99039
Average SCC for the season just gone. Not forgetting that the average includes about three months on once-daily milking.
The good thing about the length of time it takes Fonterra to get round to congratulating you for being grade-free/low SCC is that by the time the certificates turn up it’s an unexpected surprise.
This is the first year I’ve failed to break the 100,000/ml barrier.
Unfortunately, not enough of a boost to negate everything else that can go wrong. Apparently when you move farms and LIC assigns a new herd code you’re not permitted to take the compiled history and management data of your herd with you.
Unless I’ve gone and done something wrong – I haven’t been able to synchronise records for six weeks. Finally asked someone what I had to do and the result was that the programme was wiped clean – erased from my computer – and I’m downgraded back to Mindalink.
*Simple* information about minerals. What is needed, how much. Moving to a new area and getting bombarded with conflicting information and dire threats and opinions…
Now I’ve been told if I’m going to drench I have to drench twice a day.
And I’m like – wait, hang on, I’ve already discussed this with the vet and he approved my 30g MgO drenched once daily.
So I’m to drench once daily and put MgC in the trough at night – but have you (who is recommending this) ever measured how much water dairy cows drink at night?
My drench system isn’t even set up yet. I’ve given several cows a calving drench (by bottle) over the last day or two, and discovered that there’s yet another weird bar in the cowshed. It extends for about the first six or eight cows, each side of the shed, and when you put your hand on the cow’s nose she raises her head and slams it (your arm, that is)straight into that bar – or she would if she raised her head with any force.
I’ve been told it’s better to mix the MgO into the maize than dust it. So the springers get 50 g dusted on thier pasture in the morning, 50 g and 10 g salt mixed in the maize silage a couple hours later (I’m not being told to treat them with mag at twelve hour intervals??).
The milkers get their whole assignment mixed into the maize – 100 g MgO, 100g limeflour, 10 g salt which I’ve now been told to up to thirty for milking cows. Anything that looks a bit dodgy gets a calving drench mixed up at milking time, or calol.
Yesterday evening I went to see the springers and 140 was cast, blown, thrashing, regurgitating icky green stuff and snorting through it.
We’d walked through the herd about three hours earlier.
She’s lucky to be alive. I stabbed her, got the tractor and pulled her to the new break, sat her up, calpromag into the milk vein and then checked for her calf. Went home for a cow cover and dep and phone the vet for advice. Apparently they don’t have to come out and stitch ‘em up if the hole isn’t over-sized.
The calf was a long hard pull – Friesian cross bull, very much alive, very determined to stay inside. If 140 hadn’t already nearly died calving I’d have left the pair of them to take their own time about it. She was lively enough once she got to her feet, no major signs of milk fever. But she got a good dose of calol too once she was calved.
This evening milking 57 started paddling, trying to kneel down. Didn’t milk her, gave her a bag of calpromag under the skin – cold, I was trying to fill the water heater.
Must have a major water leak down the farm.
Ute got a new gearbox today.
Milk pump didn’t pump the milk away. I turned the vacuum off, pulled the plug on the receiving can and caught it in a bucket. Then it worked fine during the wash.
With ten cows in the shed, stopped using the test buckets this morning and washed the milkline before and after milking. I don’t know where it all went.
I caught about twenty litres total.
I’d been catching over thirty from four cows the previous couple of days.
Where did it go?
Two cows in 24 hours. 57 is 8, 140 9. I don’t recall that either of them have had milk fever before.
57 gave me a beautiful heifer. The only heifer calf I’ve seen since 21′s.
I think 171 is going to be okay as a three-titter. She only gave a litre a milking for the first few days. Some milkings I can get a bit out of her mastitic teat, some I can’t. It’s time to leave it be, I reckon.
Silver Fern Farms still have a minimum carcase weight for bobby calves of 9 kg.
I think it’s time certain people stopped trying to pressure me into shooting my babies.
And did I mention that I’d been told my cows were flighty? You know – those cows of which 140 is a typical example, who last night I injected, put a coat on and then drenched while she tended her calf in the yard.
I put a blue mark on her calf’s head because she’s feeding him, dep and all. I won’t be shooting him either.
Why I don’t like treating the water troughs:
a) it’s ineffective under several different circumstances – rain, presence of ground water, several troughs (fence the other troughs off, I’m told), bullying (heifers may not get enough), differences in intake, dilution over time – first to drink get strongest dose under most methods of trough treating, water leaks, water supply failure (I know that shouldn’t happen anyway) and
b) it tastes yucky.
so cows will prefer not to drink.
and c) some additives are dangerous to other stock types – bloat oil for calves? Apparently farm dogs everywhere survive rumensin added to troughs. Last year the bloat oil jumped several paddocks to reach my calves, from an in-trough dispenser in the cow herd.
Well aparently everyone else treats their water troughs with no problems.
I have seen a cow die because it rained. (I would like to add, my boss was in charge at the time. I knew better than to rely on trough treatment while it rained, but didn’t give him the ‘Plan B’ should it rain. So I guess it was still my fault.)
One of the big issues with trough treatment is running different herds on different regimes – it’s the same wtih introducing feeds that are a risk for acidosis. You start an unpalatable mineral in the water at low dose and increase gradually till they get used to it, and do the same with a dangerous feed to allow the rumen to adapt to digest it efficiently.
So what do you do when you want to transfer a cow from one herd (not getting supplemented) to the other?
I suppose most farmers work round it somehow or other. I only see two obvious solutions – take the risk of putting her straight there, or have a ‘quarantine’ area/herd for her to adjust.
Which is what I’ll be doing with the cows coming home onto maize.
At one time farmers in general avoided certain forms of mineral – chlorides, mainly – because they were *corrosive*.
I guess now that everyone’s using them cows must have evolved asbestos throats in the meantime.
Oh yeah, and I see RD1 still sells plenty of oral-cal.
The one year I used that stuff it worked all right, but stripped the skin off my arm where the cows dribbled. That’s why I never used it again.
