Youngstock Services
Your heifers are the future of your herd. Shepton Vet’s team has the knowledge and enthusiasm within it to tackle any calf health challenges that arise. Our Youngstock Club members benefit from regular calf health monitoring, they can attend informative discussion groups to facilitate knowledge sharing that aims to drive improvements in heifer rearing.
The Youngstock Team
Our experienced youngstock vets will go the extra mile to find solutions to calf rearing challenges. Vets Anna Hewison and Rob Powell are involved in the Youngstock Club and trouble-shooting calf problems on farm.
Anna Hewison
Rob Powell
Kate Travitsky
Elly Cockman
Charlie Neale
The Vet Tech Team
Our Vet Tech team can help you track daily live weight gain, collect bloods to assess total proteins, gather disease and colostrum quality data. The Vet Techs run a popular calf vaccination round, and data is gathered for our Youngstock Club members. Between them, the Vet Tech team disbuds over 3000 calves a year.
Jamie Cowling
Ray Creed
Youngstock Club
Our youngstock club helps you to monitor colostrum management, growth rates, disease levels and antibiotic use as well as share ideas with other clients within the youngstock club at our twice-yearly discussion meetings.
Membership is £50 ex VAT per month and includes:
- 6 vet tech visits per year – you are all year round calving therefore I suggest bi-monthly visits, although we can tailor this to your farm. At these visits our vet tech will blood sample all calves between 48hrs and 7 days old (both beef and dairy calves) for total proteins. Calves will also be weighed for the first time, and 2nd weights will be taken from the calves weighed the previous visit to calculate growth rates. If you have a diary to record treatments, we are also able to record and monitor calf disease levels as well as colostrum quality.
- 1 vet visit and review per year – this is tailored to suit your farm; we often review the past year’s data and benchmark this against our other youngstock farms. For your very first visit this could be used to have a walk around the farm, use the Nottingham calf health toolkit and review treatment protocols.
- One colostrum or milk bacteriology sample – checking for cleanliness of colostrum or feeding equipment.
- 2 discussion group meetings per year – variety of topics covered, you can request a specific topic. Previous topics covered include calf cleanliness, pre-weaning nutrition and heifer rearing efficiency. This is a chance to talk to other youngstock club members and share ideas too.
Our membership price includes a 20% reduction in the cost of the work performed within this service.
The advantages of calving in well grown heifers at 24 months have been repeatedly shown in increased milk yields and improved longevity. After feed costs heifer rearing is the second highest cost on a dairy farm. A reduction in average age at first calving from 26 to 24 months typically represents a saving of 16% of the total cost of rearing. Some key targets to achieve this are:
- Double birth weight at weaning
- Target an average daily live weight gain from birth to conception of 800g/day
- Heifers should be 50% of mature cow body weight by 12 months
- Calve down at 90% of mature body weight at 24 months
The key to all of this is getting a good start in which calves are fed well and have low levels of diarrhoea and pneumonia. Drug use in youngstock is covered in the industry RUMA targets with a target of 7.5 fewer treated/100 calves from 2020/21- 2024.
Youngstock services to suit your needs
- Calf total proteins – we blood sample calves 24hrs – 7days old, use a centrifuge to separate serum and blood cells, then use a refractometer to indirectly measure the protein content of the serum. This indicates how much colostrum was absorbed by the calf.
- Average daily liveweight gains – our vet techs will weigh calves twice and calculate the ADLWG.
- Calf feeding review – our youngstock vets can assess your calf feeding protocol and make appropriate recommendations to improve nutrition.
- Disease outbreak investigations – we can take appropriate samples e.g. scour samples, nasal swabs or blood samples to investigate any calf disease outbreaks on your farm.
- Lung scanning – by using ultrasound to assess the lungs we can detect sub-clinical cases of pneumonia and monitor treatment success.
- Vaccination planning – we can create a bespoke vaccine planner for your farm.
- Courses – we run calf rearing courses where team members can learn the essentials of youngstock care.
- Calf building assessment – ventilation measured using anemometer, lighting assessment, stocking density calculations
- We can send samples for bacteriology testing at QMMS to assess cleanliness of colostrum and feeding equipment.
- We perform in-house cocci counts and can send samples to the lab for speciation.
- In house, on farm post mortem service when needed or submission of carcasses to Langford
- Advice on calf shed design available on a consultancy basis
Shepton’s Vet Tech Services support youngstock health
We do this by allowing you to outsource some of the tasks that can be difficult to keep on top of such as vaccinating calves at the right time and disbudding calves in a timely, stress free manner.
Stress Free Disbudding
Our vet techs are experienced at disbudding, performing the job safely and efficiently, freeing up your time for other things.
Visits can be scheduled regularly as part of a disbudding round, keeping on top of this task. Alternatively, we can send techs to your farm to disbud batches of calves when needed.
