Calf Raising: There's no such thing as rose colored glasses.

I lost a calf this week that I could’ve saved if I had been paying closer attention. 

That’s the truth of matter sometimes. 

I found a calf that was severely dehydrated on Tuesday night. I made up a sick pen for her, gave her electrolytes, hooked her up to an IV drip, got her a blanket, and turned off the lights. 

The next morning, I came back to a IV bag that was ¾ and a calf that scoured for 12 hours with no replacement fluids. F***. 

Her nose was cold, her eyes were sunk in, and I knew I had missed my opportunity to save her. I got the drip going again but it  was too late. Later that day she died. 

As sad and incredibly frustrating as that is, I had to keep my eyes on the calves that were struggling that were still alive. Bright yellow manure covered the pens of my youngest grouped calves. Droopy ears, refused milk, and sad eyes were the landscape of the last week. 

I knew these calves had come in with something. When they got to us at 24 hours old, they were all scouring, many of them had blood in their manure, and they struggled to get going for 2-3 days after arrival. So when we came up on this 8-14 day mark, it was not to my surprise that we had a shit storm on our hands. 

I did my regular protocol of a DK-ll drench, surveillance drench 12 hours later, and electrolytes, it was about 50% successful. On the other 50%, I resorted to antibiotics, which to no surprise of mine, did nothing. 

I kept going with tubing electrolytes, giving Surveillance, and spraying their pens down with DK-ll. That brought a few more around. 

We aren’t even close to being out of the dark yet, but we are getting there, one calf at a time. Tubing electrolytes, giving Surveillance, spraying pens down with DK-ll to decrease the pathogen load, giving IVs, pulling weak calves from the groups, putting blankets on fevering calves, rinse and repeat. This too shall pass, as it always does.

What’s the point of this story?

Raising calves SUCKS sometimes, and sometimes we suck at raising calves. There’s no such thing as a calf program that is successful 100% of the time. It’s not possible. If someone claims their calf program is, they are not being honest with you.

There are too many variables and many of them are out of your control. You get the aftermath of the person in maternity that didn’t care enough to get the calf colostrum on time resulting in a passive transfer of 5.2. You are at the mercy of the person that was too lazy to change their dirty gloves before tubing a newborn calf. It is what it is, and at the end of the day, the responsibility falls onto the shoulders of the person caring for the calves to fix their mistakes. 

We signed up for it, of course, but that doesn’t make those hard days any easier. We struggle too, often. Don’t let the rose colored glasses of social media make you forget the truth, raising calves is frustrating sometimes. 

Our goal? To decrease the amount of times things like this happen. By putting information out there about the how and why that put calf raisers in this position. To help hold people accountable for the quality of the calf that comes out of their maternity pen. To improve the industry one calf program at a time, one calf at a time. It’s not easy, but it’s work that we find valuable to our industry. As people that raise calves, we are learning everyday what it takes to get a calf off to the right start, and keep her going in the right direction. We want to share that information with you.

When things get tough, it makes it a lot harder to share, but it’s necessary if we are going to learn and grow. 

If you are struggling with your calves and want someone to bounce ideas off of, or just want someone to vent too about how hard raising calves is, our inbox is always open.