Orphan Calves!

Oh my goodness! I can’t believe I decided to get bottle fed calves. We’ve had them for a few months now. And it has been quite an experience.

We first got them at 2 weeks old from a Dairy Farm sale barn. I must say that I went into this pretty green, and didn’t know what all went into caring for calves past bottle feeding.

I wanted a more up close and personal experience with the grown cows we currently have on the property. We do feed them hay and feed, (winter food supplements), but they will only allow us to get within a few feet of them without the food.

One of my more experienced family members suggested I get a couple of bottle-fed calves if I wanted them to be comfortable with me. He made it sound easy, so I immediately agreed! He quickly secured us a couple of cute baby girls, and we brought them home and placed them into our barn.

I had to buy Calf Milk Replacer and the hugest bottles I have ever seen!

It was so interesting because I quickly learned they are nothing like domestic animals, in the beginning. They weren’t as eager to run up and start taking a nip that kinda looked like their mom’s.

It was funny. They would stand there licking their lips, clearly hungry, but would not come up. It takes a little patience at first, so I had to take a seat and just sit there holding the bottles out until one of them, Misti(The Black and white calf)would give in.

Misti gave in pretty quickly, but Kara the Brown and the white calf was not having it! We had to chase her for two days! The first day she didn’t get any milk because she continued to run away from us and we could not catch her!

She was starting to look thin and she was starting to shiver from being cold. So we knew we had to get more aggressive with catching her and making her eat. On the second day, we were able to catch her and forced the bottle into her mouth.

After that, we no longer had to chase her and she would come up with little to no hesitation.

We would manually feed the calves twice a day sometimes three times a day, during the winter. We chose one of the worse times to try and raise bottled calves. Those babies were shivering before we were told they should have jackets, so a pair was gifted to them.

So we learned a lot fast, and we are still learning!