Waste Milk

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skyhightree1

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Can waste milk from dairies be used to feed bottle calves? I was just wondering since I have been getting around 3,000 + gallons per month and if bottle calves got cheap it would be less cost involved in raising them if you didn't have to buy the milk replacer. Just wondering
 
Waste milk 100 gallons per day.
Waste because loaded with antibiotics? or waste because loaded with bacteria? or waste for another reason?
What level of antibiotics? How much bacteria?
Hogs are usually better utilizing waste milk/products than baby calves.
Heavy bacteria loads can overwhelm a calf's immune system, hogs are better suited to handle waste products.
 
I wouldn;t do it
But I would be leary of feeding it to pigs unless I knew that it didn;t have any antibiotics in it. Have no idea what the withholding time is for antibiotics being fed rather then being injected.
 
I just wondered about using it on calves wouldn't do it unless it was ok to do so. I never asked the reason for the waste milk and im not sure they would tell me either.
 
It's been a really long time since I was around a dairy (like about 45 years), but I suspect there could be several reasons for them to have waste milk. It's too soon after the calf was born, so there's colostrum in it; or they gave the cow some medication that has a withdrawal period. Maybe other reasons. I wouldn't think either of those two would preclude feeding it to calves, assuming it had been kept cold so it didn't spoil. Which I kind of doubt.
 
Some people do this but pastuerize the milk to kill bacteria you can usually get for free or cheap but storage and pasteurizing cn be a pain and better done in larger scale. Usually mix of bacteria (mastitis, cows not cleaning, footrot) and the antibiotics which i wouldnt worry about to much hurting calves.
 
I wouldn't worry about antibiotics in it, I'd just assume a 30 day withdrawal passes on to the calf since it drank the milk, even though it's probably a minute amount.. I'd be more concerned about bacteria, but perhaps the antibiotics would even that out :p

Another reason for waste milk is the quota system, some systems penalize for overproduction, so it's cheaper to throw the milk away.. I have a friend who raises a lot of pigs on it
 
Seven days we have to withhold a calf after drinking antibiotic milk (ie, if it's mother was treated for mastitis or if the antibiotic milk accidentally got mixed with the baby calf milk), meaning, the calf has to be drinking clean milk for seven days before it can be sold for slaughter.
If a pregnant cow is treated the meat withholding for the cow also applies to the unborn calf.

Lots of calf rearers here buy waste milk - you want to know why it's 'waste', if a treated cow was accidentally milked into the main tank the whole lot has to be dumped but in reality the antibiotic might not even be detectable... on the other hand, the milk from one treated cow I usually only give to calves four weeks or older, preferably to non-breeders (not replacement heifers).
If you can't use it immediately you need a way to store it/keep it fresh. I've seen trouble with calves being fed from tanks that were chilled and not stirred, they got sick when they got to the cream at the end. I store surplus colostrum unchilled and stirred daily but mix it with good milk immediately before feeding and only to older calves.
 
Use to feed some dump milk. Mostly from fresh cows that still had dry cow antibiotics in their milk or cows being treated for mastitis. Either was the meds were 99% penicillin. Never had any problems. Never worried about bacteria as never had a high bacteria count in the milk but if it were it would only be the same bacteria they would get from nursing. Later when we began dairying we simply drew milk directly out of the pipeline while still warm and fed it to the calves.

Tried feeding dump milk to hogs on time and all they did was get gobby a$$ fat and got to where all they wanted was the milk and none of the feed. Not to mention a million flies.
 
i raised a bottle calf on waste milk this late winter early spring and it never got sick or had any other health issues at all but the milk came from the farm i work on so i got to chose what milk he drank it was mostly fresh milk (colostrum) and milk with antibiotics just make sure it was kept cool (there was a thread on here a while back about feeding sour milk so you might not even have to worry about that but i did)
 
TexasBred":132xthoo said:
Tried feeding dump milk to hogs on time and all they did was get gobby a$$ fat and got to where all they wanted was the milk and none of the feed. Not to mention a million flies.

:lol2: :lol2: Mine aren't fat just right between bread milk and brewers grain they seem to do well.
 
skyhightree1":1i7prd38 said:
TexasBred":1i7prd38 said:
Tried feeding dump milk to hogs on time and all they did was get gobby a$$ fat and got to where all they wanted was the milk and none of the feed. Not to mention a million flies.

:lol2: :lol2: Mine aren't fat just right between bread milk and brewers grain they seem to do well.
Just make sure they keep eating the grain.
 
Many dairies feed their waste/dump milk to their calves. One pastuerizes it but most don't. Pastuerization kills most all the stuff in the milk, good and bad so is more sterile. Questions about how much actual nutrition is also destroyed.... I get waste milk from dairies when I have fed alot of calves. I am picky about it and from which dairy as some don't do a very good job of cleaning their "buckets" that the waste milk goes into. But for the most part, even the antibiotic milk doesn't cause much problem and so you just figure a 30 day withholding as safe since most are 72hr to 7 days on the package. Most people that bottle feed aren't going to sell the calves for veal, and they are going to feed them to 3-500 lbs to market them at a stockyard, so the withholding is not a problem.
 

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