Well lucky for me, I actually enjoy cool, rainy mornings (before it gets too extremely cold that is) and I love them even more when I get to spend them with my dairy girls! It is a good thing I enjoy them too because regardless, the babies have to be fed rain or shine. Thinking of all the people that were snug and warm at home in their beds while I was doing my chores, I decided to show you what a typical and rainy morning looks like for me and my dairy babies! So here we go:
I start off my feeding shift by tending to any calves we have that need to be bottle fed! The bull calf in this picture was born on Thursday afternoon (Sept. 25, 2014) and he is living in a covered barn with a couple other boys at the moment! I feed him milk replacer, which is the calf version of baby formula, so that he gets all the nutrients that he needs to help him grow and stay healthy. In the next few days he will be transitioned to drinking his milk from a bucket instead of a bottle, a process we call "bucket training" on our farm. We sell bull calves at our dairy, mostly because we don't have the space to accommodate them along with our heifers, and so it is important that we keep them happy and health until they are sold so that we have a good reputation with our buyers! The boys go on to be raised for beef, and we don't want to be known for selling weak, sick bull calves so we pride ourselves on getting them good and "on their feet" by the time they are sold. This sweet little boy wags his tail happily while he drinks his milk, even in the rainy weather!
Next, I move on to feeding the lower portion of our calf barn, referred to simply as Lower Barn by the feeders. This is where we house our calves from the time they are weaned until they are about 6-7 months of age or until they are big enough to be put to pasture. They are grouped in community pens of anywhere from 4-6 calves, and while they are generally organized by age, more emphasis is put on grouping them by their size. This is so that there is not one bigger calf in a pen bullying any smaller calves out of the feed trough! These sweet girls get both grain and hay twice a day, and their rations of grain depend on the huber of calves in the pen and the size of the calves in each pen. Each pens get different rations, because if the calves are over fed grain it causes them to scour--a fancy word for getting diarrhea. Once they start to scour they are very similar to humans when we don't feel well; they stop eating, start acting lethargic, and overall their health starts to deteriorate. As the calf manager, it is my job to monitor the condition of the calves' stool and adjust their grain rations if I start to notice loose or runny areas. The girls also get fresh water troughs regularly and their troughs are always kept full and clean. We regularly scrub them for algae to keep them from getting gross and unhealthy. I am also a stickler for clean barns so we rack up any hay the girls push out of their troughs and sweep the barn usually once a day.
One thing to notice about tour calf barn at the moment is how empty it is! We only have two of our six pens occupied and only four calves in each of those two 6-calf pens. This past week, we rotated a group of eight calves out onto pasture because they had reached a good size and were fully vaccinated! Below is a picture from our calf barn earlier this past week to show how full it was:
We rotate the girls so that they have more room to grow, but it is important for us to keep them in the calf barn for this portion of their life before pasture! This calf barn provides shelter from the elements and a way for managers/feeders to monitor them and their health until they are at a more stable and robust age. Even though they are mostly out of the woods once they have been weaned, it is not uncommon for young calves such as these to get sick and having them in this calf barn where we interact with them closely allows us to be able to see any sick calves and get them treated quickly.
After Lower Barn, I move on to feeding the hutch babies! These are our calves between the ages of new born to about 6-7 weeks of age. They are fed milk replacer and a special calf starter grain that is specially formulated for pre-weaned ruminants. Each calf gets milk replacer twice a day, but the grain is handled a little differently. Every Mon/Wed/Fri morning shift we completely empty the grain that the calves may still have in their buckets and give them fresh calf starter grain. This is a way for us to monitor who is eating how much, when we need to bump calves up on grain, and also keeps us from wasting grain by constantly giving them grain that they aren't eating! The second picture shows the three buckets of milk replacer that I feed in the mornings as well as the buckets of calf starter grain that I used to empty and refill the calves' grain buckets. I also refill those pretty white water buckets, that you can see in the first picture, every shift! I love getting to feed the hutch babies because even in the rain they come running out of their hutches, tails wagging when they hear the truck pull up and they instantly proceed to holler for their breakfast up until the second you give it to them!
And last but not least, I feed the pasture calves! This picture is of the girls we moved out of the calf barn this past week in their new pasture. They now get fed silage and are top dressed (supplemented) with a bucket of grain every morning and evening. These girls have three huge water troughs that we constantly keep filled and are a bunch of hams to fed! You whistle at them in the morning and they all come running up the hill to greet you.
And that, ladies and gentlemen is what a typical morning on the UGA Teaching Dairy looks like from the calf side of things--minus the unglamorous tidbits about washing dishes and cleaning out dirty pens. I hope that this helps you understand what exactly I do on the farm a little better, and shows you just how much work goes into caring for and loving all these beautiful little girls! Come rain or shine, there is still work to be done on the farm.
