Dairy Cows Train Calves to Graze By Ron Daines Dairy operator
Vance Haugen was in the audience when David Mayenscheim spoke a
couple of years ago at a winter grazing conference. He listened
as Mayenscheim talked about how he let his calves graze with
their mothers on his Wisconsin pasture-based dairy, about how
the mothers taught their offspring how to graze. Mayenscheim’s
talk, discussing principles of animal behavior he’d learned from
Utah State range scientist Fred Provenza, planted a seed in
Haugen’s mind. “We had a cow that was going to fall freshen,”
said Haugen, “so we let her calf run with her, and it worked.”
The calf quickly learned to graze the Haugen dairy pastures. In
the spring of 2004, Haugen expanded his experiment with the 100
cows scheduled to freshen. The bull calves and half of the
heifers were left with their mothers. The other half of the
heifers were raised the traditional way in calf hutches. The
calves were left on their mothers remained with them till
weaning – about eight weeks – th