If say a Jersey dairy cow has a calf, in natural setting, not dairy setting… and the calf was at liberty to nurse “normally” - would the calf die???
There was a comment that was made about Angus cow vs Jersey cow and I wanted to know if anyone “knows” (have been around cows and farms but have never heard this before LOL):
“Beef cows can let their calves nurse all they want and any time they want, because they don’t have much milk. Whereas Jersey calves would die if they nursed any time they wanted, because Jersey cows have too much milk, and so the calves only get the sugar milk”
That depends on what you mean by “nurse ‘normally’”. If the cow and calf are out in the wild and the cow is not being milked, I would imagine that she would stop lactating after several days. The calf could still become ill with scowers (sp?) if it drunk too much milk. This is a problem with bottle-feed calves in particular. However, I don’t think that it could progress to the point where the calf would die, simply because it would stop drink once it got sick.
It also depends on the age of the calf. For the first few days the mother only produces a small quantity of collostrom to strengthen the calf.
Also, while Jerseys do produce much more milk than an Angus (or any other beef cow) it is known for its butterfat content more than its volume.
The calf would drink until it got full, and then wander off to do whatever calves do when they’re not nursing. It wouldn’t keep going till it burst or anything. Of course, the cow’s milk supply would adjust to fit the calf’s demands, which would presumably be a lot less than the demands of a dairy farmer.
Its been my experience that a cow’s milk supply is whatever it is and doesn’t adjust to fit a calf’s needs. If a cow is producing more milk than a calf can nurse, then one or more of the unnursed quarters will likely spoil and will not produce milk again. That being the case, I will bring in a cow in this condition and milk her out twice a day for a few days until the calf gets big enough that it will take some of the milk from all four quarters and then the problem will work itself out.
I have known of calves getting the scours and dying from dehydration, but I’ve never known one to drink itself to death.
I only spent time on dairy farms in the “modern era”. We’d take the calf away from the mother right away, and it would be fed on powdered milk. (The mother would be milked mechanically, but the first few days milk would be thrown out. It was sometimes a weird pink color. I know people here have questioned me about this, but, hey, I saw what I saw.)
But what about before powdered milk was available? After all, the famous breeds of dairy cattle have been around for centuries. As I see it, there are two choices:
The calf feeds naturally from the mother and she is not milked otherwise.
Like 1. but the mother is also milked on occassion.
I don’t think 2. was likely. IIRC, there was a belief on the farm that milk from nursing cows was poor quality (for human uses).
In particular, the argument in the OP doesn’t make much sense in the context of “what did farmers do 200 years ago?”
For the first few days the cow doesn’t give milk so much as it gives a colustrum (something like milk, but extremely concentrated with nutrients). Of course, the colustrum is usually yellowish. If the milk is pink, I would be worried about mastitis.
This is wrong, for the reasons people have already noted: milk production is a demand-and-supply thing. The more the calf nurses, the more milk the cow will make. The less the calf nurses, the less milk the cow will make. If you add an artificial milking to this, obviously, the cow will make more milk.
This “sugar milk” is something nobody has yet commented on, so I’m going to do so:
In between feedings or milkings, a lactating animal’s milk ducts fill up with what is called ‘foremilk’ which - yes - is higher in sugar, and incidentally much more watery, with less fat, than the ‘hindmilk’ which follows, and which is produced at let-down (triggered by the stimulation of suckling or pumping).
A calf who receives only foremilk is likely to wind up with scours. But a calf who self-feeds is going to empty a quarter (including its hindmilk) before moving on to the next quarter.
(In parallel, a human baby who recieves only foremilk from his mother is likely to wind up with frothy green poop in his diaper - this is why we let a baby nurse on one side until he falls off, and THEN switch sides, rather than switching based on what the clock says.)
It’s been my experience if you leave the calf(Jersey or not…even a Jersey bred to be milked twice a day can produce more milk than her calf can drink) with his mother and let him stay with her and drink as much as he wants all that happens is he gets fat and sassy…they almost never get scours
But if you take him away from his mom and feed him with a nipple pail THEN you have to be careful he doesn’t over drink…I’m just guessing but it could be the pen you keep the calf in may have the disease present and he’s more at risk in the pen with the other calves
The problem is on most farms leaving the calf with his mom like that just isn’t possible and you have to use an artificial solution to keep the calf from getting sick(medicines mixed with his milk that only work about 50% of the time if the calves are overcrowded)
BTW Just in case someone out there who thinks the mean farmers separating the mom and her baby are doing it for fun…the thing is…if you leave them together and then try to milk mommy after the calf has had his supper she’ll hold her milk and not let it down and you get nothing from her…she can do this for a long time and total screw up how much milk you end up getting from her for that season
Plus she will be more at risk for mastitis and hard quarters(this is very painful for the cow) and either of these things can ruin a cow and force the farmer to sell her prematurely