Dead cow. 45 day old calf is a stud. now what?

Luckily I have never been in this situation. I am sure I have if I would think hard enough, but never with a potential big ticket newly orphaned.

Any suggestions on what to do with him to hopefully keep him going down the path? Anybody ever successfully weaned at 45 days?

Brad Hook marketed the world's highest valued bucket calf through his P2P sale 2 or 3 years ago.  He would be a person to contact for advice.

yuppiecowboy said:

Luckily I have never been in this situation. I am sure I have if I would think hard enough, but never with a potential big ticket newly orphaned.

Any suggestions on what to do with him to hopefully keep him going down the path? Anybody ever successfully weaned at 45 days?

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            We have had good luck getting a jersey cow to put the calf on till ready to wean.

I agree with BN 32. Find a fresh jersey cow.

The steer we are showing this year was a bucket calf, the trick is to feed him multiple times a day (we fed 4 bottles a day) and as soon as you can find a cow that will take the calf, we have weaned at 90 days and been fine, but not quite that early.

Last yr we weaned 30 hd at 60 days and got along great. We might do the whole herd that way this year. Cows breed back better. Our calves were all eating creep well when we weaned and we left them on a creep feeder for 30 days before we went to a bunk ration.

you can wean at 45 days, the calf might go down hill a little bit but its certainly biologically possible.  plenty of research to back this up

We had a calf that lost its momma at around 45 days.  I don't know if the bottle will work.  We tried and we couldn't get ours to take it.  We just left the guy in the pasture with the rest of the cows and he robbed and then also attacked the creep feeder.  We ended up selling him as a bull.  He then went on to win reserve in his division at our state fair.  I'm not saying this will happen every time but he got along well!