Bottle-Fed Babies: Feeding for a Full Future

Animals, at the beginning of their lives, are quite similar to human children: they need warmth, attention from their mothers, and milk. Both are mammals and have very similar nutritional needs.

It isn’t surprising to see a powdered replacement to cow’s milk: infant formula for calves. Human infant formula was created by a German chemist Justus von Liebig in 1865, consisting of cow’s milk, wheat and malt flours, and potassium bicarbonate, necessary in normal bodily functioning. It was 84 years later that the first research into calf milk replacers began and in 1951, Land O’Lakes developed the first calf milk replacer, and other companies followed suit.

In the animal milk replacer world of my childhood, two kinds of milk replacer existed: medicated and non-medicated. Medicated milk replacers could contain low levels of antibiotics, anti-protozoans, or antiprotozoans masquerading as “ionophores.”

Veterinarians say that medicating the animal before a problem is discovered is not a good practice, one that may result in decreased overall calf health

Although it is an expensive search, with bags costing from sixty to eighty dollars per fifty pounds, in the end, finding a milk replacer that works with calves who need it is both financially feasible and rewarding.

However, what to feed the infant is only half the battle. How to feed the baby is the next part of the artificial-mother equation, and this is not a new question.

Dating all the way back through history, in the Roman times, the Middle Ages, and times measured in BC, humans struggled to find an efficient, clean way to feed infants. Beginning with perforated horns, stopping over for a long time at clay vessels with spouts, and finally ending up at glass feeding bottles with a cork feeding structure. From there, as the rubber industry made great strides, the baby bottle as we know it today was created in 1845.

An easy leap was to adapt this design for animals, and today’s calf bottles resemble large human baby bottles, with a rubber top and a plastic body.

Feeding a baby animal is perhaps the favorite of most farmers and rancher families and seems to be the job everyone runs to do.