Good hygiene, established routines and a passion for rearing good calves sees Balclutha farm owner Tania Booth avoid many of the diseases and costs that can often hit southern farms over spring periods.
Tania and partner Noel Caulfield have been farming in the region for 11 years after moving south from Matamata. They now own their own 480 cow property at Balclutha.
Tania makes no apologies for her focus on calf rearing through spring time, and puts some of the success she enjoys also down to using Biopect calf product in the course of the rearing season.
Biopect is a non antibiotic powder containing dried fruit pulp and fibres, along with electrolytes and glucose to help boost calves experiencing the stress of scours, or perhaps have calved in particularly cold, difficult conditions and need a boost to provide an early kick-start.
Those calves benefiting from it today have a calf from ten years ago to thank for Tania picking up on the remedy, and remaining adamant she would not stop using it today.
We got to the end of calving and we had this one sick calf that I was going to get Noel to shoot. When I went into the local retail store I saw this Biopect on the shelf and thought I would give it a try, feeding the calf some in its milk.
A few hours later I looked over and there it was sitting up, I decided to give it 24 hours, the next day she was up, in a week she was running around, as good as gold.
The experience left Tania a Biopect convert. Ever since she has regularly incorporated the remedy into calf milk when she notices weaker calves coming in, or receiving a mob that have come through a particularly cold blast of southerly weather.
The advantage is you can easily mix it before adding it to the colostrum, and they just seem to get an extra boost from it, the appearing brighter and livelier.
Being able to feed it with or without milk is a big plus when a calf may be already low on energy.
I find adding it to the milk means you are not stopping that calf receiving the nutrition it so often needs in the milk, the Biopect seems to just slow the passage of the milk down in a scouring calf, giving its system time to absorb it again, rather than going right through.”
She has enjoyed good results using Biopect for severe cases of scours, and knowing it does not contain antibiotics gives her peace of mind about staff using it too.
Over a season Tania rears up to 150 replacement heifer calves and up to 60 beef tailenders, which are sold as weaners.
The beef calves are treated the same as the replacements, feed up to twice a day up to 10 days and then adlib with antibiotic milk, with Biopect added. They come up to weight nice and evenly.
Tania also attributes her success to good hygiene and how all the calves are treated in the early stages of rearing.
Many people will tend to just give the bobbies the worst milk and they get the least care. We treat them like the replacements for the first four days, they get colostrum and only on day 4 do they get split off from the rest.”
She believes treating the bobbies well avoids diseases developing among them that would only spread to the valuable replacements. Tania also insists on rearing calves on her own, ensuring more time is taken around them.
It means you are more likely on your own to pick up any problems at feeding time as you watch over them.
Meantime as another calving season winds around, she has no plans to remove Biopect from her calf rearing budget. Her care and attention mean she may be spending more time than many on rearing, but certainly less time and cost on putting sick calves right. She particularly appreciates the value of Biopect against its cost.
The value of a lost AB replacement calf is around the cost of a 25kg Biopect bag, so it’s not hard to get your money back.
I only really have two things in my rearing shed ; navel spray and Biopect, and I use it simply because it works.