There was a time when feeding milk replacers supplemented with antibiotics was considered a “blanket” insurance policy to protect calves from disease. But that practice has changed considerably. Industry data suggests that 20 years ago, roughly 20-40% of all calf milk replacer contained antibiotics. Today, it’s less than 5%.

What if you could give your calves a feed additive that improved their health, helped them gain more weight in the first weeks of life, and didn’t add any appreciable cost to your input budget?

Working at Strauss Feeds is less about being male or female, and more about being a qualified individual who can perform a job well, ultimately delivering the best products and services to the customer.

At Strauss Feeds, calf milk replacer has been a mainstay of our business for more than 50 years. But we are truly infant animal health specialists, and also manufacture lamb and kid milk replacers.

The recent publication of new national dairy calf nutrition standards has prompted us at Strauss Feeds to do some updating of our own.

Feeding pasteurized waste milk to preweaned calves can make sense economically, and many dairies and calf raisers do it very well. But managing a pasteurizing system is definitely not a “no-brainer.”

If there were a bovine equivalent to an “A-list” celebrity, it would be today’s dairy heifer calf.

In a matter of just a few years, beef-on-dairy crossbreeding has taken the U.S. cattle industry by storm. Many calf barns that used to be consistently loaded with black-and-white Holstein calves now have mostly black-hided residents.

Fall is a busy time of the year for dairies and calf operations, and it’s also a time we need to be extra-vigilant about a life-threatening health condition for calves: bloat.

Acidification of milk and milk replacer is a practice that has been around for a long time, with ebbs and flows of popularity. It involves adding an organic acid to lower the pH of the liquid ration to manage the growth of detrimental bacteria.