Animal Science Department
Title
Managing To Alleviate Calf Scours: The Sandhills Calving System
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
December 2003
Diarrhea remains an important cause of illness and death of young beef calves. The
economic effects of calf scours can be profound. Some beef cattle herds annually experience
death rates of 5 to 10 percent or greater, sometimes with up to 100 percent of calves being ill.
Economic costs to the disease include loss of performance, mortality, and the expense of
medication and labor to treat sick calves. In addition, herd owners and their employees often
become disheartened after investing long hours to treat scouring calves during an already
exhausting calving season.
Management practices can have a profound effect on the health of cattle. Our
objective was to prevent neonatal calf diarrhea in ranch systems typical of the Nebraska
Sandhills by designing and testing calving systems that would prevent calves from making
effective contacts with scours pathogens. An effective contact is an exposure to pathogens of
a dose-load or duration sufficient to cause disease. Effective contacts can be prevented by
physical separating animals, reducing the level of exposure (e.g. through the use of sanitation
or dilution over space), or minimizing contact time. These actions have been successfully
applied in calf hutch systems to control neonatal diseases in dairy calves. The management
actions we defined as the Sandhills Calving System (Figure 1) were designed to prevent
effective contacts by:
1) Segregating calves by age to prevent direct and indirect transmission of pathogens from
older to younger calves
2) Routinely moving pregnant cows to new calving pastures to minimize pathogen doseload
and contact time
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Published for Proceedings, The Range Beef Cow Symposium XVIII December 9, 10, and 11, 2003, Mitchell, Nebraska.