Calves with Sam

Moving Calves into an Auto Feeder Pen

Everyone seems to agree that calves should only be moved into an auto feeder pen when they have a strong suckling reflex.

But, individual dairy circumstances seem to lead to a lot of variation. We know that we want calves nursing well from a bottle. After that is accomplished, how much time is available to train calves to drink from the auto nipple?

So, here are some reflections from my recent experiences.

One client moves calves in the morning when they would normally be fed by bottle. A calf care person is available to stay in the pen to be sure each calf goes into the feeding station. The idea is combine a hungry calf with an opportunity to suckle. They guess that at least half of the calves do not require even a second time being guided to the nipple - success!

Another client has their individual calf pens in the same large building as the auto feeder pens. As soon as a calf is aggressively nursing on a bottle the next feeding time she is guided to a "teaching station." This station is an extra auto feeder stall along one outside wall of the utility building. The calf is guided to the nipple, the calf care person manually triggers milk flow and, (we hope) presto, the calf nurses. As soon as the calf seems to have adopted robust nursing behavior she is moved over into the group pen that is being filled at that time. (all-in, all-out pen management) In general, nearly all calves move into the auto pens before 7 days old. However, they experience quite a wide age range in moving to the auto feeder pens with a few calves moving as early as 4 days and others taking as long a 2 weeks. As an aside, if they have a calf with severe scours she is held back in an individual pen and bottle fed along with electrolytes until she shows signs of recovery.

Based on calving rates and numbers planned per pen the length of time to fill a pen may vary very widely from dairy to dairy. One of my largest clients aims for a pen size between 15 and 20 and fills a new pen every 3 to 4 days - very narrow age range. Another much smaller dairy puts all the calves born over 2 weeks in one pen in order to limit the age range - over a year they average about 12 -15 calves per pen. Both dairies hand feed for 4 to 5 days before moving into the group pens.

Another dairy with two "all in all out" auto feeder pens has a 14-day hand feeding protocol for all calves. This protocol avoids all individual decision making - same routine for all calves. regardless of nursing readiness. The reasoning is that by 14 days most of the diarrhea episodes will have occurred in individual pens limiting transmission of disease. My observation is that most of the diarrhea is related to cryptosporidiosis (a parasite) and was going to occur regardless of the housing environment. Given that nearly all calves have scours between 7 and 10 days and on this dairy calf care personnel skills are limited, maybe it is best to use individual housing to make it easy to identify scouring calves eligible for electrolyte feeding.