Calves: How do you house yours?

Rearing of calves can come in many shapes and sizes and varies widely from farm to farm. It can often depend on several factors such as:

• Labour
• Resources
• Feeding method
• Space
• Personal preference

Regardless of choice, their accommodation must provide for the calf’s most basic needs if animal performance is to be maximised, and welfare standards met.

Individual pens

Traditionally, individual pens were the most common way to house calves.

It is important that single calf pens are large enough to allow calves to groom themselves, stand up, lie down and stretch without any difficulty (Pen width must be at least equal to the height of the calf at the withers, & length must be at least equal to the length of the calf multiplied by 1.1 (ADHB, 2024).

In addition, they must be able to see and touch their pen mates (unless sick and isolated) as this is a requirement of legislation.

Calves must be group housed from 8 weeks of age, unless an animal is kept in isolation under veterinary recommendation.

In a lot of cases, calves are now housed in individual pens for a few weeks until they are drinking well and then grouped.

A few disadvantages of penning calves on their own may be things like social and exploratory behaviour. They may be more fearful compared to calves that are in close contact with each other. It may be stressful for them when they are batched into groups later. In addition, single penned calves mean every calf needs their own individual feeding equipment e.g. milk feeders and buckets for meal and water. More labour may be required to ensure all equipment is washed etc.

Pairing Calves

Sometimes, calves are paired with one other pen mate. Recent research (McFarland et al., 2024) has indicated that pair-reared calves are quicker to approach the milk feed after grouping and to interact with a novel object. This may be a result of being used to having competition at feeding time and they had better ability to socially interact and adapt when in a new environment.

When assessing the individual calves within the pair, there were significant differences indicating that the higher-birthweight calf consistently outperformed and displayed less fear and more exploratory behaviour than the lower-birthweight calf within the pair.

Therefore, it is important when pairing calves that there isn’t a massive difference between the two calves both in age and weight. As naturally the bigger calf may be greedier than the smaller calf and have a negative effect on their performance.

Recommendations:

Pair calves similar in age and weight to avoid any bullying.

Group Pens

Grouping calves can work well and be beneficial for many reasons as follows:

• Encourage good social and explorative behaviour

• Familiar with their pen mates from the beginning as they will have to be batched once weaned therefore less stressful if done at the beginning.

• No stress moving from one pen to another pre-weaning

• Less individual feeding equipment to wash

The number of calves per group often depends on house design and feeding method. For example, if using an automatic feeder quite often calves will be in much larger groups as they have to access the one feeding station. Again, it is important when grouping calves to think about their age variation. Putting a newborn calf into a group where there are calves 3 and 4 weeks old can be recipe for disaster. The older calves have perhaps been already exposed to diseases the younger ones have not.

Recommendations:

• Keep calves in batches of 10 or less where possible

• Group according to age – try not to have a gap of more than 7 days between calves

• Set up pens e.g. sheep hurdles within group pen to allow for baby calves to learn to drink and once ready, hurdles can be removed, and group is formed.

There is a no one size fits all when it comes to housing – what works on one farm may not necessarily suit another. However, a few important take home messages when it comes to housing calves:

• • Fresh air (ventilation)

• • Air speed (draught prevention)

• • Humidity control (drainage)

• • Temperature management

• • Space

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