Spring is Here

Hi All,
Well, we're into it. The calves have started arriving and the cows have started milking. We are milking about 25 cows at the moment, but they are calving at about 2-3 per day at this stage. In another week or so, they'll calve at about 20-25 cows per day. It gets very busy taking care of all the new arrivals and making sure the cows are also looked after.
The flu is going around our house at the moment, making things really challenging. We'll cope though, because we have to. It's not like you can call in sick and there is no one to take your place, so you box on.
There is a nervous tension around Southland dairy farms this spring regarding bobby calves. Bobby calves are the newborn male calves. As you can't milk them and they are not beef breeds they are, in reality, a by product of dairy farming, just like the male chicks are a byproduct of the laying hen industry. With the male chicks, they are sent to be macerated and destroyed quickly and humanely as soon as possible after hatching. This is approved by the SPCA and considered normal practise.
Best on farm practise for the New Zealand dairy industry states that Bobby calves are to be fed sufficient milk, housed in a warm, dry, draught free environment and supplied with clean water at all times. When have reached four days old, their umbilical cord is dry, and their feet are hard and show wear, they are picked up by a truck or self delivered to a local abattoir. There, they are humanely killed and processed into, usually, baby food or other tinned food requiring very tender meat. We get paid about $10 per calf for the meat and hide. On this farm, there will be about 280 bobby calves born this spring and all will be sent to the abattoir.
This is the reality. If these animals were to kept alive, they would eat and drink food that is needed for the milking cows. Raise them for beef? It costs about $1500.00 to rear a dairy bred calf to the age of 2 years old. Currently, the approximate price a beef farmer gets for a 2 year old beef animal is about $1000 to $1200. These bobby calves are not bred for beef, and therefore are less efficient at gaining weight and will not have the same quality of meat as a beef animal. Besides, beef farmers, even rearing the best meat they can, still struggle to make it a viable business in some years.
The cost of feeding these little guys for the four days is about $4 plus the cost labour (normally a calf rearer is hired to care for all the newborns). It then costs about another $5 in freight to transport them to the abattoir. After costs this year, the balance will be zero. If the bobby is under the desired weight range, or has anything not quite right, the carcass is downgraded and the balance falls quickly into the negative.
Thankfully 99% of dairy farmers take the humane approach and realize this is just a cost we have to wear that comes with the responsibility of dairy farming. Killing the bobbies at four days old via an approved facility is the most humane way of dealing with these calves.
The reason Southland dairy farmers are nervous is the 1% of farms, usually corporately owned, or farms under extreme financial pressure, that only look at the bottom line. These guys may, again, end up giving us all a bad name by treating the bobby calves in a less then humane fashion. If the calves are not sent to abattoir because of cost issues, humane disposal of a bobby calf is either by shooting them or stunning them with a captive bolt and them bleeding them out. This must be done as quickly and as effectively as possible to minimize trauma and stress to the calf.
The consumer has signaled us, the producers, via their purchases, that they don't want male dairy bred animals for anything other then baby food or manufacturing beef. Economics forces farmers the unpleasant but necessary task of then, making life and death choices on behalf of the consumer. The unfortunate part is, the public then turns around and condemns us for having made these choices. We are between a rock and a very hard place. As stated earlier, 99% of us take our responsibility as food producers very seriously and make every effort to make ethical decisions. But when the public judges your decisions based on half truths or one or two poor operators it becomes a loose/loose situation for everyone involved.
We hope that even if the budget is looking impossible, that everyone will do the responsible thing and make sure the bobby calves are dealt with in a humane fashion. Farmers don't need any more bad press. They get enough rubbish fabricated about them in conventional media as it is.
As always, I would love discussion on this or any other agri-topic. Any questions or comments, good or bad, are always welcome. I may not be able to write for a little while because, after my kids, my calves are my first priority.
Take care, 4cowgirls