Milk-illness

Milk-illness:

A typical decease of the dairy farming of today is milk illness. Milk illness is a shortage of calcium in the first lactating days.

In the human and animal body, the bones are the storage room for calcium. So every animal has to take in some calcium out of is own bones.

But when a cow gets feed with to much calcium in it, she won’t learn to take in any calcium from her bones.

So when she has calved and she has to give milk she needs many calcium witch she could take in from her bones. But because the body didn’t learn to do that, the cow is getting a shortage of calcium.

You can remedy this by giving the cow a calciummagnesium drip but its better to protect the cow against the decease by giving her the right food in the dry period, what means food without to many calcium.

The consequents are:

The cow healthy is going better, so your cows stay longer on your farm en have a better production, so you can get more money.

If you leaser milk-illness you need leaser medicines, that’s cheaper. Also you have lesser labour costs, because you have a cow with milk-illness you have a lot of work with it. 

How to do it?

To protect the milk-illness you need food for the dry cows without to much calcium.

A good ingredient for a low calcium feed might be sugar beets.

Page updated 23.4.2007