Niamh Lynch, dairy advisor in Teagasc Navan gives an overview of feeding the young calf. The most important thing, when you're heading into the calving season, is that all your calves will be born with basically no immunity. The most important thing is to get good quality colostrum into them. When we look at the whole colostrum thing, it's really the three two one - it's getting three litres of colostrum in the first 2 hours into the calf in the first feed.
The other important thing is when you're getting colostrum out of your cows is to make sure the quality is good. The one way of measuring that is with a refractometer and making sure that the quality is over 22%.
That's your first feed and it's the most important thing in the whole calving season and it will set you up right in terms of the calves immunity as they get older and stops them getting sick. The other thing just to take note of is the recommendation is with feeding calves from then on, is that calves should be fed at 15% of their body weight.
As we move on, from when the calf is born, especially for people that are using Rotavec vaccination, you should be on transition milk from day two to day five, with two and a half to three litres of milk for two feeds a day. From then on, from six to ten days, you can either switch to milk replacer or keep on your whole milk. The same thing, three litres of milk, two feeds a day, again, the same thing from day eleven to 28.
Once we pass 28 days, it is suitable to switch to once a day feeding and calves with milk replacer, but you can also use your whole milk and feed it twice a day. In terms of the grams of powder per head per day, the recommendation really is that you're getting 400 grams of powder in and that's taken maintenance.
And finally, just to add in from when your calves are born, they should have access to clean water and some sort of calf crunch.
