betweenthelines
Member
- Location
- southwest
I don't but there's no way to know, it's about managing risk, the biggest way for a calf to get johnes is through sucking her dam
From what I know about johnes it's not the milk that infects the calf but rather dung from the cow so in theory even a positive dams milk could be used to feed a calf as long as you were 100% sure that no dung had contaminated the colostrum but that's too big a risk for me. I only have 2 positive cows on farm and want that number to go down not up!
So all the faffing about with "safe" colostrum is pointless if the calf gets a bit of dung on itself.
Read @som farmer's post and save yourself some time. Striping/milking a cow to bottle feed it's calf is definitely "not necessary, no value added"