# Milk from Walmart for bottle calf?



## masseyandy (Jan 26, 2013)

Milk is $.98 a gallon at walmart and MR is $2 a gallon. Could I just use the store bought milk?


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## Bearfootfarm (Jul 13, 2006)

If that's all you can get it's fine.
It would be best to get whole, raw milk from a local source but that's often not practical.


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## topside1 (Sep 23, 2005)

In my opinion only I believed that top quality milk replacer contains many more valuable nutrients, vitamins, fats, and of course 20% protein.
At 98 cents per gallon, sounds hard to beat. I just hope you have extra storage space for all those jugs. One jug a day per calf...Topside


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

Do it. Replacer can't touch it for the money. You can't crowd the real thing anyway. Now jersey milk would grow one better than the holstein milk in those jugs, and it would be better not cooked to death, but you have to drop some real money on any replacer that will come close in digestibility. It's almost like cow milk was designed for baby cows to drink or something. If you want to really make them grow, buy store milk and add enough replacer to it to get the fat up a little. Stay away from 2% skim. 

Get it while it lasts, as soon as enough dairy farmers look at their finances and shoot their cows or themselves or both (happening with alarming frequency) the markets will right themselves and milk will be 5 bucks a gallon. The only people still in business at that point will be the corporations that are immune to any negative impacts from a single suicide, and they will simply set their prices at a profitable level when it is advantageous to do so.


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

We have two extra fridges set up right now. Use coupons, shop around. Gosh people look at you funny pushing three carts of milk out of the grocery store. We just look at them and say it's calling for snow and our bread truck just pulled out better try a different store if they need bread and milk. Knew a guy that had connections and got expired milk and fed dairy steers. His steers looked good. He kept them on milk untill the fall. Once they got bigger they just drank it out of a trough.


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## masseyandy (Jan 26, 2013)

Thanks everyone


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## topside1 (Sep 23, 2005)

And your decision is?


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## masseyandy (Jan 26, 2013)

I am going to try it and see how it goes as long as prices hold.


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## HeavyHauler (Dec 21, 2017)

Not something I would be giving my calves (if I had some), but do what you must I guess.


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## Oregon1986 (Apr 25, 2017)

Not a good idea but ok if in a pinch. Calf milk replacer has nutrients the calf needs. Store bought milk has been so processed and most the "good" stuff has been taken out


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## GTX63 (Dec 13, 2016)

Some would argue that Walmart/store milk is little more than milk in name only.


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## HeavyHauler (Dec 21, 2017)

Oregon1986 said:


> Not a good idea but ok if in a pinch. Calf milk replacer has nutrients the calf needs. Store bought milk has been so processed and most the "good" stuff has been taken out


Agreed.

It's not good for humans or calves.

I don't give it to my family. There's little to no nutrition left in it.


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## wr (Aug 10, 2003)

HeavyHauler said:


> Agreed.
> 
> It's not good for humans or calves.
> 
> I don't give it to my family. There's little to no nutrition left in it.


Are you milking cows or goats?


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## HeavyHauler (Dec 21, 2017)

wr said:


> Are you milking cows or goats?


Currently, neither.

Doesn't change anything. Why would you use pasteurized milk to feed a calf, they start drinking it fresh. Why change that and give them a lower nutritional profile?

Cheaper I guess, but I would prefer not to skimp out on anything I grow and raise. I like eating more nutritional and better tasting food.


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## Whoo (Apr 28, 2016)

Ironic, in my neck of the woods Walmart is the reason milk isn't worth anything and small dairies are going out of business. Not sure how I feel about feeding the babies milk from the SUPERMARKET!


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

Storebought milk tastes like garbage, yes, but nutritionally, it still has protein, fat and carbohydrates. It is pasteurized, so it doesn't have beneficial bacteria, or harmful ones. Feeding unpasteurized commercial milk would be a good way to get Johnes, and a host of other nasty diseases. Pasteurization changes nothing significant in the nutritional profile. The issue is that it is holstein milk. So a little lower fat. I have raised calves on jersey milk after taking the cream off, they actually seemed to scour less. Jersey milk has a little too much fat for calves, because after all, jerseys are GMOs.


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## wr (Aug 10, 2003)

HeavyHauler said:


> Currently, neither.
> 
> Doesn't change anything. Why would you use pasteurized milk to feed a calf, they start drinking it fresh. Why change that and give them a lower nutritional profile?
> 
> Cheaper I guess, but I would prefer not to skimp out on anything I grow and raise. I like eating more nutritional and better tasting food.


I would not feed pasteurized milk to a calf and have never really been fond of milk replacer. I currently keep a little Jersey cow that's invaluable. She's slightly out of sync with the rest of the herd but will take on an orphan in a heartbeat. Before I had her, I kept a few goats and any orphans were bottle fed goat's milk.

If I needed milk to get me through, I called my Hutterite neighbors who'd sell me a 5 gallon pail from their dairy barns but only because they trusted me to keep my word that it was for bovine consumption.


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

Feeding unpasteurized milk from a dairy barn is sketchy. Look up the statistics for dairy cattle with Johnes in the US. We have always had a practice of canning milk when there was a surplus. Cheaper than buying replacer, can be used to replace fresh milk when their were a lot of mouths to feed. Freeing up fresh milk for human consumption. Never had a problem whatsoever, and canning is essentially pasteurizing. There is little significant nutritional loss. There is beneficial bacteria loss, but that is easy to manage in a multitude of ways. I would be far more concerned with Johnes than any perceived threat from babies starving to death from pasteurization induced calorie evaporation, which defies all known laws of physics.


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## wr (Aug 10, 2003)

barnbilder said:


> Feeding unpasteurized milk from a dairy barn is sketchy. Look up the statistics for dairy cattle with Johnes in the US. We have always had a practice of canning milk when there was a surplus. Cheaper than buying replacer, can be used to replace fresh milk when their were a lot of mouths to feed. Freeing up fresh milk for human consumption. Never had a problem whatsoever, and canning is essentially pasteurizing. There is little significant nutritional loss. There is beneficial bacteria loss, but that is easy to manage in a multitude of ways. I would be far more concerned with Johnes than any perceived threat from babies starving to death from pasteurization induced calorie evaporation, which defies all known laws of physics.


I'm fully aware of the existence of Johnes and know the standards which my neighbors maintain and while I would agree that just picking any dairy is unwise, I'm pretty comfortable with my emergency solution.


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## muleskinner2 (Oct 7, 2007)

If milk replacer is $2.00 per gallon, buy the time you weaned the calf you would have more invested than you could sell the calf for.

When I was twelve years old I milked four cows every morning before I got on the school bus. We drank that milk, cooked with it, made butter from it, and fed it to the pigs and chickens. And none of us ever got sick from it. Oh yeah, before we drank it we strained it through a cotton dish towel.

Muleskinner2


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