The following post was written by Jill from Crooked Lake Farm. As a fellow farmer, Jill wishes to engage with other farmers as well as educate non-farmers on what farming is about and what happens on a farm. If you have any questions you wish to ask, please feel free to leave Jill a comment or engage with her on Twitter and Facebook!
Why do we vaccinate our cows?
In one simple statement, we vaccinate our cattle to prevent disease.
But let me elaborate…
Many diseases that cattle can contract can have the potential to wipe out an entire herd if left undiagnosed. Not only that, but treating diseases are costly and time consuming.
With most cattle diseases, animals sometimes show symptoms. Sometimes when the symptoms appear, it may be too late and a few will get very sick and die before you even know there is a serious problem.
Many times a veterinarian is needed to be called to the farm to help get an exact diagnosis of what the producer is dealing with in their cattle herd. The veterinarian will conduct a post mortem on a recently dead animal and submit pathology tests to a lab. It usually takes a few days to get lab results back. In the meantime, more animals could be lost if the disease is really severe. All of this comes at a cost to the producer.
Once the lab results are in, the veterinarian will recommend a course of medication. The number of animals dosed depends what the producer is dealing with. Doctoring sick animals takes time and some medications to treat sick animals are not cheap.
As the old saying goes: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Stay tuned next week as I will discuss what diseases we vaccinate our cattle for!
We’d love to hear your comments. Please remember to be respectful of other people when commenting.
That’s great information to know!
This is a great post! It’s great to know that you take such good care of your cows. 🙂
Thanks for another great post Jill. I am sure as a farmer keeping your animals healthy as you can is very important.
Thank you to Jill for all her great farming posts. Really good to hear things explained firsthand. Admit that I actually do believe in vaccinations, human and animal too. After all, we get our cat and dog vaccinated so they don’t get sick.
Thanks, Janie! Jill does a great job in her posts!