How To Care For a Cow After Giving Birth

Calf on The Ground

It’s was early last Saturday morning and it was time to remember how to care for a cow after giving birth! Don heads out to the lean-to to check on Marybell and how she’s getting along. She’s real close to calving. We can tell because the bones next to her tail are real soft. As he peaks around the corner, there he sees a sweet, newborn calf on the ground. It never gets old. Read more about the day of her calving here.

We’ve learned its best to let Momma do her thing. We try to intervene as little (if at all) possible. This birth made it easy because she did it all on her own without us knowing! Here are some things we keep an eye on after birth..

1. Calf

The first thing we do is keep an eye on the calf to make sure Marybell has done her job of licking him down. This actually drys the calf! Usually within the first hour the calf is walking around and looking for Momma’s teats to nurse. By the time we found the two of them Smokey was already doing both!. This is crucial to make sure the calf is getting colostrum.

You want to make sure the calf gets colostrum within the first 12-24 hours. Now, I will say this: Our first time around we worried so much the calf didn’t get colostrum… we tried bottle feeding him, shoving his face near the teats to nurse. He wasn’t having any of it – and the reason was, they were already rock stars and knew what they were doing. They didn’t need us interfering. The calf wasn’t nursing because …. HE ALREADY HAD BEEN WHEN WE WEREN’T LOOKING! haha. Silly humans…

So this time around, we tried not to worry. As long as calf was walking, nursing and pooping and peeing after a while, we knew things were going well.

2. Momma Cow Care

With Marybell, this is her second calf. First time around, during her last calving, she got mastitis. That year, we treated that by giving her warm compress holds using an old sock filled with rice and heated that up in the microwave. We added coconut oil and essential oils like peppermint and lavender and massaged her udders every few hours. We also hand expressed the milk as much as we could. She healed up from that pretty quickly and we were off to fresh milk within a week or so.

With that history, we knew she would be prone to get mastitis again this time so we have been keeping a pretty close eye on her. So far she seems to just have edema. Edema is when the udders and teats get swollen and hard from inflammation after calving. When you try to milk a cow with edema it’s really difficult because everything is so swollen and …. well hard! When you press your finger into the udder, it will leave an indentation.

Edema and Mastitis Natural Remedy and Care

Thankfully we bought some bentonite clay with essential oils in it to help naturally treat edema and mastitis. We have the Redmond Udder Mud and apply it when we check on her each day. We apply the clay and massage and express milk as best we can. When she feels super tight, we will get the milk machine out and milk out what we can. This seems to give her relief and seems to be doing a great job at avoiding mastitis! We test for mastitis after each milking using the California Mastitis Testing kit.

The first 7-10 days we check on her everyday and just allow Baby and Momma to bond and nurse as often as they want. We pull her up to our portable milking stanchion and give her 10 lbs of organic alfalfa pellets while we check on her udder health.

After 10 days we will separate Marybell from the calf by bringing her up to the barn at night and hanging out in a stall with fresh hay and water for 12 hours. The next morninqn we will milk her out and she will get to spend allll day with baby.

We do plan to calf share. It’s our favorite way to have a family milk cow because it allows us to have more freedom. So essentially, we just milk her whenever we need milk! This means we don’t milk on Sundays or when we are going out of town for Christmas and such. There is no need to milk while we are gone because the calf will do all that for us.

3. Calf Poop

It’s also good to keep an eye on the calfs poop. Really runny poo is a sign of scours which is a virus. We’ve only ever had calves NOT born on the farm get scours. We find that calves born naturally to their Momma and are able to nurse freely for the first 10 days have a less chance of getting scours that our calves we’ve purchased from other farms. This, we think, is due to stress, early weaning and change of environment.

When we do see scours in our calves we head to Tractor Supply and get a few electrolyte treatments for them. Be sure to wash your hands after dealing with a calf with scours because it can make you sick too.

Calf poo is yellow and should be thick in the first week. This is a sign they are getting good colostrum and are nice and healthy. If you’re in doubt, just call your trusty vet and they can help guide you in the right direction.

Don’t Be Afraid to Jump In

If you are reading this and you are inspired to get your own family milk cow, do it! We don’t know it all, we only know what challenges us at the moment by trying trial and error. We can’t grow if we don’t learn new skills! You have been given all you need for this life, all we need to do is walk in it and learn. We are here for you if you ever have any questions. Walk the journey with us or just watch as we stumble our way through! ha

We love all the babies on the farm and so blessed to call this place and these living things home.