Calves must be born healthy and without problems. Therefore, it is essential to provide a safe, stress-free and clean environment around calving. Each birth is unique, and requires your undivided attention for the cow and calf. Most cows give birth to a calf without assistance. If help is needed in too many cases, you should take a closer look to your breeding program.

In the first two days in the life of a calf, make sure that it receives sufficient antibodies from the cow’s colostrum. Also supply enough energy to maintain the calf’s body temperature functions. For good colostrum, make sure that the feeding strategy of the dam during the close-up phase is checked to ensure the colostrum quality and quantity.

After 3 days, dairy calves have to be fed sufficient amounts of calf milk replacer or milk in order to achieve optimum growth and to develop a healthy digestive tract and an active immune system. This phase is very important to achieve the optimum metabolic development of dairy calves.

Intensive milk feeding programs for calves require more time for adequate rumen development and therefore a gradual weaning process is needed. You should reduce milk feeding over a period of 3-4 weeks and not stop feeding milk earlier than 10 weeks of age. Such a programme improves dry feed intake.

After successful weaning, it is important to keep supporting dairy calf rumen development while maintaining growth. By the time the calf is 6 months old, the rumen size should have increased about 5 fold compared to the size at weaning.

Research has shown that additional growth during the first 9 months of life results in an increase in milk yield during the first lactation. Most dairy cow farmers feed according to a well-designed plan up to the first few weeks after weaning and carefully monitor the results. After that period there is a tendency to feed what is readily available, but focus on growth and applying a balanced diet is a requirement to let the calf grow into a highly productive milking cow.