Misfitmorgan's Journal - That Summer Dust

@farmerjan After following your advice the calf was already looking much improved this morning. By last night he was looking like he would not make it another 12 hrs and wouldnt even stand on his own. This morning he stood up as soon as we got to the barn.

We also did a full cleaning of their pen yesterday and re-limed the floor, then put down a thick bedding of hay as they kept slipping on the chopped straw.

So glad that he has turned around..... it is amazing how bad the soy replacer can affect the calves. Some can tolerate it but more cannot. Getting their gut tract "cleaned out" of the soy, with the electrolytes... plus them giving him energy, and then reintroducing good milk slowly will hopefully do the trick. A calf needs to be a little hungry... not fully sated... for the first week or so. Because we cannot feed in the small quantities that they get when naturally nursing, as frequently as they nurse, it is sooo easy to overload the true stomach that processes the milk and it just "runs through them".
He probably had little or no actual organisms like ecoli or anything causing the scours.... just the soy not agreeing with him. But once they get weak, it is an open invitation for every bug there is to invade their weak immune response.
I really hope he continues to come back and do good.

farmerjan said:

So glad that he has turned around..... it is amazing how bad the soy replacer can affect the calves. Some can tolerate it but more cannot. Getting their gut tract "cleaned out" of the soy, with the electrolytes... plus them giving him energy, and then reintroducing good milk slowly will hopefully do the trick. A calf needs to be a little hungry... not fully sated... for the first week or so. Because we cannot feed in the small quantities that they get when naturally nursing, as frequently as they nurse, it is sooo easy to overload the true stomach that processes the milk and it just "runs through them".
He probably had little or no actual organisms like ecoli or anything causing the scours.... just the soy not agreeing with him. But once they get weak, it is an open invitation for every bug there is to invade their weak immune response.
I really hope he continues to come back and do good.

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He got some gel type probiotics as well and will get a half bottle of the new milk when I get home if he is still looking good, then the other half before bed tonight. If all looks good he is going to normal feedings after that. He was eatting very small amounts of grain and hay the day we brought him home which he seemed very young for but we didnt want to take it away if he was used to it. He was also already bucket trained as well though.

I'm wondering if they were crossed with something or just really small births. They were 68lbs and 72lbs if I recall right which is small for a Holstein calf and they were not freshly born. The first two calves were 86 and 89lbs but neither was bucket trained and had no interest in grain or hay.

There are so many dairy farmers doing cross breeding with their lower end" cows to try to get more out of the calves at the markets. Many are using Swedish red or Norweigan red , Montebeliarde is popular and they make a nice beefy but good producer in a dairy. Then if ayshire or even guernsey or jersey is used the calves could come out red if the cow carries red. The greater majority of jersy/hol crosses will be black and white or dark brown and white....they will have a different black and white pattern and you can tell them for several generations... but occasionally they will come out a chocolate brown with no white... although that is much more common in a swiss /hol cross.
It is very likely they are out of first calf heifers, so smaller calves. Looking back at the pictures, I would say the browner one you lost was a cross, and the red and white one is a holstein... is has the black nose.

If he is interested in the grain, encourage it. Any roughage like grain and hay helps to develop the rumen... Some calves want to eat more/sooner ..... some don't . Hope he is doing good for you when you get home....

farmerjan said:

There are so many dairy farmers doing cross breeding with their lower end" cows to try to get more out of the calves at the markets. Many are using Swedish red or Norweigan red , Montebeliarde is popular and they make a nice beefy but good producer in a dairy. Then if ayshire or even guernsey or jersey is used the calves could come out red if the cow carries red. The greater majority of jersy/hol crosses will be black and white or dark brown and white....they will have a different black and white pattern and you can tell them for several generations... but occasionally they will come out a chocolate brown with no white... although that is much more common in a swiss /hol cross.
It is very likely they are out of first calf heifers, so smaller calves. Looking back at the pictures, I would say the browner one you lost was a cross, and the red and white one is a holstein... is has the black nose.

If he is interested in the grain, encourage it. Any roughage like grain and hay helps to develop the rumen... Some calves want to eat more/sooner ..... some don't . Hope he is doing good for you when you get home....

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I do know Norwegian red is a popular cross locally with Holstein, so is jersey for higher butterfat. It is common for dairy herds here to be all Holstein and have a few jersey to help boost the overall butterfat. You once in awhile come across guernsey but they are no so common here. Several farms take calves in and have learned for the most part if they want to make anything at all on the calves they have to get them started on a bottle and not have wet navels. The buyers here mostly will not bid on a wet navel calf because the chances of them having gotten colostrum are low. The little brown one we lost was $17.50....we were the only bid on him. We wouldnt have but we want to try to give him a chance because if he went back to the farm odds are he would have been shot. He was just so small I doubt the farm would have bothered. The only reason he was brought was because he came on a trailer with 5 other started calves but our estimate was he was only 3-4 days old at most. The two we still have were at least a week old.

Speaking of the two we still have....they are now doing great. Scours completely cleared up, they are acting normal and the red/white one cleaned himself off. He did overly clean a few spots though so he now has two bald patches by his tail base. Very glad they are doing well and kicking myself for the stupid mistake. I'm feeling guilty about the one we lost just because I keep wondering if it was the formula or something else. I'm am thinking something else because he was shaky on his feet from the time we loaded him, but that nagging voice yanno.

Here is a very poo picture of the new twins....I will try to get a better one. Just hard to do because she keeps them in the brush/woods most of the time for now. The lighter one on the left is a girl, the darker on the right a boy.


This is our new buck the night we bought him home. He wouldnt hold still so not the best pic but he was only supposedly 7.5 weeks old and he is a big boy. He dwarfs my little girl even though she is only 1.5 weeks younger. So either he is going to be a monster or he is older then his suspected age. He was dam raised vs bottle raised though so that could have something to do with it. I will about a better picture this evening since he has calmed down finally.

I’ve seen brand new born lambs go through the auction, some couldn’t even stand up-already dying. I don’t know how people can do that. I don’t want to bottle raise any more lambs and will take them to auction, BUT they will be a week or two old, had colostrum and be well started. A bottle of milk will go with them. We have more money in milk than the two we raised will ever be worth, love them to pieces, now have a pet wether and the diminutive ewe lamb is the size of her triplet sisters.

Baymule said:

I’ve seen brand new born lambs go through the auction, some couldn’t even stand up-already dying. I don’t know how people can do that. I don’t want to bottle raise any more lambs and will take them to auction, BUT they will be a week or two old, had colostrum and be well started. A bottle of milk will go with them. We have more money in milk than the two we raised will ever be worth, love them to pieces, now have a pet wether and the diminutive ewe lamb is the size of her triplet sisters.

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I dont know either. I never would be able to but I also never would take a late pregnant animal to the auction. Doesnt make sense to chance of abortion or some other complication are to high. I do understand a lot of people do not want to bottle raised but there is still the option to as you said get it started on a bottle then sell which seems better as you would get more money then a wet navel going thru the ring.

So I want to share something that is oddly quirky. As I've mentioned before we have a blue and tan doberman pincher named Issac. He has this habit, with his food dish.

If any other animal even comes over and sniffs the food dish, he will eat almost exactly half of the dish of food. No matter the amount I put in it, it's almost exactly half. Then he will go take a nap for a few hours and if no one else has eaten the food he will come back for more in a few hours. The funniest part is, if he goes back to other half he left and an animal investigates he eats half of whats left. It's the oddest thing but our doberdoodle did the exact same thing, except she would only wait like 5 minutes and if no one else wanted it she would go finish the food. Does anyone else's dog do this? He only does it with his dry food, he gets dry food in the morning/day then wet food for dinner. Also no one see's my dirty floor and box of jars.....right?...right.

Nothing new going on here. The garden is almost done being planted....yes we are late. Everything but the corn, squash, pumpkins, and green beans is in though. I believe we need to amend our garden soil, the plants seem to be struggling this year. We did not put our barn compost on this year because the geese spent the entire fall, winter, and spring in the garden. We thought it should be well fertilized but the plants say no. Now that most everything is planted we will be side dressing our compost on the rows and maybe even resorting to garden plant miracle grow....which I've never used in my life. The compost is completely broken down into dirt and ready to use, we should have just put it on when we were tilling. Part of the choice is we need to screen the compost before we can use it and we were just to busy. The compost is 2 years worth of "barn dirt" from the first two years we were here and from multiple pig break outs, goat destruction, and sheep mischief many things ended up mixed into the manure/straw/hay we were cleaning out of the barn. Basically it left us a mess of a compost pile that we are now paying for. Thankfully all those issues got fixed and everyone stays where they should so the compost pile from last year and this year is clean, just to hot still.

That's about all.

I have one dog that guards his food. If he doesn’t eat it all, he feels like he must protect it.

Baymule said:

I have one dog that guards his food. If he doesn’t eat it all, he feels like he must protect it.

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So the opposite lol. Issac literally tries to give it away. It's like he doesnt want to eat it all in case the smaller animals are hungry. He is so funny.