The Sunday News
CALVING down in your herd is always a happy time as it indicates growth of the enterprise.
The addition of a new calf is similar to money in your bank accruing interest, a phenomenon not known by many middle aged Zimbabweans as the banking institution stopped giving meaningful interest to deposit funds a long time ago.
Calves born help the farmer to decide which animals to take to the market that year, a concept called offtake in farm business management.
However, calving down can be a source of a farmer’s headache as certain complications unforeseen can arise and wipe all the excitement of a possible herd growth.
One such source of pain after calving can come from unmitigated calf mortalities. Calf mortalities can occur primarily due to three main reasons, firstly a difficulty calving process called dystocia which we have discussed extensively on this platform. Dystocia can result in the death of a calf and even the dam at calving if assistance is not rendered on time. Secondly, calves may die due to disease attack on your herd and this can be exacerbated by failure to observe simple but critical calf management principles such as ensuring that a newly born calf gets to suckle ad lib within the first 72 hours.
This ensures that the calf gets enough colostrum which helps it with passive immunity that it needs during the early days of its growth.
Some cows are left to calve down with no monitoring and this critical stage of colostrum intake by the calf can be skipped for one reason or another. This is very common with smallholder farmers who are not even aware when their cows will calve down and in some cases the cows go into the bushes for grazing for several days before owners go to check on the herd, only to find there is a cow with a two-week-old calf!
Farmers need to learn to keep records of when their cows were serviced so that you can estimate when they will calve down and hence ensure that they are always close by when time comes so as to institute the appropriate management practices and mitigate against unwarranted calf losses.
The third and most painful cause of calf mortality can be a dysfunctional dam. This means your dam will drop down a healthy calf but it is unable to feed it primarily because of possibly two reasons, either the teats are clogged or the udder is dead or both. This means the calf cannot even suckle the colostrum that we have made reference to above and worse still it cannot get any drop of milk from its mother. As a farmer you are thus stuck with a calf which needs to feed but you can’t help. Before we look at possible solutions of addressing this predicament it is important to revisit the causes of such a scenario and see how we can avoid it.
The udder is an important part of your dam and it has to be managed properly if you are going to keep your breeding machine ticking. There are two main causes to the death of the milk producing machine (udder) and these are mastitis and tick infestations. Mastitis is a dairy man’s worst nightmare because of its economic importance as a disease. We have also discussed this disease on this platform but it serves to reiterate that in smallholder beef production enterprise such as communal farmers the disease can have the ultimate effect of killing the udder.
This is because there are no somatic cell tests that are conducted in beef herds and more so among smallholder producers and as such the disease goes unchecked and its extreme manifestation the farmer is left with a cow whose udder is dead and therefore cannot produce milk. The sad part is that even if the udder is dead it is deceiving during gestation as it grows normally giving the farmer no sense of alarm at all but only faced with an udder which is not producing even a drop of milk when the calf is born.
On the other hand teats of the udder can be damaged as a result of heavy tick infestations and this can result in teats whose canals are closed and hence milk cannot come out. This means even if the udder is perfectly fine and is producing the milk your calf is unable to suckle because the teats are blocked. This is however a condition which can be reversed depending on the severity of the damage by using teats infusion injections and the cost of these injections are perfectly manageable at $2/ injection and you need four of those.
This is just $8 and it’s nothing compared to what you stand to lose if the cow continues failing to produce milk. Next week we will look at how you can salvage the situation if you are faced with a cow with a dead udder.
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