The Moos Room™

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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG3 is here: Bradley, Emily, and myself. Today we are talking about mud.
Emily: Yes, let's get dirty.
Joe: Yes. It's on everyone's mind because the weather is absolutely awful and there's mud everywhere, continues to snow and rain, and everything in between. What does Bradley do to handle mud up in Morris? Whether or not he does the right things, we'll find that out. I don't know if there is a right answer when it comes to mud.
Bradley: No, not at all.
Joe: Before we get into that, we haven't heard an update from Bradley about his home project and how many cattle are there now, how big are they. What's going on, Brad?
Bradley: Well, they are big. There's only four still. There's always questions about getting more but sheep are always on the mine too, so we may venture back into that. I have bred some of the heifers so we're still waiting on preg check. Otherwise, everybody's doing well and I haven't gotten too out of control yet, which is usually the case.
Emily: Yet being the operative for it here.
Bradley: That's correct.
Emily: You haven't preg checked those heifers yet, Brad? I thought you did it at like 12 days.
Bradley: I wish I could do it at the day after I bred them but it's not possible quite yet. We haven't figured that one out.
Joe: We will make sure to have an update on how good Brad's AI skills were as soon as we get a preg check.
Emily: We'll get all the numbers and everything too. We'll benchmark you, Brad, on an episode. That will be good.
Bradley: My four heifers.
Joe: We'll be benchmarking Brad's four head. All right. We can do that. Today, mud, it's just everyone's worst nightmare. It really is. It's just the fact of life though in spring in Minnesota doesn't matter if you got dairy, beef, honestly doesn't matter if you have horses, cheap goats. It's all a mess.
Emily: I was just talking to my dad on the phone yesterday and my dad is a retired farmer but he taps the maple trees in our pastures now. He has said how even just all the mud in the pastures has made it really difficult to get around. He was complaining about mud, my brother's complaining about mud. He's got beef cattle there. Yes, it happens every year and every year it's the same thing where we're like, "This sucks, and what do we do about it?" It's important that we talk about it and manage it because it can lead to a lot of problems. I know when I was in central Minnesota, I did a lot of talking about hoof rot and that kind of thing around this time of year.
Joe: The big question though is, how does the mud really affect the cat ranch, and how that goes?
Emily: Well, the kitties do get a little muddy, muddy paws, but I think I've said before too my dad has converted one of the old tie stalls, put up some plywood sides, and put a little heating lamp in there. When it's muddy and gross and rainy and cold, the cats have a little hot box they can go into just like you would put a coffin.
Joe: Well, that's good. Well, today I guess the big question is, what do we do about the mud? How do we organize everything to avoid it as much as we can? At some point, there's just going to be mud and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. Beef side, dairy side doesn't matter. There's a lot of consequences to mud. That's kind of the things that we need to talk about first, I guess. Brad, what do you see on the dairy? When it gets really muddy, what do you start to see that's just a pain in your butt?
Bradley: Well, it's definitely mud season right now. It's in this late March, early April where all the snow was melted and it was raining and snowing and it was snowing this morning again on April 7th. It's the worst time that we don't like it. It's like, what do we do with cows, things like that? I think the biggest thing we see is changes in milk quality. Somatic cell counts maybe go up a little bit it. Depends on the year how a little bit more cases of clinical mastitis if we're not keeping things clean and teeth cleaned in the parlor. That's probably the biggest thing I worry about is mastitis, overall comfort, just dirty cows. It's a tough one. It's trying to figure out what to do all of the time and where to go with animals is not fun. It's a new decision every single day.
Joe: There's not a whole lot of papers for us to read that talk about mud and dairy cattle production and the effect on that. The thing that's easiest to measure when it comes to mud is dry matter intake. When we look at dry matter intakes on the dairy side, and a ton of studies have been done about dry matter intake on the feedlot side when we talk beef, we see huge decreases in dry matter intake as mud goes up. One of the numbers that I have in my head is that dry matter intakes drop by 2.5% for every inch of mud. That's a dairy study that tells us that.
That's a huge deal. That's a lot of dry matter intake. Then if you look at that the same thing on the beef side, we look at if we've got mud that's hawk deep, we're losing 28% of our dry matter intake. That's massive. That's gains, that's production, that's health. There's all sorts of things associated with that. Mud, more than it just being an inconvenience for us trying to get the tractors around trying to walk through it, everything, it's a money issue, a straight production issue.

Emily: As we're thinking about mud and the ground is soft and Joe mentioned tractors, we know tractors can get stuck, but also, I just like to remind people this time of year when it's really wet. If you are driving tractors or other equipment on roadways, look out for soft shoulders. Be really aware of that. I know most farmers do try to keep to the shoulder just for ease of other traffic passing and all of that, but it's my advice that if you have your slow-moving vehicle emblem attached and your lights flashing, be in the lane. Really try to avoid those shoulders. We see a lot of rollovers that happen from that type of situation. That's just a little safety message here as we're talking about mud.
Bradley: That's the worst part, Emily, is mud and vehicles because we bury tractors out here and TMR wagons it happens every year. There's no year that I haven't been out here that we haven't and so that's frustrating for workers. Now you get another tractor out there and it just people are at tense and tension and so I think we have to remain calm even though it happens. We know that mud is a factor and if we bury a tractor or TMR wagon, it's all part of the business and I know it's frustrating. It's frustrating for us and we just have to remember to keep calm and it'll all work out. Three weeks from now or a month from now, things are going to be totally different, but we have to deal with those issues in the beginning.
Emily: Keeping that awareness and making sure that you're checking those field conditions. My little farm safety slogan that I also think is applicable here is slow down, think twice, be safe. Slow down, think twice before you bring that tractor into the field. Is it going to make it through or is it going to get stuck? I get that in farming we are always up against the clock it seems like, but if you're going to bury a tractor and spend half the day pulling it out, you haven't saved yourself any time either.
Bradley: When we bury tractors and TMR wagons, that's a signal for us that we probably need to move animal groups or move animals somewhere else and try and find a drier spot because it's just going to continue. If you bury it once, you're going to do it again. That's how we manage that burying tractors is it's time to move the cows to not such a sloppy place and try to think about what to do next.
Joe: That can be super frustrating because one of the ways that I see tractors get buried the most obviously with the TMR wagon. Also, when you're trying to bed, when we get muddy and wet and we know we need to bed our cattle more, we need to keep them dry to keep them healthy. Your burying tractors trying to get bedding out to the cows, so that can be super frustrating because you know you need to do it. It just makes everything just a little harder when we know farmers don't have extra time in the day to begin with. We all know it's frustrating. Keep what Emily said in mind, that's a huge piece. Slow down, think twice, be safe. The other factor of mud that I don't think we don't talk about it as much as I think we could is that we see other effects rather than just straight production effects when it comes to the cows. Often when we have mud, cows tend to slug feed, so not only do we have depressed dry matter intake, but we're taking fewer meals and they're larger meals. Sometimes, that leads to acidosis. Acidosis is the first domino in anything you could think of that could go wrong with a cow. Pneumonia, displaced abomasums, lameness, mastitis, everything else.
When we get acidosis, when we have that rumen upset, it just is a domino effect for everything else to go wrong. Mud, in addition to straight production issues, we're talking about health issues as well, so it's a big deal. I think we've hammered that home. We probably don't have to keep harping on that right now. The big thing we need to do is tell everyone some ideas for what to do about it. That's the big thing. Brad, what do you guys do specifically going into spring knowing you're going to have mud? What do you do to make sure you can handle it?
Bradley: There's a couple things based on what's happening. Moving animals to different groups or to different paddocks or places where the water drains a little bit better and it doesn't create low spots. We've already moved some groups of our springing heifers and dry cows. We've moved them from one pasture to another that dries out a little bit better albeit it's still a little muddy out there and slick but it's not ankle deep or hock deep. Moving groups of cows and that's a frustrating part too. It takes time and effort, but we have to keep these animals clean and dry and not in the mud.
Moving animals is one thing, trying to figure out where to go with them, and we have a few spots. Sometimes we run out of spots because of weather. The next thing that I think about is dry bedding. Make sure if the animals are in a place where we can bed them as having clean dry bedding, especially with our milking cows. Our milking cows are outdoors. Having dry straw we probably bed a lot more than normal during this time of year but keeping them dry certainly helps with cow comfort and mastitis because we've already seen it. I look at our somatic cell count and it's jumped a little bit in the last week because of snow melt and mud and rain.
We try to work with our employees to help reiterate that cow cleanliness and the parlor and getting the teats clean and you might have to spend a little bit more time to make sure that the teats are clean before you put the milker on because it's inevitable. We do see a little bit of increase in somatic cell count. It's running 225,000 or so before and we've jumped maybe now to-- it was 275, so it's gone up a little bit. We have to keep that at bay and try and make sure that things are dry and that bedding and milking procedure is all part of that.
Joe: There's a lot of things to do, a lot of things to keep in mind, and it is, like I said, a domino effect from all this mud preparing the areas these animals are going to be in can just save you a lot of headaches. Making sure slopes are correct so you don't get low spots like Bradley was talking about. Putting drainage in if you have to, the absolute gold standard is concrete, and having concrete so the cows have some footing and it doesn't allow things to pile up, it's easy to clean. That's the absolute gold standard.
Now not everyone can pour concrete and that's expensive, so I get that, but what I like to think about is the triangle of what cows need: they have feed, water, and where they lay down. That triangle if you're going to pour concrete, I'm not saying you have to cover your entire dry lot in concrete but I'm saying that it would be super beneficial to have concrete that covers that triangle of traffic between the feed, the water, and the bedding. Now again, like I said, concrete's super expensive. Brad, do you guys have concrete everywhere or do you do something else?
Bradley: No we do something else concrete's expensive we have some spots where we can put animals that are on concrete but definitely not enough. I wish we had more.
Joe: Farmers are super resourceful and there's a lot of farmers that are really good at pouring concrete and they can cut the cost of that and do it themselves. There's a lot of other things you can do that aren't concrete. I mean road base and making paths that are pretty much the same thing as a gravel road to make sure you have some compact ground that drains well, sloped correctly, and gives those cows from footing, especially around your feeder, around the water, and then in a path or at least something so they can get to the bedded pack and stay dry that way. Lots of other things to do. I think it's really important to think about those high-traffic areas because there's a lot, especially for Brad, you got the alleyway coming back to the parlor. What do you guys do with that? Do you guys firm that up some way?
Bradley: We try and firm it up. We scrape it if it gets too deep, clean some of the mud out. We have some dried, crushed concrete that we get gravel putting it in there to help firm things up. We put sawdust in there, if we get a load of sawdust. Sawdust dries things out really fast. I know it's expensive and can be expensive for just dumping in lanes but it helps on a temporary basis to help just dry up some of that water and hold it, so that helps too.
One thing that we also think about based on our cow movements is make sure you're not putting them on slopes. We have a river here on our research center so we try not to move the animals where it's sloppy in the spring so we have runoff going into the river. There's some environmental things to think about too that we maybe throw to the backside but we think about those. We don't want to put animals on sloppy areas in the spring where we know water and rain and all of that can run off. That's important to us as well.
Emily: I think an important point that you made there, Bradley, was that with mud, there's not always a one size fits all approach. It's dependent on a lot of things, not just your budget, but the setup of your farm, the way your animals are moved, the areas that they're in, how much slope you have. I grew up in a fairly flat area of the state and now I'm in a very, very hilly area of the state where the methods that you use are a lot different. I know growing up on our farm usually every two or three years, we would get some fresh gravel laid down in our farm yard so we had just one big--
The driveway would come in and loop around and that would take you to the house, the barn, the sheds, everything. We would lay extra gravel on that to help with some of the mud. Then in the pasture, it would be a matter of closing off some areas that were just too muddy. We would have cows get stuck in the mud. I'm sure we've all been there where we've gotten stuck in the mud and lost a boot or two. I've walked up to the farmhouse with muddy socks and no boots on. It is just a matter of managing all those little things the way you can.
Like you said, Brad, if you happen to get sawdust, that could be a quick fix when you just need some absorption done. Any of those things can work. Yes, concrete is the best but if you have a neighbor that you could split some class 5 with or something, there are other options as well that are a little more budget-friendly and may work for your operation just based on, again, the way it's laid out the size, et cetera.
Joe: Brad, the other thing that I was thinking about and I think this is something that Troy Salzer and I have talked about before is if you know you've got an outwintering lot or you know you've got a spot you're going to calve in the spring, planting that with some annual cover crop just try to keep everything held together, is that something you guys have tried it all up there?
Bradley: We have done that before. Sometimes we'll out winter on some sorghum stand grass and that helps firm up the ground in the springtime. We've done a few other things rye. We try not to go out on the rye too early but it does help firm up the ground a little bit. Even cornstalks. If there's a little area, we don't have to make everything black in the fall. We can leave a little spot where you leave the cornstalks and that's a great outwintering area and it really firms up the ground and doesn't create all this mud. Now it will if you get enough moisture but it's not as bad as just having bare ground. Cornstalks are a wonderful place to have animals in the springtime and keep the ground firm.
Joe: That's something that I'd love to explore a little more. A lot of this takes planning, that's the big thing. When we're talking about what to do about mud in the spring, a lot of things we're talking about you got to be doing in the summer, in the fall, getting ready to be prepared for mud in the spring. I think that's the other thing that I would think about doing is if right now in the spring, you know where it's muddy.
Print out a little overhead picture or wherever of your farm or your corral or whatever and mark where it's muddy so you know when you're going to go deal with that in the summer or the fall and try to fix it. You know where the primary areas were, you know what was the worst spot that you need to fix. That's something that's going to take some planning and you got to find the time at some point, which is always a challenge. There's a lot of looking ahead to try to deal with the mud and to figure this out.
Bradley: It happens every year. We know that it happens. Sometimes it surprises me that it catches us off guard and we're like, "What, now what do we do?" It's like, "Well, no, it just happens every year." I agree, some planning is always helpful to try and figure out where to go with cows and it becomes better as the year goes on, but day-to-day decisions sometimes.
Joe: If you're a beef farmer and you're talking about this cow-calf, again, like Brad said, it comes every year. We know the time that's the worst. It's really worth considering moving your calving window to a different time where there's less mud. It can really benefit you. Now, moving up, getting earlier, it can be tough, but it can be done. It's going to take a while and you're going to have to do it over a series of years and you're going to have to work with your veterinarian to figure out the protocols that you need to get your cows going earlier, but it can be done.
Then there's always the option of later, which sometimes isn't as desirable because we have lighter calves at weaning and all those kind of things, but sometimes that's a better option. Little lighter calves, but more of them alive is better than little heavier calves or calves that struggle because they were born in the mud and have scours issues and all these other things. Lots to think about, but any last thoughts, Emily, Brad?
Bradley: Biggest one is, don't get frustrated. We all get frustrated this time and the brighter days are ahead. I think about that. A month from now, cows will probably be on pasture and cows will be clean and much better. It changes really quick, so don't get frustrated.
Emily: Yes, I think that that's a really, really good point, Brad. I would just add to that. When we talk about a lot on here, just go back to your basics. Remember your management basics. Do what you can to keep things clean and dry. Do what you can to keep your cows clean and dry. Do the kneel test on that bedded pack and those areas every so often. Just again, don't get frustrated. Do your best. Everybody is struggling with mud right now. There isn't always a perfect solution for every situation. I think it's just a matter of looking at those basics, doing the things that you can, and if you need to make a temporary change such as moving cattle or creating a sacrifice area, then make those and keep note of that for next year so you know what worked and what didn't.
Joe: Good deal. Good luck everyone with the mud and we're all dealing with it. We're all in the same boat. Call your neighbor and complain. They've got plenty to complain about to you as well. Watch out for each other. Why don't you wrap us up for them?
Emily: All right. If you have questions, comments, scathing rebuttals, or pictures of you covered in mud without boots on, you can email those to The Moos Room at T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu. That's themoosroom@umn.edu. You can also find us on our website extension.umn.edu, on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety. If you have any questions you would like us to talk about on air, you can call and leave us a voicemail, 612-624-3610.
Bradley: Bye.
Emily: Bye.
Joe: Bye.
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