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Livestock
Livestock & Forage
Improving suckler cow colostrum quality
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<blockquote data-quote="twizzel" data-source="post: 8054423" data-attributes="member: 64240"><p>We’ve been having a few rumbling issues this winter with calves and rotavirus (which we vaccinate the cows for), navel ill, pneumonia. The cows calve all year round but generally from nov - April. I try to get them scour vaccinated within the 3-12 week pre calving window. Anyhow, the vet was on farm yesterday for a pre movement test, and took a couple of passive transfer blood samples from newborn calves, and turns out they were too low, so obviously aren’t getting full immunity from the vaccine, as colostrum quality isn’t good enough.</p><p></p><p>The cows have good silage and pre calving mineral buckets, but obviously need something more, as the colostrum quality isn’t great. So just wondered if anyone had any ideas on how to improve it, without causing too big calves (lim and sim cows, gone to a lim bull). We don’t tend to get many cows that have enough to take colostrum off and freeze as spare.</p><p></p><p>Or what the best quality powdered colostrum is, at the moment we use Downland or ap supplies, but if there is better available, we can get some in <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="🤔" title="Thinking face :thinking:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/6.5/png/unicode/64/1f914.png" data-shortname=":thinking:" /> going to start testing colostrum quality too with a refractometer, rather than just seeing that the calf is sucking and thinking it’s job done. Any practical ideas welcomed…</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="twizzel, post: 8054423, member: 64240"] We’ve been having a few rumbling issues this winter with calves and rotavirus (which we vaccinate the cows for), navel ill, pneumonia. The cows calve all year round but generally from nov - April. I try to get them scour vaccinated within the 3-12 week pre calving window. Anyhow, the vet was on farm yesterday for a pre movement test, and took a couple of passive transfer blood samples from newborn calves, and turns out they were too low, so obviously aren’t getting full immunity from the vaccine, as colostrum quality isn’t good enough. The cows have good silage and pre calving mineral buckets, but obviously need something more, as the colostrum quality isn’t great. So just wondered if anyone had any ideas on how to improve it, without causing too big calves (lim and sim cows, gone to a lim bull). We don’t tend to get many cows that have enough to take colostrum off and freeze as spare. Or what the best quality powdered colostrum is, at the moment we use Downland or ap supplies, but if there is better available, we can get some in 🤔 going to start testing colostrum quality too with a refractometer, rather than just seeing that the calf is sucking and thinking it’s job done. Any practical ideas welcomed… [/QUOTE]
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Improving suckler cow colostrum quality
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