Bottle Calf Blues

Or, How Not To Cost Effectively Raise Cattle

Seriously, this was not a good idea.
Gabriel found some hereford heifers that he wanted to look at back in early November and, while we were there, we were offered a bottle calf for sale.
She was just so cute… and tiny.. and didn’t cost much more than a puppie.. the poor thing was being fed milk replacer twice a day. We have a milk cow that can supply her with real milk that we can feed her more frequently. It’d be much better for her… and it wouldn’t cost much to feed her right?

Never mind the fact that we’re coming up on winter. Never mind the fact that our soon to be hay-fed cow would be cutting production. So, we took her home, and things went well. Then we got a call from the hereford breeders. Would we be interested in another bottle calf? Well, why not? If we’re going to feed one, we might as well feed two right?

A few days later we went to pick him up, only to find that he had the scours. To our credit, we did hesitate, but then decided that some good old fashioned cow’s milk and maybe a little black strap molasses would take care of the problem.

Things went alright for a rew days. Calfeinne, the origianal bottle calf, wasn’t a problem. Happy and healthy and, from time to time, noisy. The new calf, Decalf (yes, we love our cheesy animal names), had a very poor sucking reflex, and was hard to feed for a while, but seemed to improve after a few days. Then, his scoures came back with a vengance and he began getting weak. I rushed out and got some medicine for him, and he started doing better.

And then, the afore mentioned milk cow, Maya, began to slack off in milk production. We started mixing the frozen goat milk that I was holding back for soap making in with Maya’s milk to feed the calves. By giving poor Calfeinne a little less than a calf her age should ideally be getting, that worked for a little while, but the frozen milk dwindled down to nothing… and Maya slacked off again. You know, it feels a little wrong to be milking a cow twice a day and sitll have to buy butter from the grocery store.

This time we broke down and bought a bag of powered milk replacer. Hopefully, with a little help from Maya, this one bag of milk replacer will see the claves through weaning. But between that, Decalff’s scours medication episode, and having to buy more of our dairy products from the store, we’ve learned the hard way that feeding bottle claves in the middle of winter is patently not the way to get ahead in farming.

Oooh, and did I mention that Gabriel still goes out to feed the youngest calf at midnight every night?
Yeah, he loves that. expecially on those cold, frosty nights