With increasing regulations and guidelines coming into play around the usage of antibiotics on farms, being able to reduce its necessity would be hugely beneficial to farmers.
Speaking on the third episode of the ‘The Calf Show’ series hosted by AgriLand last night – Martin Connolly, a participant in the Green Acres Calf to Beef Programme, spoke about his experience of implementing a herd health plan and the benefits he is seeing because of it.
Reoccuring health issues
When discussing how he began putting a plan in place for vaccinating his calves, Martin refelected back to the year before he started in the Green Acres programme and how his approach to herd health was slightly different.
He explained:
“I wasn’t vaccinating the calves before I joined [the Green Acres programme], but it wasn’t for the want of trying. We never had gotten any real positive direction in terms of what way to go with it.
“Even the first year that I was in the [Green Acres] programme, we hadn’t any plan in place.
When I look back at my first year in the programme and the year before that, I would have been treating 30-40% of the calves that had come in during the early stages with an antibiotic – maybe once or twice.
“There would always be little bits of outbreaks of pneumonia. As far as I was concerned I thought that I had everything in place with good housing, bedding, feeding and nutrition and I was still having those levels of breakdowns.”
Making the change
Martin went on to speak about how the approach to preventing health issues and pneumonia on the farm has now changed. He stated:
“Last year we drew up a vaccination programme and put it into place. I followed it through last spring and I have seen an enormous change.
I think zero antibiotics were used on my calves for pneumonia.
“This has followed through from the weaning stage to the present day as weanlings – I had no outbreak of pneumonia whatsoever.
“Now, maybe I have been lucky and I am looking forward to this year to see if it will follow through – but I am fairly confident that we have the problem nailed and I am grateful for that.”
‘The small things make up the whole package’
Further on in the discussion, Martin highlighted that it is “all the small things in calf-rearing that makes up the whole package.”
Adding to this, he said:
“From a healthy calf coming in, to providing good housing, bedding and nutrition along with getting your vaccine programme in place – if you slip up on any one of them, that can be your downfall.
“It’s not easy to do; I had attempted it for a few years and I am a good while rearing calves. I would have been going in with antibiotics and thinking that it was just part of the course, but I have seen in the last 12 months the difference vaccinating has made.
“It’s lovely to feed calves and walk away from them for a few hours, without having to go back and start watching and treating the odd calf in a pen.”