For better or for worse...

The calf came home. We'll do our best to keep it going, if it doesn't work out might try again in the spring, maybe with a bigger one too.

you'll want to keep some scour halt on hand, about all I ever raised got the poops before they got on solid food

free choice whole oats helps to stop scours. at least that's what we always found. I have yet to have scours at my place and there all jersey X. Grass hay till 5 months old. 1.5 litres milk 2x a day for 5-6 months of age.I will have 2 born in the next month. get no alfalfa till next winter. as soon as grass is green (about june) they will go on grass but still keep grass hay with them till winter. We found that calves that got alfalfa scoured to easy so we quit till 6-9 months old.

Your luck may be different.

Hi the biggest problem is over feeding. Calves do best when they have colostrum milk for the first week of their life. The fat in the milk is already broken down.
When you see a sign of scours my dad would crack an egg and put it down the calfs throat. It tightens them up. Just be careful not to overfeed!
Good luck to you. They are sure cute little buggers.
Ed Will Oliver BC

You just enrolled yourself in the school of hard knocks. lol

We all want to help, and all advice that you will have offered will come from folks just like me , with good intentions. I am only going to offer the broadest advice. Every thing related to raising a bottle fed calf goes to stresses upon the calf. And I don't mean he is worried about retirement funds, or whether his girl friend is cheating on him, lol. Your calves stresses will be physical and environmental. He will express his stress to you in only a few ways, and you need to be able to recognize them. Scouring can be the result from a infection, like the Rota Corona virus, this won't be much risk unless you bring in another calf from a different farm or sales barn. Calves will scour if fed too much milk , they can start to scour in really cold conditions when they cannot take in enough calories to live. So scouring can be caused by many things and is as much a sign of stress as it is a illness. At first sign of scouring I will get some powdered Elctrolytes from the Vet, and mix it with warm water. Very important to keep a scouring from becoming dehydrated. If you want to check your calf for hydration , simply pinch some skin on it's back with your thumb and fore finger. The skin should go back down as it was before you pinched it right away in a normal healthy calf. If the skin you pinched stands up after you have let go, your calf is not retaining enough fluids, and is becoming dehydrated. Most people want to cut back on the calves intake of fluids if they are scouring, which is about the worst thing you could do.
A pen with deep straw bedding will keep your calf both warm and dry. And even if the top of the straw looks dry, after a few days just how dry is this pen ? Remember your baby calf is on a liquid diet, and will pass a lot of liquid that goes down through the straw out of sight, and the pen will appear clean. The trouble comes from the ammonia in the urine. While we can't see it , the baby is laying on this bedding , and if there is not real good air in the pen area, the ammonia will hurt their little lungs, and you will first see this as a snotty nose.
Telling you these things , I am not trying to scare you , only tell you the kinds of things guys like rrlund, phillip, coonie , or myself would be looking for , and checking every time we look in a calf pen. Watch the calves tail, a lot can be learned just from a glance at a calf tail, and never let manure to build up on a tail. Bruce

Good looking calf as others have said keep them hungry and keep them healthy especially at first.My wife raises a lot of them and most do fine I see you have good bedding thats important to
have a dry place with no drafts.Once you get the calf thing down you can move onto goat kids at least the goats are worth 2X what calves are a pound when you sell them.

Tracto-man,

I'm betting you can do it.

When I was about ten years old, I raised a calf from hours-old. Its mother would not nurse it, so it never got colostrum. Despite all of Dad's predictions that the calf would most likely die... he made it! (At least until he was grown - and sent to the locker plant.)

add to what bruce said i use wood shaving under other bedding i think it helps soak up moisture