Maternity Pen Must Haves.
The list of things that make a maternity pen great is long, but there are a handful of things that are non-negotiable. The ball starts rolling before the calf hits the ground. As calf raisers, we take a lot of the heat when it comes to how calves are performing, but many times, more than you would probably like to know, your calves are already behind the eight ball when you get your hands on them. It makes your job a lot harder than it needs to be!
Here are three things that you have to have in a successful maternity pen:
The right person! Not just A person THE person. I would argue this is the most important job on the entire farm. The person calving, feeding colostrum, and taking care of the calves in those first 12 hours of life are ESSENTIAL to your entire livelihood. You spend a lot of money to get those heifers to the milking herd. If in two years, they get there and you have to cull them because they never performed, that’s going to cost you big money, not just the money you have into her, but the loss of production that you will never see on that culled heifer, and even more so, the loss of production you are leaving on the table with the heifers you don’t cull because of something that happened in the first 24 hours of life. Find the right person for this job, train them to perfection, and pay them accordingly.
A solid and well thought out colostrum program is number two on the list of maternity must haves. There are a lot of things that come into play when talking about colostrum, but the main thing when talking about colostrum is to make sure that you have the 4 Q’s executed as well as you can. Here is a quick reminder of what they are:
Quality: Above 22% BRIX for the first one gallon feeding, at least 200g of IgG.
Quantity: The goal is one gallon and another 2 quarts 12 hours later. This will depend on average calf size.
Quickly: Try to get the first gallon of colostrum into the newborn calf within 1 hour.
sQueeky clean: Test your colostrum regularly right before it is fed to the calf (out of the container you are feeding it from!). The goal is to have less than 100,000 cfu on a SPC and less than 10,000 cfu of E. Coli. The lower the better!
3. A sanitation protocol paired with an audit protocol to make sure it continues to work. Sanitation is only as good as two things, the person doing the cleaning, and the checkpoints you put in place to make sure the protocols you made are working. It is important that the cleaning protocol you make is thorough, easy, realistic, well written, and in as many languages needed to make sure everyone has access to the information you provide. Once a month, try to go around with an ATP meter (many feed companies have one for you to borrow!), and swab test the pen walls, the warming box, the door handles, the tuber, the colostrum crates, the gloves of the employees taking care of the first feeding of colostrum, and anything else that gets a lot of use on your farm. If you find feeding equipment that is over 10 on the ATP meter when it’s clean, double check your protocols and the protocol follow through, find out where it’s going wrong. If you are finding that your pen walls, or other environmental factors are testing over 50, dig a little deeper into that too!
4. Cameras. As much as you wish you could trust every person that works for you, that isn’t always the case. This is especially true if you have multiple people in the maternity pen working with the calves and cows. You can’t be there all the time to see what goes on, cameras can help to hold people accountable for doing the job correctly every time. When you are having issues with your young calves, you will be thankful to have them to help you get to the source of any potential issues.
If you have access to the direct management of your farms maternity pen, these will be a great place to start! Of course, there are also many circumstances where you don’t have any control over the maternity pen, like in our situation. We custom raise heifers and dairy beef calves, we pick them up how they come. Yes, they do come from a single source, but at the end of the day, we can’t decide what does or doesn’t happen in the 24 hours between birth and the time we pick them up.
Even so, we give A LOT of feedback to the dairy and it makes a big difference. They send their calves to be raised, so they wouldn’t know one way or another if something was or wasn’t working in those first 24 hours. We are the eyes and ears of their maternity program, we owe it to the calves to tell the dairy if something is going wrong as soon as possible. We are the only ones that can be the voice for these calves. We can’t keep raising calves the way we do just because “it’s how raising calves is”. It doesn’t have to be that way! We want raising calves to be FUN!
If you are struggling with your calves, calves that you custom raise, or calves that you buy, reach out to us and we can help you dig deep to find the source of the problem. We want to help you step up your game, starting from day one.