Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Keep Milk Warm in Cold Weather 

At this URL you will find a 1-2-3 summary of ideas focused on keeping milk warm on cold days - hit that 100-105 degrees goal for every calf fed. 
Here is URL

Ann Hoskins from Vita Plus has done a great job summarizing practical ways to be sure the milk fed to calves is the temperature it should be even in cold weather conditions. 

On really cold days (wind chill below 0 F) in order to feed warm milk to all the calves I had to mix my milk replace in multiple batches - mix a batch, go out and feed it (hutches), come back in (get warm) and mix another batch, repeat three times until finished.

Regardless of environmental conditions I always put bottles for the youngest bottle-fed calves into 5-gallon pails of 105-110 F water (4 to a pail). 

When I did not have help for bucket training the five or so young calves I ended up feeding them one at a time after the rest of the calves were fed. I observed that if I filled the milk pails for these five calves at the beginning of feeding chores I was almost always feeding cold milk to them. However, if I put the bottles into a 5-gallon pail of warm water even the last calf received 100-105 milk once I poured the milk into a feeding bucket.

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