Challenging the Norm: Herd check…for calves?

Replacement heifers represent the future investment of any dairy to continue to introduce new, younger animals to the herd to be able to cull older, genetically inferior, reproduc­tively spent, sick or dead cows. Although management of dairy calves varies heavily from region-to-region and farm-to-farm, veterinarians should and do play a very important role in the decisions made on dairy operations regarding several criti­cal control points, such as: number of replacement animals to generate and/or keep, newborn processing and management, nutrition, disease detection and mitigation, and inter- or intra-farm benchmarking and goal setting. Veterinarians can work with producers to establish “calf health programs” that allow regular, scheduled visits to the farm by the veterinarian to focus on calf health and disease mitigation/ detection. Understanding five key points regarding calf health and performance and how the MOAT approach (measure, ob­serve, aim and tracking) can be implemented at each of those points is important to generate discussion and change, and to improve calf health. These five points are: Colostrum Cleanliness Comfort Calories Consistency Thoracic ultrasound (TUS) of pre-weaned calves is the founda­tion of “calf health programs,” and is an important calf-side disease diagnostic that can be performed regularly to help the veterinarian identify violations in the implementation of those five key points.