Calving has either arrived or is only around the corner for a lot of autumn herds, and the final few preparations need to be made to ensure calf health.

Being prepared is crucial in ensuring a successful calf rearing season, and involves making sure calf houses, gates, and pens are properly washed and disinfected.

When it comes to feeding equipment such as teat feeders, buckets, and milk trolleys, they must be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected -minimising bacteria transfer from one season to the next is important to break the disease cycle in calf houses.

The calving season can be particularly long for autumn calving herds as generally, it rolls into spring calving without too much of a breather.

This means that there is only a short period of time to get everything prepared, cleaned, and disinfected before calves occupy the calf shed for the next number of months.

Farmers need to ensure that there is access to clean fresh water at the front of the pens, beside where the calves go to drink/eat as water is a key driver in aiding concentrate intake and rumen development.

Consistency is essential when it comes to calf health, and farmers need to create standard operating procedures (SOPs), particularly when there are numerous people helping out during the calving season.

Optimising calf health from birth to weaning is the first step in achieving the target age at first calving of 24 months for your replacement heifers.

Numerous research projects have proven that any set-back in calf development pre-weaning can have a significant impact on the animals' ability to achieve this 24-month target. 

When it comes to calf housing, ventilation, and stocking density are limiting factors on calf health and performance alongside poor drainage, as they increase a calf's susceptibility to diseases such as pneumonia or calf scour through damp air and run-off into calf pens.

A clean, dry bed is essential, and regular removal of dirty bedding material is necessary throughout the calving season to mitigate the risk of disease and sickness spreading.

If possible, the feed preparation or equipment cleaning should be a moderate distance from calves to ensure that buckets and feeders are regularly cleaned and disinfected.

Treating sick calves can add a significant amount of time onto the daily workload during the already busy calving season.

This increased time cost coupled with the cost of treating the illness, as well as the knock-on effects on subsequent growth and lifetime production, will waste important resources.

Pneumonia, for example, is the most common cause of death and poor performance in young cattle from weaning to 10 months-of-age.

Pneumonia can reduce average live weight gain by up to 200g/day. In addition, these animals may never recover completely, which increases their lifetime costs and reduces their efficiency to convert feed to gain or performance.

According to Animal Health Ireland (AHI), 14.5% of dairy heifers that get pneumonia as calves, fail to reach their first lactation, which is a staggering percentage.

Colostrum intakes are essential in the health and growth of calves, as sufficient intakes of good quality colostrum will help minimise the risk of diseases commonly found in a calf house.

Colostrum quality is defined by its immunoglobulin concentration (IgG) and this can be measured on-farm using a colostrometer, which should read higher than 50 g/L of IgG), or through using a brix-refractometer which should read higher than 22%.

Colostrum quality declines after six hours, so should be harvested and fed as soon as possible. It should also be stored in a fridge, or frozen if it is not all used at the initial feed.

Quantity of colostrum is important, and the rule is to feed 10% of bodyweight, meaning a 40kg calf should be receiving 4L of colostrum.

They should ideally be fed using a teat bottle as this will promote transit of the colostrum to the stomach.

However, when calves are hitting the ground in rapid fashion, time is not always on your side. A popular way of ensuring the calf receives their colostrum is through a stomach-tube, which ensures that the full volume of colostrum is received by the calf.

Calf milk replacers will have feeding instructions, as well as a list of ingredients. It is important that ingredients are discussed with a vet or nutritionist to ensure the milk replacer is sufficient to meet the needs of growing calves.

Invest in a set of scales and either measure each feed or use the scales to calibrate the scoops regularly to ensure the correct mixing ratio.

To achieve a minimum growth of 0.6-0.8kg/day pre-weaning, calves should receive between 750-900g of calf milk replacer/day.

A whole-herd health plan should be in place and discussed regularly with your vet.

This plan will include a treatment and vaccination plan for calves while also discussing what disease pressures impacted calf health last year and where improvement can be made ahead of this season.