Ensuring that colostrum quality is high among your cows before the start of calving should be a focus on dairy farms.
During the dry period, the nutrition of cows needs to be correct in order to ensure that they are capable of producing high quality colostrum.
Colostrum is produced by cows during their final days before calving. It is highly nutritious, and is a source of material antibodies.
Calves are born without immunity, so ensuring that they receive colostrum is vital.
If colostrum quality has not been sufficient in previous years, there are a number of areas and options to look at for improvement.
Colostrum quality
Firstly, it is important that you are testing all of the colostrum from your cows that you will be feeding to calves.
This can be done quite simply, by using a brix refractometer. Only colostrum with a reading of over 22% should be fed to calves, as this means the colostrum contains 50mg/ml of immunoglobulins.
You need to ensure that cows are being fed a silage with at least 12% protein – this will help them in producing high quality colostrum.
Offering cows between 200-300g/head should improve the colostrum from the cow, without impacting calf size.
Some farmers may be hesitant to feed soya to cows that are heavily in-calf and close to calving, but once soya is not overfed to cows, it will have little to no impact on calf size – but should have an impact on the colostrum produced by the cow.
The price of soya also needs to be considered, and it should only be used in situations where it is required. Otherwise, it is an extra expense that farmers are not going to see the benefit from.
Other areas may need to be improvement within dry cow nutrition, which may be impacting on the quality of the colostrum being produced by your cows.