The U.S. dairy industry has shifted its perspective on calves, moving from seeing them as future earners to recognizing them as the immediate “high-value” future of a dairy farm. Kendra Wells, a veterinarian with Valley Veterinary Clinic in Wisconsin, said calf care has come a long way in recent years.
“The biggest thing, however, is just that people really care more about their calves now. It’s no longer this: ‘Well, eventually she’ll make me money.’ It’s now very much recognized that she’s the future of the farm, and so that means I want to put more investment in it. And so, I’ve seen a lot of change, specifically with facility design, nutrition plans, how we’re treating them, and even investment in vaccination plans. Coming on the horizon, I think, too, is more technology. So, we have a lot of monitoring now in the cow side of things, and I think they’re going to see more of that on the calf side.”
A new term making the rounds at U.S. dairy shows is “precision care,” and she talked about what that means.
“Precision calf care, in my mind, is just really narrowing it down, so really identifying what my key takeaways are. What do I consider success anymore? Because every farm success is going to look different; how I want a calf, what I want her to become, and what can she become? And so, I think precision is tailoring my program to have those goals met.”
She talked about where the new emphasis on calf care is coming from.
“When it comes to sexed semen and beef semen, we are raising way fewer replacements, and so the replacements we have will need to be good replacements. We can no longer pick from 900 heifers a month and be like, ‘Oh, well, at least if 50 percent of them make it, I get something out of it.’ But we are raising fewer and fewer, and so they need to be good replacements.”
There will be some new developments in the near future to help improve precision calf care.
“I like the idea a lot of a calf-monitoring technology, so ear tags, bolus, and what have you. It’s a collar, and I think that’s really just starting, but I’d really like to utilize that information, maybe not necessarily the individual calf, but looking at that as the group. Personally, I think there are a lot of questions around whether my calves are ruminating appropriately. Are we weaning at the right time? And so, I think we’re going to ask questions that, right now, we go, ‘Oh yeah, I wean at this time,’ but I think we’re going to be able to eventually utilize that information to say that one’s not doing well and not ruminating, so, I shouldn’t wean that, or I have a group that’s not doing well. What happened?”