Labor
The UGA Dairy is a teaching dairy that utilizes student workers to fill several of their positions. Because the workers are students, several of them will only work a few shifts a week, leading to several inconsistencies when it comes to caring for the calves.
The most important inconsistency is the feeding times. Workers will begin feeding anywhere from 5 AM to 8 AM in the morning and 3:30 PM and 4:30 PM in the afternoon. This is not ideal for the calves, which do best with consistency.
Here you can see the feeding schedule and that no 1 person feeds more than 3 shifts per week. You can also see the scratched off names as workers changed their minds.
With having several different workers feeding, some things are forgotten while other tasks are done twice. In addition, workers are required to use their "judgement" in several situations, which is very different from person to person and can negatively impact the calves health (evidence from the current calf barn manager).
This is 1 of the boards located in the calf room that has calf information on it, but lacks protocols and specific instructions.
There is often a lack of training for the workers as evidenced by the fact that 1worker who has been at the dairy for 2 and a half years and did not know how to intubate a calf.
There is also no 1 full-time worker to take care of the calves. 2 part time workers are managing the calves, which is not optimal for their care. During any week, as many as 10 different workers will feed calves which is extremely inconsistent and breeds errors.
When entering information into the computer, different workers will code things in differently, again leading to inconsistencies. This is evidenced by the missing information for some animals as well as some of the functions for PCDart which are not used at all.
One of the books has protocols, but they are very basic and non-specific to treating symptoms.