Meet Our Bottle Calf, Clare

Meet one of our new bottle babies, Clare. When I found her, Clare was a bit of an orphan. She was nursing off three different cows and wandering around, not knowing who mom was. This resulted in her not being bonded to a particular cow.

Even though Dad and I try to calf check roughly every three hours during calving season to monitor who is going into labor and ensure every calf gets up and nurses right away, we missed Clare’s birth. Normally, if you miss a cow going into labor, it isn’t a huge deal, since you usually see the newborn and mother either bonding, nursing, or engaging in some other act that ties them together as mother and child. Not with Clare—she was born, was quick to get up, and nursed off of someone (whether that was her mother or another cow willing to lend her some milk). After a few hours of trying to figure out who to pair her up with and surveying which cows had signs of a recent birth (blood on their tail, afterbirth, etc.), I had no idea who her biological mother was.

So I had a choice: I could have chosen the cow who I thought was her mom, paired them up in a little pen to bond, or make Clare a bottle calf. I chose the bottle calf route due to her insane size—Clare is around 90 lbs; our average calf weight is 60–70 lbs. She’s a moose of a woman, meaning she is going to take a lot of milk to keep her healthy. The cow she was nursing off of most is a small-framed Wagyu who doesn’t produce much milk. Clare would be a huge drag on that cow, requiring her to produce more milk than she could healthily sustain—or resulting in Clare not being supplied with enough milk, which normally means that:

A. Clare would be underfed and not develop correctly, or

B. Clare would turn to “stealing” milk from other calves and nursing off their mothers.

I bet Clare would take route B and sneak milk from other mothers, which is also not healthy for the herd, as those calves would not receive the milk they need since Clare is taking a share.

Since Clare wasn’t fully bonded to any one cow and no cow was fully bonded to her, making her into a bottle calf made the most sense to me, and it was super easy. After about 10 minutes of showing her a bottle has milk in it, she was sold and now drinks a half gallon in about 4 minutes, haha. She is such a love—a big, playful beauty who is always looking forward to a meal and some scratches behind the ears. We love having her and her fellow bottle calf, Kevin, in the barn and are thrilled to help them grow big and strong.