Hello everyone my name is Julia and I am an animal science student at the University of Maine on the Pre-Vet track. I am currently part of the UMADCOWS group which is responsible for maintaining heard through the course of the semester. It is a very busy time of year especially with all of our calves being born! There are many steps to properly caring for a newborn calf. Just a few are making sure the calf has all healthy vitals, making sure to feed the calf its colostrum so as to coat the lining of its stomach and intestines with the proper bacteria it needs to fight off various other viruses (among all sorta of other things), make sure the calf is clean and watch for any signs of illnesses. All of our calves are very well taken care of and we have quite a few new babies to introduce you to! The calves are in order from most recently born to the calves born the earliest. Meet Pumpkin Patch! She was born on 10-18-2019, and her mother is Poohbear who is another one of our milk producing girls Meet Noble! He was born on 10-17-2019, and his mother is Nevada which is one of our cows in milk as well! Meet Harriette! Harriette was born on 10-12-2019, and her mother is Hazel, another one of our milk producing girls! Meet Diego! His mother is one of our dairy cows, Damsel, who gave birth to him on 09-16-2019.
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Thursday night into Wednesday morning, our cows Nevada and Poohbear gave birth to Nobel and Pumpkin! Come to Witter Farm to see them and their friends like Diego, Nigel Thornberry, Piñata and Recoil during our visiting hours between 8:00 am to 4:30pm on the weekdays! Be prepared to get many kisses!
Hello everyone, my name is Grace Banks and I am a pre-veterinary student here at the University of Maine. I participate in a class called UMADCOWS where we are in charge of the dairy herd here on campus. This past week we had a calf born at the farm named Harriette who was born Saturday, October 12th. This is an especially fun time for me because she was my assigned calf! So once she was born, I was in charge of getting her pen ready, getting her cleaned, and most importantly, giving her her first meal. This was colostrum, a form of milk that is first to be produced from her mother. Unfortunately, Harriette's mother, Hazel, had low quality colostrum, so hers could not be used. It’s so important that they get this colostrum that we keep some from other cows in the freezer for cases exactly like this. Colostrum is one of, if not the most important things a newborn calf can get! This milk has antibodies and essential nutrients from her mother that can protect her from things like E. coli or salmonella. This is her first defense system, as she doesn’t develop an immune system until one to two months of age, so it’s critical that she gets it as soon as possible!
Harriette is already growing to be big and strong thanks to her colostrum. Be sure to go visit her during regular business hours to see the positive effects of colostrum on a newborn, growing body Hello! My name is Alex and I am a junior at the University of Maine, and I’m currently an intern in the UMADCOWS program at Witter Farm. An important aspect of the dairy herd, which can sometimes be overlooked are the many babies we have at the farm at all times. Not only do the calves contribute to our current growing milk production, many of them will grow
up to be dairy cows themselves, so keeping them happy and healthy is very important to us.The calf barn gets cleaned twice daily, during both AM and PM milking shifts. Calves in pens get their pen picked and rebedded, and calves in the group pens get their bedding picked and rebedded and their floors scraped. All water buckets are dumped, scrubbed, and refilled, and grain and hay is fed to all calves. Milk replacer is fed to heifer calves that have not yet been weaned, and milk is fed to bull calves at the end of the milking shift. Meet our babies! There are only 2 reasons why we as milking students ever get calls at 3:45 am from Lizz: we either didn’t show up to our milking shift, or our assigned cow is calving. When I woke up to my phone ringing Monday morning at exactly 3:45 a.m., I immediately thought that I misread the milking schedule and was late for milking. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case—my cow was actually calving!
Damsel, one of our heifers, gave birth to a bull calf we named Diego between the time that I got Lizz’s call and when I actually got to the farm (about 15 minutes). As I drove by her pen, she was already busy cleaning him off! This was Damsel’s first calving ever and she did so good! She was able to calve all by herself, which is not only awesome for her own health but also for Diego’s. She was due on September 13th but only ended up calving 3 days later which usually poses some risks, especially with heifers. The longer the calf sits inside mom, the larger it gets, which means it could have a hard time fitting through mom’s birth canal on its way out. Cows also aren’t fully grown until they are about 4 years old, which means that Damsel’s pelvis is not as wide as some of the older moms at Witter like Raisel and Ramen. We are so lucky that it all went well! Once Diego was mostly dried off, we put him in a fresh calf pen and put Damsel in the dairy barn. My partners dipped Diego’s navel (which prevents bacteria from traveling up into his body) while I gave mom a few shots to help her recover from calving. Then, we milked Damsel for the first time to get her colostrum out and fed it to Diego. It’s been about a week since Diego was born and everyone is doing great! Diego looks forward to his dinner every night (which currently is fresh milk that we bottle feed him) and Damsel is fitting in perfectly in the Dairy barn with all the other ladies! |
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