This beginning dairy woman has questions about hay quality and twin calves:

Hi Beth,

Our Jersey cow, who just calved twins a week ago…. is a really picky eater. She’s grass fed almost entirely, except for some scoops of dairy rations she gets once a day (a total treat for her yet, at first, she wouldn’t eat it because it wasn’t the same as in the milk farm she came from). We bought hay for the winter last fall from three different fields (all were cut last fall….so none is dusty nor moldy…and I know for a fact that other cows eat that hay). The problem is that we just ran out of the batch she likes. We’ve put a mix of batch no. 2 with batch no. 3 in her feeder but……she’s barely touching it. We sprayed molasses on it….she licks the hay and digs for it (making a mess in the process)…but is still barely eating (it’s been 24 hrs of this). I’ve posted on some Facebook family cow page looking for advice to get a picky cow to eat…. and got all sorts of advice. Many are saying to give her grain a.s.a.p., others that’s she’s in ketosis (even though I specified that she’s been eating 1 ½ of square bales a day…until yesterday morning), others to travel across Canada to find her hay she would like (I’m barely exaggerating), others that she will starve herself to death if we don’t do something quickly, and finally others that say to wait….she’ll eat. Now, my husband and I are newbies….we’ve only had the cow since last June. We’ve been milking her and making milk products (except when we dried her up in November). We are members of the School of Traditional skills and have read your book. We have 9 acres of cleared field (with a great variety of plant species) where our cow can graze during the summer….we want to be 100% grass fed. Where we live, in New Brunswick Canada, more than two feet of snow covers our fields so grazing is out of the question right now…..an early spring would be nice.

Your comments and advice concerning this issue would be appreciated. We want the cow and the twins to be healthy……and specially to prevent her from getting ill.

Hi, Josie,
Congratulations on your twin calves; we’re sorry you’re having any troubles with her. And, yes, you get a lot of different opinions on social media, and nuances are very often lost.
Twins are a strain on a dairy cow for sure. One risk is hypocalcemia, as she depletes her own body for calcium to make milk for her calves. It’s a risk for any dairy cow, just a bigger risk with twins. You can give her prophylactic tubes of Ca, or CMPK (our choice) orally, just to start out with, but in the long term her Ca needs to be coming from her diet. Decent pasture has plenty of Ca, but while you have snow on the ground it has to come from her hay. Legume hay, like alfalfa hay, should be higher in Ca than all grass hay.
Regarding hay quality, age does affect that, but the conditions of its making matter even more. So your hay from last summer could still be dusty or moldy, even though it’s relatively fresh. If the grass was insufficiently dry when it was baled, it may have molded in the barn. How does is smell? Do you see anything like a little dusty cloud when you break the bales apart? These could be mold spores. One hates to think of having a barn full of hay that isn’t feed quality, but it happens.
Your cow needs plenty of protein and calories to make milk for twins. This is one of the instances where I can see a use for feeding concentrates (grain), because this mama has an unusual strain on her. Your dairy ration is probably at least 16% protein (that’s standard in the U.S.), and you can get higher protein if you search around a bit (I know a dairy that feeds 24%). If you measure your scoops by weight, you can figure out how many pounds of grain she is getting, and this will help you find a pattern that will let you feel confident she’s getting what she needs. Recommendations for how many pounds of feed a cow should get are calculated from her size and how much milk she is giving, and they do vary pretty widely; you’ll have to decide for yourself what is necessary.
She needs lots of energy, which should be coming mostly from her hay. Is it leafy, or maybe stemmy/twiggy? Does it appear to be mostly grass/legumes, or are there a lot of stemmy weeds? If it was cut in the fall, I’d like to assume it’s at least second cutting; if it’s first cutting, it is probably pretty lignous (full of dead stems). These are questions that may help you work out your cow’s objection to the hay you’re offering her. Of course, I’m hoping she’s gotten over it by now, but even if she’s eating it, you do want to ascertain something about the quality of the hay you’re offering her. Next summer you’ll be able to shop around a bit and make sure that what goes in the barn for the dairy cow is forage quality hay.
Two last things. First, winter and with twins isn’t the best time to transition a grain cow to forage; you want to begin that process on the best spring and summer pasture. You’ll want to watch her weight while you do it. Although we’ve transitioned a number of cows from grain and hay to all grass, they were young (usually on first or second lactation, or younger), and we don’t live in an extreme climate, so the winter pressure on them wasn’t as great as yours. You want to be confident that cows are grass animals, and nature outfitted them for digesting cellulose, at the same time that you know that modern dairy cows have been genetically shifted away from thriftiness and survivability toward grain tolerance and super high production. In the U.S. today, the average dairy cow gets only one or two lactations before she becomes a Big Mac – that’s how fast we destroy their health.
The second thing is about twins. Your chances of seeing milk fever go up considerably with twin calves. It’s no fun giving a jugular I.V. to a cow – not scary or difficult, but no fun – and if you don’t then solve the underlying problem of hypocalcemia, she’ll go down again. On our farm we like to leave calves on their mamas for several months, but if we get twins we’ll bottle feed them, starting at a gallon per day, and going up to one and a half or more. Left on mama, they might take multiple gallons per calf per day, and she’d still be trying to put milk in the bucket as well.
Not as good for them, but adequate, and much better for mama.
There are a thousand ways to skin a cat; I’m just sharing our experience. I hope it helps you, and I hope to hear how things come out.
God bless, and stay in touch!
Beth