Abstract

Last year Northern Irish farmers Chris Catherwood and Jason Rankin won the All Ireland calf rearer of the year award and received a computerised machine as a prize. For the last two years the calves on the Cannon farm had been reared using teated feeders and were fed a skim and buttermilk based milk replacer once a day (OAD).

As they are block calve with 180 cows calving in 10-12 weeks they decided to use both systems to rear the calves and to compare performances and costs on each system. To compare each system they weighed calves at 5 days of age and split them between the two systems.