Best calving hint I have is to do it in May. Seriously, a lot of your calving difficulties can be handled by calving in warm weather. Now I know a lot of people aren't going to change their calving season but we really did see a lot of our calving problems disappear when we switched calving seasons.

On a practical side, save your back. All you really need to do to get the calf to clear his lungs is to get his nose slightly lower than the rest of his body. The best way I know to clear the lungs of a calf is to get them out to the hips so that they can expand their lungs, and then wait for the fluid to drain. Their rear end will be elevated so the fluid will usually run out. Once their chest is clear of the birth canal their hips could stay in all day long and it wouldn't threaten the life of the calf. There is no need to hurry once the chest is out.

Keep your fingers out of the mouth when you are pulling the calf, the first stimulation of the mouth starts the timer ticking on the closing of the gut wall to the passage of large antibodies. I prefer the nylon straps to chains because they are easier on my hands. If you have to pull the calf make sure that you get it in front of the cow and that she smells it before you release her head. It is much easier to get her attention that way than when she is tearing around the pen trying to get away from the pain in her backside.

If you want to prevent disease, make sure that all of the calves you have in a group are within two weeks of age. Also calve on clean ground if at all possible, i.e. the Sandhills Calving Method. Using this method of calving we have reduced our scours occurrence to nearly 0. Last year in one of our groups of cows there were 85-90 cows calving and I treated one case of scours and I didn't lose a single calf to scours.

We struggled with the typical calving difficulties as well as disease troubles the same as everyone else did. After loosing about 10% of our calves in one storm we decided that we had to change calving seasons. Once we made the switch we had a whole different set of problems to deal with, but we have really reduced calf diseases such as scours and enterotoxemia to nearly zero.

EDIT: I forgot to include what I use for the occasional adoptions. Having tried many of the tricks others have mentioned, the best luck I have had consistently is O-NO-MORE. It is a powder that you sprinkle down the back of the calf. The stuff smells like ammonia but cows can't resist. They will sniff the calf and try to ignore him, but pretty soon they will be licking away. The best part about it is the faces the cow makes while she is licking it. The link is to Valley Vet where I get mine.