Talk to any farmer who is focused on delivering results or dependent on getting a return and they will tell you that if you get the management right in early spring, it will set you up for the year.

Whether this is a newborn lamb, a 60kg suckler calf or a freshly calved milking cow, get a good head start and you can make life a lot easier for yourself and your animal for the rest of the year. If we don’t get the basics right early in life for newborns, or early in lactation of cows, all the vaccines, antibiotics or natural remedies in the world won’t fix the problem.

Colostrum

In this week’s Focus, the Journal Vet makes a special plea to farmers to feed calves colostrum, explaining why you need to get the best biestings into newborn calves and lambs and the basics of selecting the best colostrum. Colostrum is not some fancy new product you’ve never heard about, but the basic silver bullet that sometimes requires effort to get into the calf or lamb, especially after a difficult birth.

Aidan Brennan and Finola McCoy discuss the national trend in milk quality and what dairy farmers can do now in early lactation to set cows up for a good 2020. The progress has been exceptional, but there are new challenges coming around the corner. If milking cow antibiotics are not available and with limits on dry cow antibiotics on the horizon, dairy farmers need to get a tighter handle on individual somatic cell count or it could have serious consequences for the future.

As tired as most farmers may be at the peak of the calving and lambing season, it’s fair to say the effort put in now towards animal health will pay big dividends for the rest of the year, if you can stick to the plan.