In order to optimize calf welfare and health it is important to know the behavior of cattle in free ranging conditions. When the cow is about to give birth to a calf she will leave the heard about 12 hours before. It is then rather obvious that isolating the cow about calving time in a single pen is imitating the cows? natural behavior. To save space and minimize building cost it?s common that the farmers build calving pens for four of five cows especially at larger farms.

In order to investigate if the KRAV-regulations have any effects on the health and welfare of calves, KRAV-affiliated farms were compared to conventional farms with respect to calf management and outcome. The dairy calf has had a low economical impact during history. Even today the value of the calf is low and a lot of calves have a poor health status. The calf breeding is built on tradition and on the fact, that cheap antibiotics have made it possible to ignore, the recommendations about good hygiene in the calf?s environment.

This paper aims to, through a literature review, examine how to best design and adapt calf huts to meet the calf's physiological requirements and reduce the infection pressure for enteric and respiratory diseases. It illuminates how the calf relates to different temperatures and climate, which temperature control mechanisms it uses and its ability to perform these regulations, as well as providing a summary of the past decades´ research on the calf huts housing system. These two theory chapters, along with a concluding discussion, provide a better understanding of how to, especially in temperate climates, design the most suitable calf hut, which cater to the calf's both thermal comfort and physical health. The literature suggests that the calf's own temperature control works well to counteract the temperature outside the desired range, and that one of the most important factors rather is ventilation of a calf hut, which reduces moisture and pathogens. The conclusion of this paper is mainly that there is not an obvious way to place and construct a calf hutch and that most design principles contribute to both positive and negative effects simultaneously.

Calf health is of importance both from a financial perspective and from an animal welfare point of view. Housing system and environment are factors affecting the calves? health. The objective of this project was to make a review of literature on Calf health and housing and to perform an observational study on Calf health at Nötcenter Viken, Research Dairy Farm, Lantmännen Sweden that changed calf housing system; from a traditional indoor system (Group IN) to outdoor hutches (Group OUT). It was only the housing system that was changed; the routines and feed were the same in both systems.

Good feeding practices are a basic aspect of good Calf health. During the calf's first few months the calf is fed with purchased milk replacer or raw milk straight from the cow. On all farms, it will be a surplus of milk that may not be delivered to the dairy for various reasons. Milk that may not be supplied to the dairy includes colostrum and milk with unnormal properties, including milk from cows suffering from mastitis. This study investigated the possibility of improving the milk by pasteurization in order to secure its use as feed for calves and thereby obtain an improved Calf health.

Swedish agriculture stands in front of big changes the whole time. As a milking producer you have to adapt and develop the company to these changes and find the best solution. This potential is easy to find if you compare your company with other similar companies. Labour cost is the biggest cost in milking production after the cost for food. Today it is rather easy to measure how many hours per cow different system of cow houses needs, but we do not know so much about how many hours it takes to breed a calf. To learn more about the labour time with the calves during the first time after the calf was born, I made time studies on five different farms with calf hutches, automatic milk system, large calf boxes, and smaller calf boxes with teat buckets.

Livestock of pastoralists provide meat, milk, blood, dung and are useful for transportation purposes. In semi-arid and arid areas with very low precipitation the herder must often walk far distances to feed the livestock. This affects the animals? production, especially of milk. Previous studies have investigated how to improve milk production in terms of milking strategies in cattle.

The purpose of this literature review was to investigate how the rearing systems influence the behaviour of dairy calves. Calves are social animals that form groups within the herd where play and social licking between calves are important social activities. Suckling is a complex behaviour and essential for the calf's survival. In the modern rearing systems the calf is usually separated from its mother soon after birth. Calves are then kept in individual pens, group pens or, more rarely, with a foster cow.

SammanfattningSyftet med studien var att undersöka om det fanns någon skillnad i muskelaktivitet ivadmuskulaturen när olika eller inget vadskydd användes vid vadpress. Jämförelsegjordes mellan vadskydd (A), stickat av ett modifierat polyolefingarn och ett tillstickningen identiskt och utseende näst intill identiskt vadskydd (B) av polyamid,samt utan vadskydd.Testgruppen bestod av 13 män från militärhögskolan i Halmstad. Testpersonernagenomförde vadpress i smithmaskin* på en belastning av 50% av 1RM*.Muskelaktiviteten mättes med hjälp av sEMG* och tre mätningar per persongenomfördes. Det första utan vadskydd, andra med vadskydd A och det tredje medvadskydd B. Resultaten visade ingen signifikant skillnad i muskelaktivitet mellan användandet avvadskydd A och vadskydd B eller mellan vadskydd A och utan vadskydd.Mätmetoden sEMG är känslig och kan ha gett missvisande resultat. Fler studierbehöver göras dels angående skillnad i muskelaktivitet och dels för att testavadskyddens eventuella andra egenskaper, positiva eller negativa.

A cattle producer that buys calves that are younger than six months to the herd should have a starter stable to prevent infection spreading in the herd. According to the Swedish animal welfare regulation there has to be a starter stable if more than 50 calves that are younger than four months are bought in yearly to the herd. The aim of the study was to improve the knowledge about bovine buildings and management of starter stables to obtain optimal weight gain and health of the calves. The hypothesis 1) The younger the calves are when purchased, the higher the calf mortality and 2) Purchasing calves from a high number of herds involves a higher risk of Calf health problems and calf mortality were tested in the study. The objective of the study was to give advices by way of presenting ideal solutions of how a starter stable should be constructed and managed. A field study was done during June to September 2008 to collect knowledge and experience from existing starter stables.

Since long, Sweden has had exceptionally low calf mortality compared to most other countries. The tradition has been to keep calves in individual pens. With increasing number of cows per herd there is now a larger interest in more efficient and economical group systems for housing calves. However it has been noticed that bigger herds have more health problems and higher calf mortality than smaller herds. The early signs of disease are harder to detect when the animals are not fed manually.

Healthy calves are the foundation in order to run a profitable diary production. Being healthy as calf results in a better start in life and good growth is expected to follow. Within dairy production it becomes more common to rear calves in groups and feed them by an automatic milk feeder. The milk feeder enables for the calves in greater extent to ingest milk or milk replacer several times per day and they are also able to perform natural behaviors in greater extent. Group rearing of calves puts higher demands on the animal keepers to localize individual calves in the group pen, showing signs of illness.

Several factors affect the heifer´s growth and development, the newborn calf´s feeding of co-lostrum during its first hours of life is one important factor. The colostrum contains higher amount of immunoglobulins and insulin growth factors compared to matured milk. A high intake of immunoglobulins from colostrum results in a high blood concentration of immuno-globulins until the age of eight months. This leads to a lower incidence of diseases that can affect the growth and development negatively. Diarrhea is the most common disease in calves younger than 30 days.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of strategy for grouping calves into group pens with automatic milk-feeding systems on the calves' health and growth rate. The usefulness of changes in feeding behavior recorded by the computerized milk-feeder during periods of illness to identify calves with clinical diease was also studied. In the first experiment, 64 calves were moved in and out of group pens in a continuous way, while 46 calves were transferred into group pens until the the pen was considered "full". The calves in the latter groups were then held together until weaning. It was found that calves in the fixed groups grew approximately 100 g / day more compared to the calves in the dynamic groups. Signs of clinical respiratory disease were less frequent in this group, while the incidence of diarrhoea was slightly higher. In the second experiment health parameters, milk consumption and feeding behaviour was recorded daily for 46 calves.

The calf extrator?s function has been studied, through measuring traction and how this varies in different situations, in comparison with corresponding manual traction situations. This was done against the background that excessive force at assisted calvings at dystocia can mean life threatening damages on the calf such as grave acidosis, vertebral fractures, femur fractures and rib fractures. The calf extractor has earlier been measured to pull with greater force than the established maximum force of ?two strong men?.