| Calves |  |
Our calves are all AI produced and reared on farm. All female calves are kept and the bull calves are sold to Midfield Meats for either the veal or bull beef markets. In 2008, we decided to keep a small number of pure bred bulls for registration and sale as paddock bulls for farmers in the surrounding district. These bulls (to be listed ASAP) are available for sale now.
In 2006 we started operations in our new calving facility. We had outgrown the old one in terms of calf numbers and user friendliness. The new facility allows us to house 16 calves individually (or if pressed, we can double up the pens with 2 calves each giving us capacity for 32 calves) and 4 group pens of 20 calves. In total we can house inexcess of 100 calves.
The calves enter the calving facility at a maximum of 24 hours old. Those that arrive before suckling off their mum, are given colostrum over the first few feeds. The majority however are left on their mum until they have had a number of feeds of colostrum (we observe this) and come into the shed to go straight onto whole milk.
At birth, each heifer calf is allocated a 4 digit number which she retains for life. As a calf, this number is displayed as an ear tag, later on to be matched to a brass tag, the NLIS tag and her collar. A file on the computer is created for each calf (heifers and bulls) so that we can trace each animal back to her dam and sire.
In the calf facility, calves are housed individually until they display effective feeding and are then moved into a group pen. A group of calves is kept in the shed for as long as it takes us to make up a group of 20, ensure that they are of a uniform size and all display similar aggressiveness when it comes to feeding (ie. no shy feeders at the milk). When this is established, they are moved from the shed to one of five small calf paddocks and are kept as a small group until after weaning when the groups are combined.
Weaning occurs when the calves reach 120kg.
As of 2008, all calves that are retained on farm are registered with Holstein Australia. This also includes any bull calves that we keep for sale later on as paddock bulls.
**UPDATE - July 2010**
The 2 recip cows have now calved and we ended up with 1 bull and 1 heifer.
Tom with "Craiglands Megaman Kelly" in 2009 
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