One thing that we have noted this spring is that we dripped far fewer calves in April.

Weather has had a big bearing, in that stronger calves have been let out to grass to reduce stocking pressure and disease presence in calf pens.

Calving started later and was more compact compared with the perfect storm of early calving during the very wet and miserable spring of 2016. But I think the most apt adage for this spring is that prevention is better than cure.

There is no doubt that Cryptosporidium was the causal agent for most scours in one- to three-week-old calves in April 2016. As Cryptosporidium has no cure, all we were trying to do was to keep calves hydrated and keep other factors at bay in the hope that the calves would recover.

In fairness to those that suffered major losses, they heeded our advice to steam-clean calf sheds with appropriate disinfectants to kill Cryptosporidium and to let sheds dry out for as long as possible.

Many also had good results using halofuginone lactate, with calves dosed for seven consecutive days starting within one to two days of birth. Used in conjunction with vaccination protocols for coronavirus and rotavirus, this has done the trick for us.

A crude way to measure a farmer’s success is by looking at the volume of intravenous fluid bags. There is a lot of unused stock in our clinic.

Farmers can be congratulated on this – it is not often we say positive things in this column. While we feel there were fewer losses, we cannot rest on our laurels; we still isolated Cryptosporidium regularly from calves that did get scour. Therefore, this cause of scour has not gone away; it was just managed better.

In the future, antibiotic resistance will be more relevant. There is always a compulsion to throw antibiotics at calves that have viral or protozoal (Cryptosporidium) scours where they have no primary function. We will be forced to reduce this habit. The way Cryptosporidium was managed this spring shows prevention is better than cure.

Sean Coffey works at Mulcair Vet Clinic, Newport, Co Tipperary, part of XLVets, a group of progressive practices working for better future for veterinary in Ireland. See www.xlvets.ie.