They grow to have very strong, very predictable heats, and they breed on the first service over and over again. Cows raised by their mothers demonstrate impeccable health, performance, and longevity.
When we have an entire herd of cows that were raised on their mothers, we will have an entire herd of strong, healthy problem-free, bred cows. Once we began the switch to raising replacements on their mothers the payback grew exponentially. Our current program for raising replacements consists of using our best cows, each raises her own calf, and only her own calf, for a full ten months. They even wantedthe job, to boot.Ĭows Raising the calves is financially rewarding and a lot more fun for everyone involved! Photo by Dietrich Gehring We knew that only one “individual” could raise our replacements and could actually do it far better than we could: their own mothers. No one else cared enough to be sure the milk was the right temperature, and the bottle was at the right height, etc. We could never find reliable help so that we could pass the job off. It was a pain in the neck, and it added so much time to daily chores that we almost dreaded it. But it was the need for less work that actually got us to go back to raising our replacements on their mothers in our commercial dairy. The overall health of our replacements was truly at the back of our minds, pushing us to make the switch back. Having raised calves on cows in earlier years, however, we always knew there was something better. We never lost a calf, and by general standards our calves always grew extremely well and looked extremely healthy. We tried many methods of calf rearing: bottle feeding, bucket feeding, grain, buckets with nipples, and nurse cows. Raising our replacements on their mothers is by far our best investment with the biggest payback.
Since we have been doing this, the benefits have reached all aspects of our operation. When we began commercial dairying, we knew that we would not make any real progress (and therefore money) until we raised our replacements on their mothers. The recent quota placed on many organic dairy farmers spurred a smart decision to keep more replacements and, to keep those replacements on cows, either mothers or nurse cows, to stay under quota without selling cows or dumping milk. As an effective method of improving shipped milk quality, many farmers use cows with high somatic cell counts (SCC) as nurse cows.
More and more dairy farmers are raising heifers on cows for a variety of reasons-a trend we at Dharma Lea Farm are glad to see.
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