Cattle breeders told to enrol cows in fat camp before calving

Cattle breeders have been warned to put their cows on a “fat farm” regime to ensure that they are not over weight come calving time.

The importance of managing body conditioning scores has been raised by the Farm Advisory Service following an unusually large number of caesarean sections in calving cows – a situation which they believe is due to the strong grass growth throughout the summer.

Robert Logan from SAC Consulting, part of Scotland’ s Rural Colle ge which delivers the F AS programme, said that the incidence of calvin g difficulties could be avoided if farmers kept a close eye on the fat levels in their herd – and effectively managing body conditioning scores would, he said, help mitigate the number of caesareans required.

One method of ensuring a bit of weight loss was to delay weaning of calves at foot, Logan said.

However he added that calf condition could suffer under such a regime as their weight gain would also be reduced on shorter grass swards:

“So creep feeding would be essential if this approach was adopted,” said Logan who added that all cows should be weaned no later than three weeks pre-calving to ensure they produce sufficient colostrum for the new crop of calves.

An alternative option was to wean cows early, put their calves on to aftermaths and heavily graze dry cow son poor quality pastures at close to double the normal stocking density.

According to the F AS another option would be to go down the boot camp option and encourage cows to take as much exercise as possible: