Hay Belly in Calf - Help Please!

[chippie]

The Producer's Pride feeds are very low quality.
If you need to buy your feed from TSC, buy the Purina 4-Square Stocker Grower. It has 14% protein and is a pellet. I use it in our creep feeder. A good quality hay is important for her too.

Like the others mentioned, she may need to be dewormed and you might want to give her some prebiotics and probiotics. They will help her digest the hay.

http://www.tractorsupply.com/en/sto...reg;-stocker-grower-supreme-cattle-feed-50-lb

 

[skylavaulter]

The first picture is from October 10th. The second picture is from tonight.

 

[skylavaulter]

Ok. I will head down to our local feed store tomorrow and see what they have in stock for horses and post back with my choices. We live in an area where few people have cattle, so choices are limited. A few counties over and there's a lot of dairy farms, but I'm not sure where the feed stores are over that way.

 

[Kingfisher]

Get another cow before she thinks she is a goat...

 

[Alan]

You have received plenty of great advice here so far, so don't over think it. As dun said, slowly build up the 12 to 14% grain intake along with good quality hay. It will take a while, but grain and hay will fix it in time, just don't over think it. My :2cents:

 

[chippie]

If she were mine, I would separate her from the other livestock ASAP. When a bunch of animals eat together, you have no idea how much feed any of them are getting. It is usually one or two critters wolfing everything down and keeping the others away.
If the straw on the ground is the hay that you are feeding, you need to get something else. Straw which has almost no nutritional value. Tractor Supply sells Stanley Hay in compressed bales. The timothy hay or grass/alfalfa mix hay would be good for her. It is not cheap, but you are going to have to spend some money to get her in shape. Dairy cattle nutritional needs are different than beef cattle.

 

[skylavaulter]

The color is off in the picture. It's orchard grass hay and actually pretty green in person.

 

[milkmaid]

Here's a site on hay I found awhile back - in my area we typically have alfalfa and more alfalfa, so I'm not familiar with the different types of hay.

http://bunniesinneed.net/hay-nutritional-value-chart/

Orchard grass looks to run about 9.4% protein, which is going to be a large part of the reason for her appearance.

Quick spreadsheet with the numbers:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... =157107548

You should be able to edit it. Looks like you need higher protein hay regardless of the grain you buy though - even with 16% protein grain I still can't get the protein of the ration up to 14% with a reasonable intake (Holstein calves eat more than others but still won't usually go over 4% of their bodyweight) unless I push the grain into a % of the ration that could be dangerous for someone not experienced with feeding grain.

 

[greybeard]

The Producer's Pride feeds are very low quality.
If you need to buy your feed from TSC, buy the Purina 4-Square Stocker Grower. It has 14% protein and is a pellet. I use it in our creep feeder. A good quality hay is important for her too.

Like the others mentioned, she may need to be dewormed and you might want to give her some prebiotics and probiotics. They will help her digest the hay.

http://www.tractorsupply.com/en/sto...reg;-stocker-grower-supreme-cattle-feed-50-lb

I've had pretty good results with Nutrena textured grower and TSC does carry it here, but tsc seem to push their dumor (or less) brands, so other brands don't seem to really get much attention when it comes to their ordering process--

The Nutrnea textured does have lower protein level than the 4 sq but mine seem to do well on it. It's a brown looking bag with an Angus calf on the front.
Skylavaulter:
Could just be the time of year and winter coat, but from a beef animal perspective, it looks wormy