6 Holstein calves... a little help please.

[Irishred]

Thank you.

Yes we are watching all of them. He was on the softer side than the other but we were expecting that: stress, milk change, etc. He is eating well and was one of the more aggressive eaters today (those head buts can hurt :shock: ).

 

[angie1]

Nice looking bottle baby you have already established there.
You have done that one right. :nod:
Your 8 y.o. will be a good help to you.

 

[chippie]

They look good. Once they settle in and start nibbling the hay and grain, you can go to feeding twice a day.

Actually after our calves are a little over a week old, they nurse twice a day. We have Jersey cows and we keep the calves up so that the cows will come in to eat. We milk what we need, then let the calf strip the cow out. Right now, I have a store bought calf (auction barn LOL) who is nursing one of our cows Sondra.

Good luck with them. (aren't you secretly glad that you don't have to take care of 30 more?

 

[Irishred]

mini update...

I asked this morning and the calves were about 2(?) days old when bought on Wednesday, so they are about 5 days now. Being treated for scours as one started they all started. Cleaning out an area next to and in part of an old barn shed today to move them there, give them a bit more room, shelter from rain and better shade from the afternoon sun. He asked about getting more again and I told him only if we have a better feeding system cause feeding 6 by hand is hard enough at this point.

I am getting them to nibble grain out of my hand after they had each had their pints. Then a small bucket with a bit of grain is left in the pen (gets knocked over quite often so not much). When we get some panels up I'll see about attaching the buckets to the fence to get them out of calf kicking and other things way. Also going to look into some kind of (homemade?) bottle rack so I can feed more than one at a time

Oh, they are still bulls but will be banded soon, they like to do it when the calves are a week or so old.

 

[gg4rebels]

Concerning the amount of MR, my little one was 5 days old when I got him and he drank 2qts MR twice a day only.

 

[TexasBred]

Since the square bales seem to working as a pen, only think I'd do differently would be to go ahead and make separate pens for each calf and make the partition between the calves high enough so they can't lick on one another and get cross contamination.