North – Tom Warboys
Autumn has arrived suddenly and provided some extra silage. Tough grazing conditions over the summer have left some beef herds leaner than usual. Many clients report that cows will calve more easily after drier, leaner summers. This could be a sign that those animals were over conditioned in other years!
That said, it is important to remember that successfully cleaning up post-calving, lactating, returning to cyclicity and conceiving again all require decent body condition and nutrition. It is important to avoid the temptation to feed up over winter, to get cows in better condition for the spring. In the final three months of pregnancy, animals partition a lot of their energy intake to the calf, and well-meant supplementary feeding may result in cows staying in exactly the same condition as before, but producing some very large calves!
Central – Ellen Taylor
Dorset County Show was a great opportunity to thank Andrew Davies for his many years with the practice and celebrate his retirement with lots of familiar faces. Thank you to everyone that visited our stand – congratulations to everyone who entered the livestock classes with lots of success across the region!
Many clients have been busy using Animal Health and Welfare Pathway funding over the summer. Examples of visits include calf feeding discussions for dairies, lameness management discussions/farm walks, wormer resistance testing and planning for sheep flocks, plus trace element testing. Please get in touch if you have any questions about how to apply and how to utilise this funding!
West – Jenny Clayton
It has been a month of variety. We have seen acorn poisoning, grain overload, red water, grass staggers and an earlier than usual onset of pneumonia. E. coli was identified on a dairy farm in very young calves which meant calving pens needed cleaning more regularly. On another, Salmonella was found as a cause of scour in calves with the farmer noticing that they had seen a few abortions in the hot summer months.
On several suckler units we have had disappointing PD results and this has led to more bull fertility checks. One bull failed so badly – it was the worst sperm morphology I have seen in 17 years! More bull fertility checks will be done in the coming weeks, but it is always better to check the bull before they are relied on.
East – Louise Silk
By the time this newsletter is printed our east team will be well into beef PD season. It will be interesting to see how the cows have performed. The hot dry summer has left its mark on cow condition and the general feeling is that will have had some effect on fertility. Autumn rain has resulted in a definite spurt of grass growth over the last month or so but the ground in this region is still very dry.
Ram MOTs have been done and, like with the cows, ewe condition is variable. It was nice to see show success for our clients at Wilton Sheep Fair recently! The number of cases of Bluetongue has increased steadily in September and October but thankfully many clients have vaccinated their animals and we have seen little of it clinically.
Lympstone – Rose Young and Sylvaine Lacrosse
Rose and Sylvaine are both moving on from the Lympstone team this winter, and would like to say goodbye and thank you for the happy years working with clients and colleagues in the area.
Sylvaine adds “September 1st marked my 10 years at Lympstone and what an incredible journey it’s been. It has been a fab chapter in my life and it’s been very emotional saying goodbye. I just wanted to say a massive thank you to the Lympstone team and farmers who welcomed me as an excitable new graduate! And in that time, I’ll treasure the friendships that have been made and the many great (and hilarious!) memories I’ve had on farms and at the practice.”
Elsewhere in the region, a mast year for many tree species has resulted in a huge acorn crop with several cases of acorn poisoning this month, and one particularly severe case in a large suckler herd utilizing moorland grazing. Watch out for cattle looking off colour in high risk pastures. Rapid and thorough veterinary intervention is needed to try to save affected animals. All affected calves had been in a smaller group given limited access to creep feed, which we suspect may have played a part in their enthusiastic acorn consumption.
