Calf scour management and alternative therapies

Calf scour remains highly prevalent in UK herds causing not just immediate short-term problems, but also significant negative downstream effects in later years on weight gain and milk yield. Animal welfare problems are also an issue. Calf scour should be viewed as a herd problem, and one clinically affected calf can subclinically affect five others. Recent surveys have shown that around 82% of farmers experienced calf scour in their herds in a 12 month period and of those 48% had calf deaths as a result of scour. Not only is there short-term damage and financial loss with scouring calves, but scour or respiratory disease have been clearly demonstrated to impact negatively on future performance. Accordingly, reducing calf scour at the preweaning stage can go a long way to benefitting future milk production and productivity in the long term. It should be noted that calf pneumonia incidence is also closely linked to calf scour incidence with scouring calves being up to 20 times more susceptible to pneumonia. Conversely, calves with a higher average daily gains pre-weaning have been shown to be heavier and produce more milk when they mature.