A large crowd of farmers and industry stakeholders gathered on Seamus Dolan's dairy farm in Killynaff, Co. Cavan, on Tuesday, January 20, for the Animal Health Ireland (AHI) CalfCare event.

Despite the wet and windy day, there was plenty of shelter provided by way of the many sheds on the farm, including a newly-built calf-rearing shed.

There are just under 300 cows set to calve on the farm this spring, and the herd was recently transitioned to a fully spring calving herd.

To cater for the large volumes of calves arriving on the farm in the spring, a custom-built calf shed was completed in January 2024 with a capacity for approximately 180 calves.

There are a range of impressive features in the calf shed including:

Automatic calf feeder;
Mechanical ventilation;
Yorkshire boarding;
Canopy to rear of calf bedded areas;
Dry bedded area and wet area for feeding;
Drainage flow channel.

Seamus said that the addition of the new calf shed has been "a game changer for managing the calves on the farm".

The automatic feeder has the capacity to rear 140 calves with space in the shed for an additional approximately 40 calves also.

Ray Foy from Teemore Engineering said that the custom-fitted VentTube installed in the calf shed has the capacity to "transform any shed".

"Otherwise you've a problem because the air is moving too fast," he said.

He added that the system changes the air in the shed five-six times per hour.

The gallery below includes some of the features in the calf shed:

AHI's Natascha Meunier explained the importance of having good ventilation but no direct draughts on calves, as well as the need for deep, dry bedding allowing calves to nest in straw without lying in any dampness.

Assistant professor in herd health at University College Dublin (UCD), Catherine McAloon discussed abomasal bloat and summer scour in calves.

She said: "For every four farms referred to us [UCD] with summer scour, only about one of them actually has summer scour."

She explained that the other cases are often issues such as coccidiosis, worms, high molybdenum or copper issues, which "look exactly like it but they're managed differently".

Niall Kilrane from the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation and Teagasc's Fergal Maguire discussed the Commercial Beef Value (CBV) and dairy-beef nutrition.

Kilrane encouraged farmers buying dairy-beef calves to use the CBV values as a tool and said that the CBV can help to move dairy calf-to-beef businesses in a more profitable direction.

Maguire said that dairy-beef weanlings should have a target average daily liveweight gain of 0.6kg/day over their first winter.

He advised farmers to use their silage test results to make decisions when determining the level of concentrates to feed weanlings.