Rog Wood: It's good to be retired

Rearing heifer calves is a very important job on a dairy farm, that requires a full-time employee on larger dairy herds.

Dairy-bred bull calves, particularly those sired by beef bulls, are often sold to be reared by others. Such calves offer an economical way for new entrants to farming to build up cattle numbers.

The best way to rear calves is to let them suckle a cow naturally. When my father started farming he reared bought-in calves by multiple-suckling cows. When milky beef cows calved, they were brought into the byre and chained in their stall. They then had another, bought-in beef calf fostered on. After about 8 weeks, both calves were weaned and another two, bought-in calves fostered on. They would also be weaned after a couple of months, when a single bought-in calf would be reared before the foster cow was dried off.

My father regularly had six foster cows coming into the byre twice-a-day during the summer, while the calves, that were kept in a straw-bedded pen at the end of the byre, were let out to suckle them as they ate their concentrates. During the winter the foster cows were tied up full-time.

Such a system allowed my father to rear about 50 extra calves over and above the ones produced by the foster cows - but it was a lot of hard work.

I also reared hundreds of bought-in calves when I started farming short of capital, but did so by feeding them milk substitute from a bucket.

The problem with buying young calves from markets was that they introduced disease to the farm. One of the biggest killers of calves is diarrhoea, or scour as farmers call it.

Forty years ago there wasn't the range of effective drugs and re-hydration therapies that there is today. Scour caused by the likes of salmonella, cryptosporidium, E. coli and rotavirus killed more than just the bought-in calves - it also spread to the calves suckling my beef cows.

Scouring calves lose a lot of fluid and, left untreated, soon die of dehydration, just as dysentery kills children in third-world countries.

Fortunately doctors working in those countries developed re-hydration, or fluid therapy. It involves regularly feeding a saline solution that contains glucose.

Farmers have adopted the technique and mix sachets of powder in warm water and feed it to the sick calf by means of a tube that is passed down its throat into its stomach. The solution replaces lost fluid, various salts or electrolytes to maintain blood concentrations at the correct level, and glucose to give the calf energy.

I can tell you from bitter experience that nursing sick calves twenty-four hours a day is a tiring and soul-destroying task that regularly ends in disappointment. The survivors of a bad bout of scour or pneumonia often go on to become ill-thriven, loss-makers.

My wife Carmen, as with most farm women, was much better at rearing calves than I was - and I put that down to the fact that she had nursed babies and reared young children - the "woman's touch".

When calves first came home from market, we often had to train them to drink milk from a bucket. That involved putting your hands into the milk and then letting some of it dribble from your fingers onto its tongue to encourage it to suckle your fingers.

Once the calf was suckling strongly, you lowered your hand into the bucket of milk so that it sucked it through your fingers, before slowly and gently extricating them from its tongue and leaving it drinking. That is easier said than done.

Calves would stubbornly resisted that simple training programme and invariably flicked the bucket in the air with their head, drenching you with milk. Often as not, I would lose my temper and abandon the wayward pupil, in the hope that hunger was a better teacher.

Carmen on the other hand, with the patience of a woman, would quietly persevere until she had the calf drinking.

It's good to be retired.