Managing calf health for maximum long-term productivity

Prevention is better than cure, and this mindset is especially applicable when it comes to preparing calves for their productive adult lives. Dr Schabort Froneman, technical manager for ruminants at Zoetis, provides some pointers on how to raise healthy calves that can become healthy adult animals.

- Lloyd Phillips

Health management is a critical factor affecting the profitability of a cattle operation. Yet establishing, maintaining and improving an effective health programme for a beef or dairy cattle herd can be difficult due to the many variables and unanticipated risks involved. To minimise these, a herd manager should ideally implement such a programme when a calf is in utero.

According to Dr Schabort Froneman, technical manager for ruminants at animal health company Zoetis, cattle farmers should look at a herd as an epidemiological unit. This is a group of animals that share the same approximate likelihood of being exposed to a pathogenic agent. This may be because these animals share a common environment or are subject to the same management practices.

“Treating individual animals for health problems is reactive, whereas improving a herd’s health, and hence automatically improving an individual animal’s health, is proactive,” explains Froneman. “For a subclinical or clinical disease to affect an animal, three overlapping factors need to be present simultaneously: a disease-causing pathogen, a susceptible host, and an environment conducive to the proliferation of the disease. Veterinarians and herd managers should always try to prevent, or reduce, one or more of these overlaps.”

He adds that one such preventative measure is to proactively improve the immunity of a herd and, thereby, the individual animals within it. As part of this strategy, it should be understood that the breeding cow herd is the functioning nucleus of the enterprise, and the replacement heifer herd is the future of the same enterprise, as these heifers will eventually become the breeding cow herd.