Bovine Blog
Categories: Blogs, DairyDiary
I’ve started making the acquaintance of a herd of heifers on a farm I will call ‘VT Farm’. The ladies are a dynamic bunch and we are just starting to get to know each other. This interest in profiling the individual personalities of heifers was partially inspired by the article ‘Exploring Stock Managers — Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production’ by Catherine Bertenshaw and Peter Rowlinson at the School of Agriculture and Rural Development, Newcastle University, UK which states; “On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001).” If interested, the full article can be downloaded from: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/anthroz/2009/00000022/00000001/art00006. Individual attention and interpersonal relationships are known to be paramount to human development and well being, but their being recently proven as beneficial to the bovine species raises interest in other comparative behavioral studies. As human relationships have expanded and been augmented via the internet and social networking sites, cyberpsychology has emerged. Can these investigations be applied to cows? How might cows react to virtual attention? Does the behavioral psychology of social networking have something to teach the dairy industry? Both the dairy industry and online social networking relationships straddle the line between high-tech and high-touch – what does this delicate balance mean for both humans and cows? I will investigate these questions over the coming month as I profile these cows and introduce them to the online community.
The farmers have pointed me towards a few personalities to begin profiling. Firstly there is the herd that is currently being milked for commercial milk and cheese production and then there are the cows who are taking care of the calves. The latter are kept separately and are lovingly referred to as ‘the nursery’. In the nursery I met Norma and Josie who are acting as wet nurses. The cows are mothering 5 calves between the two of them, calves who are not necessarily theirs. Norma is an older cow, and a veteran mother. She is a Normande which are said by the North American Normande Association to “reach sexual maturity early and have good fertility, mammary conformation, mothering ability and production longevity”. Josie on the other hand is a Jersey which is one of the oldest dairy breeds, popular because of its milk and butterfat production.They have an average weight of 900 pounds, and produce more pounds of milk per pound of body weight than any other breed. Most Jerseys produce more then 13x their bodyweight in milk each time they lactate. Norma and Josie are in the nursery due to the fact that their milk has tested high in somatic cell counts. Somatic cells are white blood cells which are produced when the immune system is in overdrive due to an infection of some sort, possibly mastitis. The milk is not commercially viable when the somatic cell counts are too high and if Norma and Josie’s counts don’t drop they will have to leave the herd. In this instance the farmers are performing a type of experiment to see if rigorous suckling will lower their somatic cell counts. They will test again after this batch of calves is weened from Norma and Josie. This constant milking from calves takes quite a toll on Norma and Josie physically and they are both looking quite thin these days. Traumatic suckling syndrome? Might they benefit from an online support group of nursing mothers? Josie is now a password holding member of http://www.breastfeeding.com/forums/.
- wet nursing