“These are the times that try men's souls.” | Why risk pulling a second calf down if calf is robbing milk? Granted I run in a different world than most of you, but here leaving a under month to two month old calf to fend for himself is just going end up with a dink calf. If calf is 90-100 days old and gets doggied off cow, it's a good chance calf will be ok. But start out with cow not giving enough milk, then he has to rob, he will be a dink that can't recover in 50 days.
I would pull calf either raise on bottle or sell him. If over the 14 day mark, calf has a good chance to make it on bottle, then transfer to bucket feeding for 90 days milk. 14 days is critical time frame for roto viruses, etc. But being he drank from mother I would guess he's good.
Put cow on feed, flesh her up and pound her out. Calf is a lot easier to get on bottle now, then transfer to bucket. Real tough to start month old calves on milk bucket, some do good, some don't if range cow raised. Holstein are a totally different deal, easy to raise them on bucket.
It's a known problem today, its not going to self fix itself. Mother's nature's fix is for calf to die, and cow come home fat, most likely rebred.she look wonderful and wash and repeat cycle. When you forgot to sell cow. |
Am I wasting time and money trying to make cow milk more?
