Since buying the Wennemars ECF System a year ago, my experience has been extremely positive. A real time saver, easy to clean and saves space too, thanks to the Swing-Over System. The words spoken by my mother in law say it all: ‘We should have done this much earlier!
Hello I am Olga van der Horst, together with Rob ten Tije and our 2 sons we live in beautiful Ekehaar which is just under the smoke of Assen. We milk about 185 cows at this location, I start the calves until they are about 6 weeks old and then they go to the young stock location where Rob’s parents live. My parents-in-law look after the rearing and when the heifers are pregnant they come back to us to calve here.
before we started using the ECF Calf Drinking System, we fed calves from buckets. Here, we had a lot of problems with tripe drinkers, who drank too fast. This caused them to become sluggish and lag behind. It also took a long time to teach the calves to drink from a bucket.
We wanted another system where the calves drank calmly from a teat in a more natural way and the system is easy to use. The price-quality ratio was also something we took into account because we feed milk to the calves at two locations. After repeatedly looking around and talking to colleagues, we ended up at Wennemars.
We had to get used to the system, but the calves did well . They needed a small hand in the right direction and the rest goes by itself, as it is built into the DNA after all this way of drinking. Where I used to prepare small portions of milk and feed per two or four calves, I can now prepare all the milk at once, fill the feeders with milk and walk around and keep a close eye on them.
In short:
As I write this, this is my fine view: Healthy smooth calves, this makes me happy!
