Disbudding

Our vet techs have been specially trained to perform disbudding, and work in a team of two to minimise the disturbance to you and your regular farm staff. Batches of young calves are normally sedated (knocked out) and local anaesthetic is administered so that disbudding is a stress and pain free experience for these calves. Calves also receive a pain killer so that they can make a speedy recovery from the procedure. 

Our vet techs currently perform routine weekly visits on some farms to keep on top of the disbudding. This also provides a chance for other interventions like vaccination and weighing. Ad hoc disbudding visits are also available. If interested then please contact the surgery.

Mobility Scoring

At Belle Vue Vets we have two RoMs accredited mobility scorers, and state of the art software to help report mobility scoring outcomes back to the farmer. The benefits of regular routine mobility scoring have been shown, allowing you to monitor progress of individual cows after treatment, identify cows requiring attention at the next foot trimmer visit and to assess herd level seasonal trends in mobility. All this data can be put to good use, allowing data driven advice to be given at herd health plans to improve herd lameness control. To maximise the benefit of mobility scoring monthly scoring around a week before the foot trimmers next visit would be advised. 

Vaccinations

Our Vet techs provide a professional service for the delivery of calf and herd level vaccination. This service takes the stress of vaccination out of your hands and ensures that all animals get the right vaccine at the right time, and that vaccines are stored and transported correctly to maximise their benefit. Vaccination protocols are drawn up with the individual farm’s vet to ensure that the correct diseases are being covered. This will be tailored to the specific needs of the farm. After each visit, a list will be shared with the farmer of all animals vaccinated, and the batch number and expiry date of the vaccines, allowing you to keep your medicine book up to date. This service is available for youngstock pneumonia vaccinations as well as herd level boosters against infectious disease. 

Body Condition Scoring

This under-utilised management tool, if used regularly, helps to establish changing trends in body condition across the production cycle. Do your cows lose too much body condition immediately after calving? At what point do they start regaining condition? Are your dry cows over-conditioned and is this more evident in the far off or the close-up group? The minimum critical points for body condition scoring are calving, first service and dry off. However, the more data contributed the better our understanding of the herd dynamics will be. 

Or vet techs are both trained in delivering body condition scoring by a standardised approach meaning that they will be consistent across different farms and over time. 

Reports can be produced to monitor individual body condition changes or to give an overview of herd performance and whether body condition is affected by season or management changes. This requires long term commitment to body condition scoring. Our vets can give you advice about how and when to start body condition scoring and we are happy to collate and evaluate any data that you generate.

Calf Health & Weight Monitoring

Daily liveweight gain is an objective assessment of calf health, productivity and welfare. When calf health is optimised, liveweight gains will be maximised. Heifers only start to repay the cost of their rearing when they calve for the first time and enter the milking herd. Rearing them to this age is costly, and by maximising their health and liveweight gain we can achieve our target age at first calving of 24 months, thus minimising costs. 

Monitoring liveweight gain gives us an insight into how different factors affect calf health and growth. For example, do lower temperatures in winter affect growth, and can we alleviate this with management changes? Does growth rate improve when a different milk powder is used for feeding calves, or when we vaccinate against pneumonia? 

Our vet techs can conduct regular monthly weighing visits to monitor liveweight gain, with reports produced every quarter assessed by one of our vets. Working as a team they provide this service with minimal disruption to the working day of your farms staff, and other services such as disbudding, and vaccination can be delivered at the same time. 

The weigh crate is suitable for calves up to around 12 weeks old, allowing weight gain to be monitored past weaning. Beyond this an on-farm weigh cell would be required, normally linked to a crush. There are benefits to be had from quarterly monitoring of youngstock right through to at least first service. Any data generated during this period can be assessed alongside other calf weights.