What nutrients do calves need?

Calves rely on their mother's milk for the first few months before slowly turning to a diet of what their dams eat over the next few months until weaning. Newborn calves can't have anything else for the few few weeks except milk because their stomachs are not suited for a diet of roughages as soon as they are born. It takes three months for a calf's rumen to develop to be fully functional.

A bottle-baby can be fed hay, grain and even eat grass along with being fed milk from a bottle or bucket. Bottle-calves are fed milk-replacer formula until they are weaned at around 3 or 4 months of age. Calf-starter is often accompanied to such calves as those raised in dairy farms. Dairy calves are housed in separate stalls, conventionally as a means to reduce the spread of disease among the calves and to make it easier to monitor milk consumption per calf.