New Nubian Doeling

[babsbag]

Weaning at 8 weeks isn't really too young. I know many people keep their kids on milk to 12 weeks but I wean all of mine at 8 if they are being sold. A cocci load could have stunted her as well as poor feed and/or selenium deficiency.

 

[Goatgirl47]

Be careful with herbal dewormers. Make sure you are getting fecals done to make sure their worm load stays low. I posted a thread about that titled: Do herbal wormers actually work?
Also, pelleted dewormer is often known to be ineffective. Plus, it is hard to feed exactly right individual amounts- resulting often in underdosing and worm resistance.

@Green Acres Farm, three of the five kids we are giving it to were previously dewormed with a different and more effective wormer. I am planning on running fecals on those three kids soon. The other two (a Mini-Lamancha wether and his twin, pictured above with Harriet) didn't look like they needed worming but I am giving them the herbal wormer just in case. We are using Molly's Herbals.

I was told a few months ago on this forum that pelleted dewormers don't work very well, and since then I haven't used the rest of the bag I had left.

 

[Goatgirl47]

Weaning at 8 weeks isn't really too young. I know many people keep their kids on milk to 12 weeks but I wean all of mine at 8 if they are being sold.

I thought for standard goats the earliest you should wean them is 12 weeks. We go longer. I think it is better for them to be on their dams/or the bottle for a longer period of time. With calves most people would wean at 3-6 months, but we go 10-15 months.

 

[TAH]

I thought for standard goats the earliest you should wean them is 12 weeks. We go longer. I think it is better for them to be on their dams/or the bottle for a longer period of time. With calves most people would wean at 3-6 months, but we go 10-15 months.

Do you have a reason for going longer?

That is a really long time to be feeding a calf.

 

[Goatgirl47]

Warning, this is a fairly long post!

@TAH, we don't bottle-feed our calves, they are all dam raised. Once they are two months old we separate them from their dams and put them in with the chickens/goats. They get to nurse twice a day until they reach about four months old, and then they can only nurse once a day.
The cows we try to breed back 2-3 months after calving. If we let them have their calves 24/7 they don't come back into heat.

We don't want to milk every day so that is one reason for letting the calves nurse longer. We usually milk 3-5 times per week, and the calf gets to nurse on the cow after we milk her, and on the weekends when we don't milk her.
We also just think it is better and healthier for the calf to nurse longer. They usually fill out better too.

Every single calf I have seen weaned at 3-5 months old is very small, stunted, and looks like a runt. And bottle calves too. We once bought a Black Angus bottle calf and we weaned him at 4-6 months (I think). He was VERY stunted. We hardly got any meat off of him. He was way smaller and leaner then some other beef calves who were a lot younger him and nursing on their dams.


This is Violet, a calf we weaned at 8 months old. That isn't really too early for us, but we still like to have them nursing a little while longer. Violet's dam was bred back very quickly at her previous home, so we had to wean Violet earlier then expected so that Rowena could have a rest before her calf was born.
Below is Violet at about 20 months old, around two months into her gestation with her first calf.

This is a heifer we bought who had already been weaned - at four months old. We bought her when she was five months old, along with her mother. We slowly grafted her back on her dam and let her nurse until she was around thirteen months old.
The day she arrived:

She was potbellied.

And at twelve months old (still nursing once per day):

And here is Piper, who was with her dam every day (only being separated at night) until she was about five months old. In this picture she was seven months old. She was our chubbiest calf.

And at fifteen months old, just before we sold her. She was still nursing because she was a milk thief. She only got to nurse once a day though (when one of the other calves nursed on his mama). She was a pig!!

And here is our current milk thief, Linus. He's fifteen months old and only gets to nurse on the weekends right now. The only reason we still let him nurse is because one of our littler calves can't drink all the milk her mama produces just yet.

That is just what we do. Not everybody agrees with letting calves nurse for 12 months!

 

[Southern by choice]

Wow... know nothin' about cattle but to my completely untrained eye... gorgeous. They look healthy and shiny.

 

[TAH]

WOW @Goatgirl47 those are some of the nicest looking cows I have ever seen especially the last pic of the jersey. He is filled out really nice.

 

[NH homesteader]

Your cows are beautiful. Makes me wish I had enough property for cows now...

 

[Goatgirl47]

These were taken Saturday. It rained heavily all weekend. Linus (15-month-old calf) went into the goat house and kicked most of the goats out, so they got all wet. We had to fix up a place in the barn for them instead. They were glad to get out of the rain!

Sally wouldn't let anybody eat out of the hay bag.

 

[Goatgirl47]