The Moos Room™

[music]
Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. We are a little worried. Emily's supposed to be here. We know she was on vacation recently. We were excited to hear about figure skating and everything that she got to see in Canada, and she's not here. Apparently, we're back to maybe a true crime podcast. Brad hasn't heard from her. I haven't heard from her. We're not sure.
Brad: We haven't heard from her in two weeks probably and so we don't know where Emily is.
Joe: Yes, we'll find out. We'll keep you updated. We've got a text out to her, a call out to her. Maybe she'll show up while we're in the middle of recording. That would be the best option. We're going to move ahead. We got to get something on tape here. We recently completed most of a case study on a beef farm looking at BVD. Now we decided, let's do one on the dairy side just to walk through some of the same things and starting with a visit and get this all in a series for you on what's going on.
Brad, you never have problems that need to be looked into at your place, right?
Brad: No, never. We're doing everything A-okay. [laughs] Actually, which is not true. We work hard at trying to keep things clean and we always seem to have a few problems. The weather lately has not been the best, but yesterday, it was 80 degrees here, and today it's rainy and 40, so that's just asking for disasters to happen for new calves going outside, you name it.
We got one calf that's really-- I don't know what's going on. It's two weeks old and it just doesn't have a sucking reflex. It just doesn't want to drink. We've been tubing it every day to keep nutrition in it, and it's fine, but it just doesn't want to suck off a nipple. We're going to try and put it on a bucket or something. We're trying. We're spending a lot of time and effort with one little small jersey calf.
Joe: Of course, it's a jersey calf. That makes a lot more sense.
Brad: Exactly. [laughs]
Joe: I was trying to picture a Holstein in my mind and it wasn't making sense, so.
Brad: No, it wasn't. It's not a Holstein. It's gaining weight but--
Joe: Unfortunately, some of my diagnosis involves just that it's a jersey. [laughs]
Brad: Anyways, that's our problem of the week.
Joe: Problem of the week, the Jersey calf that just won't drink. All right, well let's get into this. This is a heifer grower operation that asked for some help not too long ago. Just to give you some background on what's going on, this heifer-growing operation gets in calves that are between two and five days old. When they get them, they get them from several different dairies.
We've got multiple different dairies coming into this grower system. Reportedly, what's been happening is that somewhere between five and nine weeks old, these calves are becoming ill and dying. That's about as much information as I got when we first visited this farm. We're going to walk through what's going on and next steps and where to go from here.
This is a little bit of a different one because when I hear calves dying from what they're calling scours, I immediately think that we're talking in the first month. That's similar probably to what you see, Brad. If you have a scours issue, it's probably pretty early, that first three weeks especially.
Brad: Yes, first three weeks is when it really ravages here definitely.
Joe: Immediately calves dying at five to nine weeks old, that puts me in a different mindset from maybe what we're looking for. That's where we start. We go in and we're saying, okay, the ages, we confirm everything that we've heard. That's the big thing. I like to start even before we get straight to the problem in getting just a rundown on everything on the farm because that allows me to see the bigger picture, everything connected together.
It also allows me to take care of knowing enough that when I do make a recommendation, I'm not putting my foot in my mouth when it comes to logistics, labor, other things going on on the farm. That's where we start. We ask questions, we figure out where we're going and what the rest of the farm looks like. Gives us a lot of information into, are we looking for a treatment or are we looking to change management practices to solve a problem and be more on the preventative medicine side rather than going in and trying to fix things with either a vaccine or some antibiotic or other treatment.
First thing I start with with [unintelligible 00:04:54] is nutrition. What are they eating? On a heifer grower situation, it's a little difficult because we can't truly control the most important thing, which is colostrum. That's frustrating. I don't know if you guys have ever done some custom raising Brad or anything, but it's super frustrating when you can't control that front end.
Brad: Colostrum is probably the number one key, and it's hard to control on, on anybody's farm, let alone and we're monitoring serum total proteins on our calves and sometimes it's like, oh man, what in the world? We've gone through a stretch of four or five calves where we don't have good passive transfer and it's like, oh, well now what do we do and how do we go figure it out? That's a tough one. Whether it's a heifer grower or your own dairy, [chuckles] it's a challenge
Joe: On a heifer grower, I think you got a little advantage over, let's say a dairy beef farm buying wet calves because most of the time, guys are going to take really, really good care of their heifers and make sure because they know they're coming back and they need them in the future, so they put some extra effort into it. Now that bull calf that hits the ground, sometimes that can be a different story and there's either cutting corners or some compromises that are made, and some of those are okay for sure.
We have to make some decisions like that and prioritize certain things. If I was a dairyman, I'd prioritize my heifers too, but in this situation, it's heifer calves and we can't really control colostrum. Now, they're getting the calves young, so that's really cool.
If we were worried about colostrum, can clearly tell which calves came from which farm. We can take blood and check serum total proteins to make sure that that's something that's going well at the home farm. That can be a value-added service as a heifer grower, if you want to look at it that way to say, hey, I'm going to do that because it benefits me and I look better when you send me really healthy calves and I'm going to monitor it for you so that it really helps you as well.
If you're getting calves that young, you could check that and we like to see them at least 24 hours old and within seven days old. If you're getting on them two to five days old and you grab blood right away, you can really use that to check the colostrum program at each dairy that you're getting calves from. I started asking about nutrition and what happens when they get there.
Nutrition side, looking at these calves getting fed a little over two quarts of 20 20 milk replacer twice a day. Calves had starter available right away when they got there. They also had water available after milk. They feed in a bottle and then try to transition to pales or buckets as quickly as possible. The calves are weaned at six weeks of age, and to do that, they cut the volume in half the week leading up to weaning.
Then they do weigh starter and the calves are required to eat two pounds of starter for three days in a row before they're completely weaned. There's some good and bad when we talk nutrition. I hone in on what are we feeding and how much. We've talked before, Brad, you've had done some studies, you've allowed calves to eat whatever they want, [laughs] and as much as they want and we've looked at all sorts of things, but that's what stands out to me right away, 2 quarts of 20 20, twice per day. What are your thoughts on that number?
Brad: There's nothing wrong with a 20 20 milk replacer, that's pretty standard. There's a lot of dairies that still feed at 20 20. It's the standard in the industry now, but I just think that farms probably should be feeding a little bit more. The 2-quart bottles, in my opinion, are one of the worst things ever right now. I just think that animals need more nutrition than two quarts at one time.
A lot of that is based on research that we've done here. When we started, that's what we were feeding. As you increase it more and more and then you see ad-lib, you're like, wow, those are good calves. I don't think ad-lib is the way to go either that's a lot of money and a lot of milk, but 8 to 10 quarts a day is probably where we probably need to settle in at for regular, say Holstein sized calves, which I think this heifer grower is pretty much Holstein calves.
Joe: Yes, I should have mentioned that this is all Holsteins that we're talking about, which makes it easier for the grower. If you throw a dairy set of new Jerseys in with Holsteins, then it can really create some issues. It's easier to have all the same breed or at least the same stature.
Brad: They just do better up. As Wayne's calves today and we got a calf that's a month old and it weighs 210 pounds already. [laughs] That's a month old. We're feeding what would be 10 quarts a day, so these big calves are getting a lot of nutrition and they're growing well. It's nice to see good growing calves and I just think that the health of the calves, once you feed more milk is better.
We just probably have less incidents of scours, respiratory problems when we've been feeding more milk.
Joe: 20:20 milk replacer for me, I think is something that you can use that in the summer and for several different months. When it gets cold, I don't think 20:20 is adequate and volume is a huge piece of this. We definitely need more milk and I would argue at least a 24:20 milk replacer. That's what I would prefer, especially in heifer calves because we're talking about lifetime performance being affected by growth in this stage of life and we have studies that show that.
For me, if it was bull calves, we have more of an argument because in the gold standard ideal world, I would feed not a 20:20 milk replacer, but with bull calves, we have more economics to think about and different economics to think about. The heifer calves, I really want to see a 24:20. A 26:20 would be great. Whole milk would be the best but availability on that when you're a heifer grower is a huge challenge.
I agree, Brad, those 2-quart bottles, I wish they just didn't exist, to be honest. That would be so much better if they just didn't exist at all. If we had preferably a 4-quart bottle, that's what I would want. I do like that people switch to pales quickly if they can because that gives us some more flexibility on how much volume we feed. That's the nutrition stuff. We pointed out a couple of things that we saw. Of course, we talk about vaccines and health.
I like to see that because as we talked about before, to be honest, sometimes I think people are doing too much. It depends on what they've got in already and when they're doing it is a huge piece of that because adding and stacking stress on other things is a bad idea. On this, there wasn't a ton happening, which is good. On arrival, so whenever the calves get there, they were getting an autogenous Salmonella Dublin vaccine in Force 3.
Then the calves were getting weighed, which is a great idea, and then having some blood drawn and then we're getting after those calves again at two weeks, but that's with an intranasal vaccine once PMH. Three weeks, we're back to then giving another autogenous Salmonella Dublin vaccine and that was given Sub-Q, which is the first one. Dehorning at four to five weeks and then at five weeks, they were starting to feed half milk.
Six weeks they're weaned and then they remain in the barn until they're seven to eight weeks old. Then they move out to group pens. The group pens, when they move out are small, six to eight calves at a time, which is a good thing, real good thing. In this vaccine protocol, there's not a ton that stands out to me right away. The autogenous Salmonella Dublin vaccine, Dublin is a bad bug. It's a real bad bug.
It gets after calves and once it's around, it's usually just around. There's not really a way to eradicate it, especially if you've got it seated in your barn. You're just stuck dealing with it, unfortunately. Now we can talk about timing and placement of the vaccines and all that, but that's pretty boring. We'll get to that maybe later after we covered all the fun stuff. When we talk about calves too and then we know there's a scours problem, which we were told about this farm.
The other thing I want to know how is calf flow. How is that set up? How are the barns managed, especially pre-weaning? How do you empty them or do you empty them in between calves? Is there any disinfecting and cleaning going on? This farm, in my opinion, is doing a great job. They were treating-- The way they had their barn set up, they had four different areas or four different barns that were all attached to one milk room and they were managing it all in, all out.
They didn't put any calves into one of the four sections until it was empty and they had a chance to clean the whole barn and then put calves back in, which is great. That's awesome. All in, all out. That's something we stole from the pig guys and the poultry guys because they figured that out way before us on the biosecurity side of things and it works great. The other place we see this a lot is on auto feeder barns. I think that's how you manage yours, right Brad? It's all in, all out.
Brad: All in, all out. Even when we're in groups outside, it's all in, all out. We don't switch. It just helps keep the disease from spreading. Definitely.
Joe: Yes, and cleaning and sanitizing. That's a whole other topic and maybe something we should cover at some point.
Brad: That's a whole new podcast about cleaning and sanitizing. That's our big thing out here is man, we just got to keep everything clean and using bleach or chlorine, something that kills a lot of that stuff or tries to anyways, some disinfectants.
Joe: When we talk about scours on this podcast before, bugs are hardy. When you pressure wash, when you use bleach, all you're really doing is pushing them around. They stay alive. The big thing is cleaning, getting rid of most of the material, and starting over with a clean slate, making sure you have all that organic debris gone before you try to sanitize with chlorine dioxide or something like that.
That way, we know that disinfectant is going to work because it's not having to fight through organic material to do so. We're going to stop there on cleaning. This farm was doing an excellent job, so I'm not too worried about that. We've identified a few things right away that we think, okay, just by looking at all the management of this farm, we've identified a few things that I personally would change and I think Brett is on board with changing them as well.
We've done all that and found those things without actually looking at the period of time where those calves are dying and really digging into that yet. We need to do that. Of course, you got calves dying. I want necropsies.
I want to see the inside of those calves, I want them going to the diagnostic lab so we can get more information because I want to know what bug we're dealing with. Now on this farm, we have maybe an idea because of the fact they're vaccinating for Salmonella Dublin, I would hope they're doing that because they've had a problem in the past, not just doing it out of nowhere.
That is the case with this farm. We have a history of Salmonella Dublin being a problem and that's why they're vaccinating for it. How do you feel about that weaning age, Brad? I think you've experimented with a lot of different ages. What do you think?
Brad: It's interesting. I think probably about eight weeks is maybe optimum. At least eight weeks is optimum. A lot of farms now are pushing that to 9 or 10 weeks. I was on a big dairy in California a couple of weeks ago feeding 10,000 calves on milk and they're weaning at 10 weeks. I think people are pushing the weaning age back up again whereas one point we were trying to wean even less and less.
When I was an undergrad at the University of Minnesota and worked at the St. Paul Dairy, they were weaning calves at 28 days and that was the routine a long time ago, was 28-day weaning. I think those days are gone and we're pushing the weaning age back up. Here, where we're at, we're at nine weeks now and I think 9 to 10 weeks is probably optimum for our situation. I'd have to think hard to think about farms that are weaning at six weeks yet. It's not common anymore. Meaning age is a tough one.
Joe: It is a tough one. This is where economics come into it as well. If you're raising your own calves, it's much easier to see the return because you're going to feed more upfront and you know the cost of that, but you're also seeing the direct benefit later in life. When you're raising someone else's animals, you have a whole different economic game that you're trying to work out.
There's more compromise in that situation in my mind because I agree with you, Brad, if I had my absolute 100% option, it'd be somewhere in that eight to nine weeks. I think that's a good balance and some of it has to do with logistics too. Ideally, we do want the calves to stay in that pen for a week after weaning before we group them up to make sure that stress isn't stacked on the stress of joining a group and having a new environment, all those kind of things.
Logistics can play a big piece of this. If those calves have to leave because more are coming in, you got a different argument there, so I agree. Seven weeks is the bare minimum in my mind. I prefer is more. The reason being is that we need that rumen to be ready. That rumen needs to be ready when you take the milk away because now it's responsible for providing all the nutrients to this calf. If it's not ready, you'll know because you see those calves go backwards, which I'm sure you've seen Brad. Crashes after weaning can be bad.
Brad: They are. Weaning crashes are tough. It takes a while to recover after those. Months sometimes.
Joe: It's a tricky one because milky replacement is expensive.
Brad: Milk replacement is expensive, grain is expensive. I understand why it's purely economics a lot why you want to wean early and, yes, that's a tough one.
Joe: Now I think the one thing that this farm is doing really, really well is that they are weighing the grain and they were adjusting weaning ages a little bit if a calve wasn't getting to that two pounds a day. They were allowing that cap to stay on milk a little longer if they weren't eating enough green. I think that's a really good way to handle that as well. When we see the calves are becoming ill and dying in that five to nine week old period, it's pretty hard to take the weaning piece out of it.
When we see, okay, we're cutting milk in half at five weeks, and that's the start of when we're seeing calves get ill, so that's stress. Then we're weaning at six, and then the two to three weeks after is when calves are dying as well. This to me, is all centered around the stress of weaning. It's causing a break. There's all sorts of different explanations for tha. Stress is a piece of it, but I think one of the things we identified earlier, is really what I would consider the cause of Salmonella Dublin on this farm is not feeding enough milk.
Not feeding enough milk, and not having calves that have enough fat that can deal with the stress, and seeing a bug if they do get ill. When Bradley mentioned earlier, if you feed them more, they just seem to be healthier, you have less scours, that's real. That's 100% real.
Brad: One thing that I think about here is you said they want to feed them 2 pounds of starter per day at weaning. I think that's maybe not enough either, our calves here, it's five pounds. They have to be eating five pounds of starter, which they are. At nine weeks of age, they're eating 5 pounds of starter, so they can get weaned. 2 pounds is maybe not enough groceries for these calves to keep growing.
If you're feeding grain, grain is expensive, I get it, but I think we need to feed more grain than 2 pounds at weaning. I think it should be at least 5. We've been 5 here for 10 years.
Joe: I agree. We need consistent intake for at least five weeks of grain for that rumen to be ready to go. We're not going to get into the whole hay versus grain debate right now, but I know that if you're going to wean at an early age, you need at least five weeks of grain intake for your rumen to be even close to ready. That's minimum.
If you need five weeks of consistent intake, that to me is what sets your weaning age because that first week, they're probably not eating super consistently and they don't even know what it is, they're still discovering what the bucket is, and what that means and what's in there. I discount the first week. If we discount the first week, and then we need five weeks, our very bare minimum is already seven.
For me, that's where the absolute bare minimum comes in for seven weeks and then I prefer more so we know that rumen is ready. Eating more grain tells me that they're probably ready to take the calories from milk away and allow that rumen to get going and support that calf all by itself. Feeding calves more milk, we've identified that. Personally, I think they should be fed at least a 26:20 milk replacer but 24:20 would be acceptable depending on what's available with cost because again, we're balancing cost with this farm and this heifer grower.
Then like we talked about, increasing the weaning age to seven weeks. That's initially what I identify and I see and would be a recommendation of mine, at least seven weeks, preferably eight. Then we'll get into vaccine protocols and things like that as I sift through it a little more. I think about timing and all of that because that takes some time to figure out. It also takes a lot of discussion with the farm to make sure that it works for their labor and logistics and we're not adding too much labor in different spots depending on what they have going on.
That's where we need to start with this farm in my opinion, and that's where we're going to go back to them with these recommendations and see where we can go from there. We've also got calves at the diagnostic lab, and I will get some results from that to see if we're on the right page and we think that it's Salmonella Dublin back again. Those calves have a unique appearance and at this age, I think it fits.
Scouring calves, Salmonella Dublin, they don't usually breathe too hard unless they're breathing hard from acidosis associated with the scours, and they don't cough. It's really strange. In my experience, Salmonella Dublin calves stand there, they look miserable. They often have a little increased respiratory effort, but they don't cough, even though their lungs are probably affected. It's a strange disease. A bad one to find, but most of it is not solved with a needle, most of it is solved with management changes. Any other thoughts Bradley?
Brad: No, I think the big one is nutrition is of the utmost importance as well. Yes, we all get diseases on our farms, but I think just getting enough milk in those calves, enough grain, and keep things clean. You'll probably have not very many problems, I hope.
Joe: Yes, we'll come back and let you guys know how the discussions go on our recommendations for what we saw, and what's actually going to happen, which may be different from the ideal recommendations that we're bringing to the table because there's a lot of compromise, like I said, on the economic side because there's different drivers of that. On this farm, space is probably going to be a huge piece of that as well because everyone's short space.
Brad's short space. You're always short. You always have a few too many animals for what you have in the barn and space in the pasture, everything. Yes, we'll keep you updated. We'll also keep you updated on Emily. No word yet.
Brad: We haven't heard anything from her.
Joe: No, it's radio silence. We'll keep calling, we'll keep texting and we'll let you know what's going on. With that, we'll wrap it there. If you have comments, questions, any rebuttals to this episode. Please email themoosroom@umn.edu. That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu. Catch us on Twitter @umnmoosroom, and @umnfarmsafety. Catch Bradley on Instagram @umnwcrocdairy.
Visit our extension website extension.umn.edu. I can't think of anything else that we need to plug. There's probably more and I'm forgetting something, but that's where we're going to wrap it. Thank you for listening. Catch you guys next week. Bye.
Brad: Bye.

1