THOUGHT About Raising a Bottle Calf....

[farmerjan]

If your angus were eating 2 bales a day, I bet they would roll down a hill in any direction.....LOL. Yeah, we have the 3x4 and 4x4 x 6 and 8ft. BIG square bales too. A few dairies here use them. The do weigh in the neighborhood of 1,000 lbs or more.

 

[Ridgetop]

FarmerJan: You said it all! We used to buy Holstein bull calves from our friends with a dairy. They made sure the calves had a feeding of colostrum - something most dairies don't do with bull calves. Since we had a large number of milking goats showing all summer, we had plenty of milk. The calves each drank over a gallon of milk every day, and all the left over stemmy hay from the goat feeders. (Goats are picky feeders! lol) At around 200 lbs (2 months) we loaded them up and sold them at the calf auction in a single lot of 3-4 calves. If we were raising straight veal, the calves got all the milk they wanted 2X daily and no hay or grain. The veal calves all went to slaughter at 300 lbs. since their stomachs never developed due to not eating hay. No vaccinations, no expense except for the cost of the calf. We watched them carefully for scours and gave them paste probiotics and electrolytes at the first indication. The $$$ made from them went toward supporting the dairy goats.

DrDooLittle: A cow is an expensive pet and can be dangerous - particularly since you would be getting a bull calf from the dairy man. Heifer calves are valuable, bulls are all they give away, although most dairies have scheduled pick ups by a calf broker who pays minimal for the calf and takes the risk of having it die without a colostrum feeding. Bottle calves are delicate especially if they do not get a feeding of colostrum. They can go down and die in less than 24 hours if you don't recognize a problem and act immediately. Even then you can lose a calf quickly. You would have to have the calf castrated - another expense. Also cattle need to have vaccinations, hoof trimming occasionally, a magnet in their stomachs, and other neat and expensive stuff. Oh yes, and dairy bulls are the most dangerous bulls for some reason. Meat breed bulls cause fewer deaths than dairy bulls, but pet bulls raised on a bottle are more dangerous than non-pet bulls.

If you decide you must get a calf, please do it with the idea of eating it instead of keeping it as a pet. You can butcher it for veal at 3-4 months old (300 lbs), or raise it a little longer for baby beef. You and your children get the fun of raising a calf with a great life lesson about where food comes from. The calf has several months of a great life and then fills your freezer before it gets so big it is a danger to you or your family, or a drain on your time and $$. A friend made the mistake of buying his daughter's veal calf at the Fair with the idea he would put on another 500 lbs. and then butcher it. He ended up with a 4 year old bad tempered Holstein bull in his back yard that no one could approach to even get it into the trailer to take to the butcher! It cost him a fortune in feed, his wife and kids were terrified of it, and he never got any decent meat out of it!

 

[babsbag]

I buy BIG square bales of alfalfa for my goats and they weigh about 1200 lbs. The "small" bales here weigh between 100-120 lbs. I'd like to raise a bottle calf too but it would go in my freezer at a pretty young age. I would also raise it on goat's milk.

 

[Ridgetop]

If you decide to raise a calf make sure it gets colostrum. If you buy a newborn from the dairy, give it goat colostrum. They will drink 2 quarts in the am and 2 quarts pm plus eat all the leftover and rejected stalky hay bits your goats leave in the feeders. No need to pasteurize the mil for the calf like you do for the kids either. You can also raise it to about 300 lbs as veal on just goat milk, but it will be drinking about 3 gallons by then. You want to keep paste probiotics and electrolytes on hand in case the calf starts to scour. Immediate action can save it, but a calf can scour and go down in 12 hours, be dead in 24, so you have to be right n top of it. I use the paste electrolytes because if the calf won't drink his bottle he definitely won't drink electrolytes. The paste you can get down the calf right away and the paste makes the calf thirsty so it wants to drink. If I had a calf scour I would also cut the milk with water until the scours cleared up.

FYI: I used to color the pasteurized milk for the goat kids blue with food coloring so we knew which milk in the fridge was safe to feed the kids and which to feed the calves and ourselves. I pasteurized every 24 hours every morning so I saved the evening's milk until then. By coloring the milk I knew which was pasteurized and which was not. We did not bother pasteurizing our household goat milk although I understand it is recommended now.