Within six hours of birth, calves are given four litres of their own dam’s colostrum, which is first tested for quality, and are then placed in a disinfected individual pen for between 12 and 24 hours. They are then fed eight litres of whole cows’ milk per day and placed in single hutches until the week before weaning, when they are moved into group pens of seven calves. Calves are given a heifer rearing nut from one week of age to nine months old.
“At six months old we send our heifers to a second farm where they are fed a heifer nut and put out to grass, once they are in calf,” says Tom.
“Our aim is for heifers to calve down at 80% of their mature weight, so we look for them to reach the right withers height before going to the breeding shed. Two months before calving, they return to the dairy unit and move in with the dry cows.”
In recent years, Tom has worked on expanding the herd, but now he’s at capacity the focus has switched to improving cow quality. “Our breeding focus is on health and fertility, so we genomically test all our heifers, serve 90% of them with sexed semen, and put the rest to an Angus beef sire,” Tom explains.
Testament to the success of this programme are somatic cell counts at 160,000 cells/ml, a heifer fertility rate of 66%, and heifers calving down at an average age of 23.4 months.
“When we returned from the US trip, we took calves off whey based powder almost immediately and replaced it with eight litres a day of cows’ milk. This reduced rates of scours prior to weaning, but I still wasn’t happy with their growth rate of 0.75kg per day,” he says. “This was when I asked ForFarmers’ Bethan Till to take a look at what we were doing to see what she thought we could do to improve performance.”