Ad lib. Ad. lib
10th-12th 1-1/2 made up to Ad lib. Ad. lib
12th-14th 1 1 gallon with Ad lib. Ad. lib
14th-20th 1 pint water if Ad lib. Ad. lib
possible
Milk fed in three meals daily.
The best meal ration for calves is home-grown oats 3 parts and linseed 2 parts, both ground to a meal, mixed and fed dry with the addition of a little coarsely ground wheat, fed at the rate of 2 per cent of liveweight. But where good silage and/or hay is available ab lib., these form the perfect food for calves from weaning stage, and as a supplement to suckling. I avoid any kind of meal or cake until the animal calves her second calf. The feeding of unnatural concentrates in early life is the surest way of impairing digestion and ensuring disease in cowhood.
The main aim in calf rearing and feeding for dairy purposes should be big bellies, bare ribs and skinny udders up to the age of fourteen to eighteen months. Between the age of three months and eighteen months unless you feel a little ashamed to show your dairy young stock to your friends and visitors, you may be sure they are too fat for development as successful milking cows.
Big bellies must be developed if the animal is to grow into a cow capable of dealing with large quantities of food. This can best be done by feeding large quantities of bulky, but nutritional food, and limiting fat and flesh-making concentrates.
Bare ribs are an indication that the animal is using all its food for growth instead of putting on surplus flesh. But this does not mean the calf must be starved. Growth should be maintained throughout but the ribs should always be capable of being counted without handling them. This means that they must be seen and not flesh-covered so that they are individually indistinguishable, except, of course, when the thick winter hair growth covers them.
If good grass, hay and/or silage is available, and, with calves over six months old, oat straw for belly filling, there is no need to feed concentrates of any kind, and when the calf becomes a cow she will have a better digestion as a result. In cattle, as in humans, it is the concentrated manufactured and processed foods which damage the digestion, and the longer the stomach can be kept free of such foods the healthier will the system remain and the more capable will it be of coping with a period of strain should it be necessary during the cowhood milking life.
Flesh or fat on a young heifer's udder is a sure indication of a potentially poor yielder. The udder at all stages of growth to cow-hood should be loose and silky, rather than formed and fleshy. Hard living will help this; overfeeding will put flesh and fat around the udder which will always be an impediment to profitable milk production.
Bull calves which are to be reared for breeding need a higher level of nutrition than the heifer calf. My experience is that a heifer calf fed on more than 130 gallons of milk, spread over five months or so, will rarely become a really efficient milk producer. That extra milk seems to make all the difference between an animal which acquires the ability to put on flesh and one which produces a large quantity of milk efficiently. But with a bull calf it is different, at any rate up to a maximum of about 180 gallons of milk given at the rate of a gallon or so daily for six to eight months according to the size and breed of the calf, and of course suckled from the cow every time. But it is still possible to ruin even a bull calf with too much food of a fattening nature. A successful Hereford breeder I know went in for Jersey cattle and decided to prepare his first Jersey bull for show. He turned out a magnificent animal, but though it started life as an extremely well-bred Jersey, it looked, apart from its colour, much more like a Hereford than a Jersey in the show ring.
It does demonstrate how important feeding is to the development of true breed characteristics, and how a really good inheritance can be made the most of, or marred beyond measure, by feeding. If underfeeding is practised to the detriment of the continuing growth of the calf a similar change in breed conformation may result, but overfeeding, especially between the ages of six months and maturity, is far more common, and in my opinion more harmful to the dairy calf.
The most important thing of all is to see that all the food the young animal has is its natural food, grown without chemical stimulants or poison sprays, and that if any supplements are given at all, they are natural and not synthetic. There is often need for a mineral and trace element addition to the normal diet, especially on land which has been depleted by years of chemical manuring, or years of extractive cropping without adequate organic manuring. But it is wise to avoid the synthetic mineral and trace element supplement, and use only natural herbs (in the leys or in dried form) or seaweed meals or powders which contain all the known minerals and trace elements in natural form.
If the bull calf is not to be reared for breeding, then, in the pure dairy breeds nothing can be gained from keeping it longer than the next convenient occasion for a journey to the slaughterhouse. (For the small difference in price which grading through the market brings for the calf, a shilling or two, I prefer the calf to escape the agonies of a day at the market with its inevitable cruelties; it is now possible for them to go direct to the slaughterhouse.) The cost in milk of getting the higher price of a veal calf is far greater than the gain.
When buying a bull calf for rearing avoid one which has been taken off milk and put on to a milk substitute or gruel. See that he is thriving on his dam or a foster mother and he should then be easy to transfer to the nurse cow which you will have waiting for him. Find out how much milk he is having and allow him a similar quantity when he arrives on your farm whether or not you feel it is too much or too little. Then any change in quantity that is to be made to adjust him to approximately a gallon a day, should be made gradually. A sudden change of feeding, involving also a change of environment, will invariably result in digestive trouble and scouring.
If it is a Jersey calf, forget the fallacy that Jersey milk is too rich for a Jersey calf. Nature provided Jersey milk for the Jersey calf before ever man had the idea of using it for himself. The reason that many Jersey calves scour on Jersey milk is not because of its richness but because they are getting too much. Occasionally also, a calf will scour because it is getting too little and, in hunger, eats scraps of other food lying around the calf house, which it is unable to digest. As advised in the disease treatment section of this book, the first thing to do in case of scour is to stop all food, and proceed with the treatment. But in order to be sure that the calf is returned to the correct quantity of milk after treatment, while he or she is fasting, check the weight of milk being given by the foster mother, and if it is too much or too little, adjust it by changing the nurse cow if it is too little, or taking from the cow each day milk in excess of the calf's need.
But whether the future herd sire is bred on the farm or bought from another breeder at less than six months of age, the most important factor in his future working efficiency and health, and consequently the health and vigour of his progeny, is the way in which he is reared from birth. There is absolutely no substitute for mother's milk actually drawn from its mother, or a foster mother, by the newly born creature itself, from birth until it is old enough to be self-sufficient on solid food, whether the creature is a calf, a baby elephant or just the farmer's boy. In spite of the much advertised foods of royal babies and Royal Show winners, nothing has yet been found which gives the same vigour and disease immunity as mother's milk. There is a job here for scientific experimenters to compare several generations of entirely naturally suckled animals, with comparable ages and breeds of animals reared from an early age, for several generations, on the 'fortified' foods of modern science, which, though they may give the superficial splendour of apparent well-being, may at the same time be devitalizing the digestive ability of the stomach and the eliminative capacity of the intestines and preparing the certainty of stomach ulcers and constipation, or T.B. and Johne's disease in adult life. Until we can be certain beyond doubt that there is no connection between degenerative, digestive and intestinal troubles and the now widespread practice of unnatural rearing, the only wise course is to continue in the way which has succeeded in nature since life began, limiting any modifications on the commercial farm to those from which there is no economical escape, such, for instance, as using a nurse cow after the calf has spent the first week or so suckling its dam.
23. A heifer in good growing condition—Polden Autumn Gold
24. Heifers should be kept in hard growing condition—without excess flesh. A group at Goosegreen in the early Spring
25. Some of the author's Polden Herd going out to graze. Note the capacious barrels essential to efficient dairy cows
26. A group of the author's prize-winning Jerseys
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