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Nurse cow operation
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<blockquote data-quote="Ky hills" data-source="post: 1637116" data-attributes="member: 24816"><p>I raised calves on nurse cows for several years. The most cows I had was 12 with usually 6-8 in rotation at a time. At that time there were still several dairy farms around but now they aren't many at all. It is a challenge and a lot of physical work. I started out bottling calves and switched to some cows, then after a few years of that finally went back to bottling as I wasn't physically up to working with the calves and cows, when it came to starting new ones. For a while I had a pretty good thing going. I was getting all the calves from one dairy and all the bull calves from another. I would have 3 or4 calves per cow and wean them at 2-3 months and start another group on the cow. The cows cooperate much better when they have their own calf. Some are better than others at letting calves nurse. The calf has a lot to do with how the cows respond too. If the calf is forward and takes to nursing right off the cow is more at ease than if it's scared or slow to start nursing. It takes a lot of trial and error to get it going both in terms of getting calves and keeping them healthy and also with the cows. I had a mix of older dairy cows and some young dairy heifers. The results were mixed but I would recommend trying to find some good gentle Jersey or Geurnsey heifers that had sound udders. The older cows tended to have blank quarters or big broken down udders which complicated things and reduced the number of calves they could raise. </p><p>I was fortunate at the time to know a local AI tech that could get some dairy bull semen and we had some of our cows bred to Jersey bulls. We used Angus bulls for the cows and heifers that didn't take to AI. On the later end of it I started using Hereford bulls as they seemed to put more volume on the calves but when bred to Jerseys some of the calves would be brindles.</p><p>Sometimes the crossbred Angus or Hereford heifers could be used as nurse cows too.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ky hills, post: 1637116, member: 24816"] I raised calves on nurse cows for several years. The most cows I had was 12 with usually 6-8 in rotation at a time. At that time there were still several dairy farms around but now they aren’t many at all. It is a challenge and a lot of physical work. I started out bottling calves and switched to some cows, then after a few years of that finally went back to bottling as I wasn’t physically up to working with the calves and cows, when it came to starting new ones. For a while I had a pretty good thing going. I was getting all the calves from one dairy and all the bull calves from another. I would have 3 or4 calves per cow and wean them at 2-3 months and start another group on the cow. The cows cooperate much better when they have their own calf. Some are better than others at letting calves nurse. The calf has a lot to do with how the cows respond too. If the calf is forward and takes to nursing right off the cow is more at ease than if it’s scared or slow to start nursing. It takes a lot of trial and error to get it going both in terms of getting calves and keeping them healthy and also with the cows. I had a mix of older dairy cows and some young dairy heifers. The results were mixed but I would recommend trying to find some good gentle Jersey or Geurnsey heifers that had sound udders. The older cows tended to have blank quarters or big broken down udders which complicated things and reduced the number of calves they could raise. I was fortunate at the time to know a local AI tech that could get some dairy bull semen and we had some of our cows bred to Jersey bulls. We used Angus bulls for the cows and heifers that didn’t take to AI. On the later end of it I started using Hereford bulls as they seemed to put more volume on the calves but when bred to Jerseys some of the calves would be brindles. Sometimes the crossbred Angus or Hereford heifers could be used as nurse cows too. [/QUOTE]
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