Practical ideas and answers to calf health and calf scours prevention.

Prioritizing herd health starts in the maternity pen because immediately after a calf is born, every decision matters to its future productivity. We explored five ways for modernizing the maternity pen to gain benefits for your calves and dairy operation.

Cleanliness and comfort
Ask yourself how high or low your facility ranks in terms of how easy it is to keep clean. Easy is best. A clean pen can prevent injuries, reduce stress, lower disease incidence and more.

Biosecurity
Make sure you take stringent biosecurity measures. You will gain the upper hand disease prevention, productivity and food safety.

Colostrum
Create a dedicated areas for colostrum collection and storage, and design the pen with timely colostrum administration in mind.

Overall efficiency
Keep your team in mind, too. Provide easy access to calving tools and visibility to your standard operating procedures (SOPs). Plan for an overall efficient layout and design.

Visibility
Take advantage of monitoring technologies to track calving progress, for example. Use them to track each animal’s health, too.

Deciding to invest in your maternity pen of course requires thoughtful consideration of the economics. Read the full article for a more detailed look at whether an upgrade makes sense for you.

This post originally appeared in Progressive Dairy magazine.