Group feeders

[Dixieangus]

I have seen Automatic feeders for bottle calves and was where you can look at them on the internet and if any of you have had experience with them.

 

[Gale Seddon]

I googled "calf group feeder" and got found a lot of information. Sorry, I have no personal experience with them. Have you tried asking on the "Got Milk" section of Cattle Today?

 

[hillsdown]

I have seen Automatic feeders for bottle calves and was where you can look at them on the internet and if any of you have had experience with them.

I think the problem with them is the calves are all together, which I do not like for bottle calves.

 

[regolith]

Do you mean the type of feeder that mixes & warms the milk and allows the calves to drink at will?

I have no experience with them. I've seen good reports of them but suspect that's mainly advertising. I can think of enough drawbacks to a system like that to continue doing things the old way - the first one being the expense of installing and running such a machine.

 

[Keren]

Apart from the initial expense to purchase them I reckon its fantastic. The ones i've seen, you tag the calves with electronic ear tags, you can set the computer to deliver a certain amount per calf, or as much as they want. It records intake as well. I've only seen them at field days so I can't point you to a website unfortunately, and i've never used them myself (too expensive) but I think for medium to large scale calf rearing its definitely an interesting system to consider

 

[Till-Hill]

All the dairy's here in NE Iowa have been putting in this one: http://www.delaval.com/en/-/Product-Inf ... er-CF1000/

Buddy has one on a 280 cow registered herd. Seen it in use on a 150 cow swiss herd. Also some bigger guys even been putting it up too. Works awesome!

Calves never suck on eachother because they are not hungry!

 

[regolith]

Well now that we have to tag every calf with an electronic tag anyway - I guess that's one part of the expense taken care of.
I've put cheapo EID tags in all the mature cows... but the calves are geting protrack (drafting system) compatible ones because you just never know in the future what fancy equipment I might have.

 

[Dixieangus]

i was talking about the computerized ones and have been looking harder and found some, but NONE put anything about the price. So do any of you have any idea how much they are?

 

[Till-Hill]

For the milk replacer mixing station and computer software and 2 feeding stations it was last year when we priced it for our dairy about $16,000

 

[Keren]

Yeah if I remember correctly one machine was about eighteen grand australian