Dairy news and advice from the LLM Farm Vets team in Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire.
It is well known the biggest cost to you as dairy farmers is your heifer rearing. It will take 2+ years before you start to see any returns from an animal, and within that time, as most of you will have experienced at some point, a lot can go wrong! […]
We’re aware of the negative effects of poor calcium, excess negative energy balance and poor anti-oxidant status on reproductive performance but some new studies go into more detail on this, highlighting the strong relationship each of these elements have for getting a cow back in calf.
A recently published paper […]
With the costs of purchased feeds at record levels, there has never been a more important time to challenge how much milk you can achieve from grazed grass. Here, Kingshay gives us some tips on managing the transition to grazing and feeding for performance.
Feeding for performance
Dry Matter: The […]
With turnout hopefully not too far around the corner, now is the opportune time to get Lungworm control fresh in your minds to avoid losses at a later date.
Lungworm (‘husk’, ‘hoose’ and ‘parasitic bronchitis’) is caused by the parasite Dictyocaulus viviparus. Animals are infected after grazing on contaminated pasture […]
Over recent years at LLM we have seen some excellent reductions in the incidence of mastitis on farms, with many units achieving targets of <20 cases per 100 cows per year (half of the 40 cases/100 cows/year of 20 years ago!), whilst a few are managing single figure incidences. This […]
Winter dysentery is an uncommon but highly infectious viral disease in cattle which is difficult to confirm through diagnostic testing. It’s a form of bovine coronavirus, with symptoms including profuse, watery diarrhoea, dark brown in colour and sometimes containing blood. Milk yields of infected cows will show a rapid and […]
For my DBR dissertation I set up a project on two LLM dairies investigating the prevalence of subclinical milk fever and the effects having low blood calcium at calving had on their subsequent fertility. We are all familiar with the clinical signs of milk fever (cows unable to rise, low […]
On the Sunday afternoon of a steady on-call weekend, whilst taking myself out to visit an open garden, I received a call from one of our calf-rearing clients for advice on a sick calf that had been noticed a couple of hours prior. This isn’t a case we see every day, […]
The deaths as a result of poor hygiene are mainly caused by calf scour. Whilst some scour in calves is the result of brand new pathogens, the main cause of scour is pathogens already on the farm being present in high enough quantities to cause infection.
It is surprising how […]
We’re having a bit of a calf health focus this Autumn as after all, they are your future herd so ensuring they get a healthy start is key. The Mayer family at Orslow Manor have kindly allowed us to feature their youngstock health set up, successes and protocols. They’ve put […]
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