The overall health of our replacements was truly at the back of our minds, pushing us to make the switch back. Having raised calves on cows in earlier years, however, we always knew there was something better. We never lost a calf, and by general standards our calves always grew extremely well and looked extremely healthy. We tried many methods of calf rearing: bottle feeding, bucket feeding, grain, buckets with nipples, and nurse cows. Raising our replacements on their mothers is by far our best investment with the biggest payback. Since we have been doing this, the benefits have reached all aspects of our operation. When we began commercial dairying, we knew that we would not make any real progress (and therefore money) until we raised our replacements on their mothers. The recent quota placed on many organic dairy farmers spurred a smart decision to keep more replacements and, to keep those replacements on cows, either mothers or nurse cows, to stay under quota without selling cows or dumping milk. As an effective method of improving shipped milk quality, many farmers use cows with high somatic cell counts (SCC) as nurse cows. More and more dairy farmers are raising heifers on cows for a variety of reasons-a trend we at Dharma Lea Farm are glad to see.
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