There’s a Hole in My Milk Bucket

Have you ever felt like you keep doing all of the things you’re supposed to when it comes to raising great calves and it’s just not working?

Calf raising is just like any other kind of animal agriculture, “We manage biology for profit.” 

So how can we manage calf biology and still make a profit?

By managing the size of the holes in our bucket.

You have a nice, new milk bucket. No scratches, no dents, no problems, nothing. 

Now, pretend this bucket is your calf the day the cow is confirmed pregnant. 

The calf is chillin’ inside her mom, but her mom gets heat stressed, her dry cow ration is lacking, or she doesn’t have adequate space to lay down as often as she would like. Those are maybe a couple of dents in your new bucket. Not enough to completely destroy the bucket, but enough to compromise it ever so slightly. 

The calf is born, she lands face first in a dirty maternity pen, and she gets a gallon of colostrum that is 18% BRIX, now this is going to really start impacting your bucket. Maybe that puts a ¼ inch hole ¾ of the way down the side of the bucket. Again, not the end of the world, but you will never be able to fill the bucket all the way to the top again. 

The calf gets moved to the calf barn and gets scours. She's going to recover, but this puts a couple deep scratches in the side of the bucket, leaving more opportunity for bacteria and other things to get in where they shouldn’t be. 

It’s below 55F and she has no calf jacket, this puts another small hole in the bucket, maybe only the size of a needle. 

She gets fed 2 quarts 2x per day when it’s less than 55F and she doesn’t have a jacket on, say this puts another hole but a little bit bigger in her bucket. What if that milk replacer is also low quality? Another hole. What if she gets fed at a different time every day? Hole. What if she gets cold milk sometimes? Hole. What if she gets fed with dirty equipment? Hole. 

Say she is constantly stressed from poor air quality or a draft, this puts another hole in your bucket. 

All of a sudden you have this bucket that used to hold a gallon, and now can only hold 1 quart, and only for a little while because all of those other small holes are constantly leaking.

You started with a beautiful calf, and her potential has been beaten and battered by all of these stressors. Okay, so now what can you do to minimize the amount of holes a calf gets in her bucket?

Start by downloading our initial visit questionnaire. 

In this questionnaire, we will help you find all of the holes in your buckets. You can’t fix what you don’t know about, the first step in improving is knowing where the problems are to begin with. 

If you fill it out and you find out you have some holes in your bucket that you don’t know how to fix, give us a call. We want to help you get those patched up ASAP and make raising calves easy and fun.