Every year, Bovine Respiratory Disease, better known as BRD, costs the cattle industry an estimated $1 billion annually. BRD can cause pneumonia in calves which may be fatal. And even if calves survive BRD, they often end up being poor performers. This will negatively impact a rancher’s reputation and bottom line. Here are some of the ways you can stop BRD from affecting you.
Provide newborn calves with a clean environment
When calves are born a clean, none contaminated, area is critical. Moving to fresh calving areas weekly will dramatically reduce the incidence of scours, BVD and other pathogens. This will cut down their chances of being diagnosed with BRD.
Set calves up with the right vaccinations
In addition to providing newborn calves with a clean space, you should also work with a veterinarian to make sure that they are put on a proper vaccination program to give the calf a chance of building immunity ahead of exposure. which will eliminate a lot of the treatment costs and death losses. Putting your calves in a position to stay healthy will result in less treatments and death loss.
Give cattle the best starter nutrition
One of your main goals with your calves should be to boost their immune systems. You can do this by making sure they receive high-quality colostrum at birth. This will improve their immune systems and when combined with good nutrition they will have less stress and higher levels of production. You can’t stop all of your calves from getting sick but following good herd health, nutrition and management programs you can improve your percent calves weaned meaning you’ll have more pounds to sell.
Applying good health, nutrition and management to cattle with superior genetics will give you even better returns. It doesn’t cost any more to feed and care for a good one than a poor or average one. But your profit potential is greatly increased. Flying H Genetics can help with superior genetics that are BRED 4 PROFIT and BUILT 2 WORK. Go to www.flyinghgenetics.com or call and email us to take advantage of our generations of experience making ranching more fun and profitable. Getting the cattle right and managing them and the ranch as a unit is important. We are in business to make your business better. Needing to add superior cattle genetics to your ranch or ask questions about improving your operations? Contact us today to find out what we can do for you and your ranch.
