tveguy3 said:Dave, is this 24 hours after calving?

More like an hour. The placenta hasn't come yet. We're keeping an eye on that.

Awwwwwwwwwwwww baby is soooo cute

Daisy has the prettiest face! look at those eyes & eyelashes. She could steal your heart.

That's one full udder!

dave said:The placenta hasn't come yet. We're keeping an eye on that.

The placenta did come and all is now well. The calf is up, walking around and has already met the other cows.

I'm glad everything turned out ok. Is it a heifer? My money's on a girl! Really cute.

You win, Tom! My son came in a few minutes ago and told me he got close enough to see the udder with 4 little teats. We have another heifer!!

Congratulations!

Congratulations. Is she a keeper? or for the freezer? Looks to be about half of a beef variety. I had a good start of a dairy heard, but when I went to college, it got to be too much trying to manage that and school, so I sold out, and used the money for school. I haven't had any since. I do like cattle though.

Nice little calf, Dave.

To clarify the oxytocin question, it is most often used in dairy cattle to get them to let down their milk. It might also be efficacious in cleaning, but that's not something that we've ever done.

tveguy3 said: Congratulations. Is she a keeper? or for the freezer? Looks to be about half of a beef variety.

She's definitely a keeper. We carefully selected the bull to breed Daisy for the right mix of genetics and couldn't be happier to have him throw another heifer for us. This heifer plus our earlier heifer born last year (Elsie) are 7/8 Jersey and 1/8 Normande.

Glad she's a keeper. So cute

When it's time to breed them will you breed back to Jersey or Normande or something else entirely?

That's something I haven't thought too much about yet, but if I could breed them to a Normande I would be very pleased to do so. I'll almost certainly be doing the AI route from here out, which dramatically opens up my options.

Congrats Dave, very cute calf you got there!

Thank you, Margaret.

We separated her from her mama yesterday afternoon and did our first milking last night. The calf did pretty good with the bottle. This morning Daisy gave up a couple gallons of milk and the calf took the whole bottle. She is quite tame already!

She misses her mama and they are mooing at each other. She will learn that WE are her mama now and Daisy will learn that WE are her calf now.

Dave, sorry but I don't know too much about farm animals so please excuse this dumb question, why take the calf away from the mama so soon seeing as she is drinking mom's milk anyway, wouldn't it be less work to let her nurse normally.

Some people do that but I find it's better for everyone to take the calf and bottle feed her.

If you let her nurse then the cow will hold back for us. She won't give up much milk because she knows we're stealing from her calf. So if she isn't nursing a calf, then she lets down every time and gives us all the milk.

Aw I see, and of course I'm sure everyone has fun feeding the calf.

Very very much so!!

Dave, how is the new calf doing?