Unfortunately for him, he has also been gifted with my stubbornness and my short fuse.

Our similarities are why we get along so well most of the time, but on the occasions we don’t, it can be tense (well, as tense as it can be when I’m trying to stop myself laughing at just how cross a six-year-old can get with his dad).

Last week, our standoff involved my young lad’s breakfast cereal bowl. We have a simple rule in our house — if you eat from it, you wash it. Simple.

Not so simple in the mind of a six-year-old though.

“Why can’t I just leave it on the table and eat out of it again tomorrow?” he asked. “I always finish my Weetabix so there’s no need to clean it.”

I could see the innocent logic in his thought process so I said: “That’s fine. Leave it on the table after breakfast and use the same bowl every morning from now on.”

After three days, he was not a happy bunny.

“There’s stuff stuck to the inside of the bowl and my breakfast tastes disgusting,” he proclaimed, as if all this was somehow my fault. Our dog had off-flavour Weetabix for his breakfast, but the learning curve was only getting steeper for my hungry son.

As he set about washing his bowl, with three days of Weetabix stuck to the inside, he cried tears of frustration and anger. “It’s impossible to get off,” he wailed.

At this point, I gave him a helping hand and we had a good discussion about how, if he just gave his bowl a rinse under the tap every day, his breakfast would always taste nice and the clean-up afterwards would only take a few seconds.

This little nugget of advice is not only free, but also transferable to every farmyard during this busy spring period.

Over the last week or two, I’ve been on lots of farms where the ‘you use it, you clean it’ rule should most definitely be enforced. Starting with the colostrum bucket.

I’ve seen a lot of lovely, hard-plastic buckets being used to collect and store colostrum. At the start of the calving season, they were immaculate. By now, three weeks in, some of them make a grim sight. You can see the custard residue on the top and even on the outside of the bucket from a distance.

Rubbing your finger along it raises off an inch of yellow/orange gunk.

This stuff is chockablock with bacteria, just waiting to get into the newborn calf’s stomach and set about making that calf very sick in a few days.

A calf with a stomach full of bad bacteria is not only sick, but much more likely to succumb to pneumonia or even the dreaded crypto.

Colostrum should only be stored in a bucket like this for 12 hours. Either freeze it or discard it. Before any more is put in, give the bucket a wash with hot water and a brush. Such a simple task could be the difference between a spring of calf scour versus a spring of thriving, healthy calves.

The next, most obvious, bit of equipment is the calf feeder. Most automatic calf feeders are thankfully self-cleaning.

However, it’s worth paying particular attention to the teat. Every single calf in the pen sucks on this teat every day, so it’s well worth taking it off and cleaning and disinfecting it. This should be done at least once a day.

Having two teats for each station makes life very easy. One on the feeder, one being disinfected and change them daily. The area around the feeder should be swept clean daily, as this area is where every single calf walks, carrying any bugs back into the nice straw bed.

Tub feeders are a different kettle of fish and require a bit more effort to clean. Saying that, they should be washed after every use and disinfected regularly.

Not washing them, even after only one feed, allows a barely visible scum to build up, particularly within the teats themselves.

Once this starts to build, it holds on to bacteria and suddenly, your feeder is a reservoir for lots of nasty bugs.

I’ve seen some feeders in the last few days that would almost walk away from you, such is the level of cheesy scum on the inside of them, teeming with bacteria.

If there isn’t a decent tap and hose nearby, either pipe one to where you need it or bring your feeders to it. Your general calf health will benefit hugely as a result.

While we use water to clean our feeding equipment, we often tend to ignore the water we are asking our calves, and indeed our cows, to drink.

A lot of older calf sheds have drinking bowls at the back wall, in the centre of the straw bed.

Do me, your calves and yourselves a favour and take these out asap. They are invariably leaking and saturating the bed all around them.

They are a breeding ground for crypto in particular.

Unless you are cleaning them out daily, calves won’t drink much from them anyway and if you are cleaning them out, where’s the water going? Only on to the straw bed that you are trying to keep dry.

Water troughs belong at the very front of the calf pen, beside where you feed concentrate, and they need to be cleaned thoroughly every day.

Don’t forget the cows either. They need a huge supply of fresh water daily, but if this water is in a dirty, green trough, quarter full of a mix of algae and silage, they certainly won’t consume enough of it.

If you wouldn’t eat your Weetabix out of it, don’t expect your calves, or your cows, to drink out of it either.

​Eamon O’Connell is a vet with Summerhill Vet Clinic, Nenagh, Co Tipperary.