Re: Raising young calves

Posted by Hal/ Eastern WA on November 06, 2013 at 13:32:49 from (97.115.182.128):

In Reply to: Raising young calves posted by picassomcp on November 06, 2013 at 08:05:20:

When I was a kid 50 years ago, I always had the job of caring for the calves, heifers and bulls of our from 2 to 5 milk cows. At that time it was legal and customary to sell raw milk to customers who came and got it at the farm. We had lots of customers who liked our milk because they said it was cleaner than what they could buy at other farms. Anyway we always had several cows milking at once and to keep them milking, they had to each have a calf about once a year. We fed the baby calves milk with nipple pails, colostrum at first, then whole milk for a while and eventually skim milk, as we ran the excess milk through a separator and sold the cream.

Over the years I raised lots of these calves. Some of the heifers became replacement milk cows, while others joined our beef herd. The bulls were always castrated very young, and we usually fed them out and butchered them when they were about 18 months old. We only ever lost one of the milk cow calves.

Were they particularly profitable? I really don"t know how well we did on them, but our little dairy business did pretty well. I do know that dealing with the calves all the time was quite a bit of work for me, but it was just one of the jobs I knew I was supposed to be responsible for, so I took good care of the calves. My guess is that we came out OK on the calves partly because we had milk to feed them, essentially free labor and plenty of good pasture on our small ranch. We had to do something with the milk cow calves--my Dad did not believe it would work well to have them continue to nurse from the cows.

But these days I do not believe that it is legal to sell raw milk on a farm and I would be very leery of the possible civil liability in doing so. At least in my area, it is no longer acceptable to sell separated cream to a local creamery. So I don"t think many people are milking a few cows any more like they used to. Calves need milk. Milk replacer might work, but it is fairly expensive, and in my opinion, not nearly as good as real milk. There may be better ways of feeding young calves than the methods we used, but I still think that taking care of baby calves still would be a bunch of hand work.

I could see dealing with a couple of baby Holstein bull calves, planning to raise them up to butcher size, but only because the calves would be cheap to start with. But I would doubt that it would be a paying proposition to raise a bunch of them to feeder size, unless somehow you have milk available and want to do a lot of work for little or no pay.

But some guys have to try things for themselves. Good luck!

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