Sonia Chandler has been raising calves for 30 years and swears by the feed supplement Mylo.
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“It’s just a great product, and it’s a big thing for me to say that,” Sonia said.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, seen a lot of products and a lot of them are BS.”
Currently Sonia is the calf rearing manager on a 950-head Undera dairy farm run by Goulburn Valley Creamery, in northern Victoria.
She also rears calves off a nearby 250-head dairy.
“I receive 700 heifer calves a year,” Sonia said.
“The farm calves six times a year, which means we have the calves in and out fairly quickly because the whole calving shed gets pulled down and cleaned between each batch.”
The portable fences are taken away and scrubbed, the used bedding is scooped out and replaced with new bedding, the concrete ground pressure washed.
Sonia’s calving shed’s death rate is less than two per cent — an incredible rate, especially for a farm with Cryptosporidium parvum lingering in the pastures.
The calves are ready to be weaned at nine weeks, allowing the farm to raise more batches of calves and redo the calf shed before the next calving.
Early weaning is one advantage of using the Mylo feed supplement, Sonia said.
“It improves everything. We use very few antibiotics — next to nothing — we’ve got very good mortality rates and the calves wean earlier simply because they’re healthy, bigger and doing really well.”
Sonia buys the supplement from GTS Home Timber and Hardware in Tongala.
Mylo is a liquid feed supplement designed for dairy cattle by Queensland-based ag-biotech company Terragen.
The supplement contains live microorganisms suspended in a mix of water and molasses.
The supplement can either be fed diluted in milk or mixed with feed rations.
It’s also certified for use on organic farms by the NASAA.
“I have them on it from day one,” Sonia said.
“It makes them a healthier calf because their gut is working better. It’s 10ml per calf per day until weaned.
“The first time I used it, I was working on another farm. I’d heard about it from someone and I said to the boss ‘let’s give it a try’ and there was a such a massive difference from one day to the next.”
Sonia said the supplement had a sweet smell, but actually tasted like vinegar.
“It’s got great ease-of-use. A lot of these supplement products are powders and you need to mix and measure them in. With Mylo I just walk along and squirt it into their milk as I’m feeding.”
She said feeding Mylo, colostrum management and deep cleaning all contributed to excellent calf health and growth.
Fighting crypto
Any farmer who has faced Cryptosporidium parvum won’t be forgetting its name in a hurry.
Crypto is a one-celled organism that lives in the intestine lining of cows.
The organism is shed by the dam through her manure and calves quickly become infected by spending time in the pasture and nursing from a dirty udder.
Crypto makes calves violently ill and will usually kill them after days of watery diarrhoea weakening the calf.
Sonia said the trick to beating crypto was to expect it from day one.
“The Mylo certainly helps, but farmers have got to expect they are going to get it [crypto] and manage it. As soon as a calf steps into the shed, I’m preparing them for it.
“In two-and-a-half years, I’ve only lost one calf to crypto, and that was the first one who got it.”
Sonia said crypto was managed by strengthening the calves as much as possible in their first 10 days.
This is done through colostrum feeding, using the Mylo supplement and ad lib milk (letting calves drink as much as they want).
“We measure our colostrum here with a refractometer. It tests the colostrum and if it’s 22 or above we use it,” Sonia said.
“The higher the number, the thicker the colostrum and generally the better it is.”
Refractometers are used to estimate colostrum IgG (immunoglobulin G).
“When the mother cow comes into the dairy, she has to be really clean and then she’s put on a test bucket so she’s caught individually.
“From the test bucket it comes to me, I put it in a white bucket, test it and it goes into a coolroom.”
The farm will even freeze high-quality colostrum for later use.
“Our cows are vaccinated against a host of things, so their colostrum has a lot of antibodies,” Sonia said.
“Recently we got a set of new cows in who hadn’t been as vaccinated, they calved the next week and I fed those calves colostrum from our cows that’d been frozen to give them those extra antibodies.”