The glamorous life of bottle feeding calves
As I mentioned earlier about what a bottle calf is, they can actually be quite expensive to raise! Think about how much a human baby drinks in formula. They have their tiny little 8 ounce bottle of formula they drink several times a day. Now think about a 2 month old 75lb growing calf. How much milk do you suppose it takes to sustain them! A typical calf bottle is 2 liters or 67.6 ounces. That is 8.5 standard 8ounce baby bottles! Now factor in a 50 lb bag of calf formula, coming in at $69.99 a bag! Each calf will get one, 2 liter bottle of milk 2–3 times per day. Each bottle will contain about 3 scoops of formula. You can see how quickly it will add up. The standard calf who is nursing on their mother will stay on the mom cow for about 6–9 months. During this time they get valuable nutrients from the cows milk, and they will learn to graze and eat grass in the open fields. A bottle calf, like ours will need to take a bottle for at least 4 months. All the meanwhile you need to teach it to eat hay and grain. So now you have that cost to factor in too! If you were to take a 6 month old bottle calf, and compare it to a 6 month old cow raised calf, you could see the difference in their size! They may stand shoulder to shoulder, but their mass will be lacking. Mothers milk is always best! When we moved ranches over the summer, we took our 3 bottle calves we were raising and brought them here. We obtained 2 pregnant cows, with their babies. They were pretty similar in birth age, but the mother raised babies were much stockier looking. Although ours did compare in size, the difference was noticeable. You start to notice in March and April “bottle babies” being sold on farm and ranch groups. Many people, such as our selves would buy them. Our first time in, we had no idea how much it was going to cost us to feed them. I think this is the time we became known by every single employee at Tractor Supply!
Aside from the price that comes with feeding babies, it really can be rewarding to stare down into the eyes of a little calf and watch it suckle its bottle. But beware, they become bossy and will head butt you! I can tell you, I have been head butted in the thighs, and butt many times!
Little babies are fun! Whether they are bottle fed, or mother raised, having a new generation of animals on your ranch is what helps keep it going. You tend to forget about the pain staking hours you spent trying to get one to take a bottle from you when you see them flourishing while running and playing with the other babies.
That reminds me of a calf we had. Her name was Ronda Rousey. She earned her name in all rights. She was a twin calf we bought up in Ranchester. The rancher was selling her because he wanted her sister to become a single calf for its mom to raise. When we got Ronda home, she was a little fighter! She was stubborn as all get! She never once, not one time suckled on a bottle. She absolutely refused! At every single feeding Scott would have to take a 60ml syringe and force feed Ronda her formula. He did this for months! She kicked and fought the whole way! Ronda was always much skinner than the other calves. She never really gained a lot of weight, but she always fought through it. I remember sitting on the ground outside next to her. I started sobbing because of how skinny she was, and I didn’t want her to die. She pushed through it for a little while. She probably ate grass and grain much sooner than the other calves. Unfortunately a really big snow storm hit, and she just wasn’t strong enough to survive it. That was really really sad. I will always remember her though, she taught me to never give up on them!
