The Moos Room™

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[cow mooing]
Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG3 is here, kind of in and out because Emily is here.
Emily: I'm here.
Joe: Bradley is driving. He's cutting in and out. We'll see how much we get to hear from Bradley. Hopefully, it's not very much.
Bradley: I'm here. I was doing great work for dairy farmers in southwest Minnesota today. I'm happy today.
Joe: Shout out to our local educator down there, Melissa Runk, who put everything together. Brad got to leave his little bubble in Morris and go somewhere else and talk dairy all day. I'm sure he is thrilled.
Emily: We're very happy for you, Bradley.
Joe: Yes, that's all we really are. Just continue to just live through Bradley's experiences. That's really what we do on the podcast.
Emily: Absolutely.
Bradley: I'm getting rid of my cows and heifers tomorrow, but I'm going to bring some more home. I'll probably have one less but more Jersey.
Joe: That sounds good. You couldn't even go probably 24 hours without animals at your place.
Bradley: Not at all. Not at all.
Emily: More progress at the Brad Heinz funny farm.
Joe: The funny farm. Exactly.
Emily: [chuckles] Joe, what's on the docket today?
Joe: Today, we are giving an update. We started a case study, Brad and I did, a while ago, about a heifer grower. To catch up on everything so that everyone's on the same page, it would be good for you to go back and listen to that so that you know where we left off. That episode is Episode 144, Heifer Grower Case Study Number 1. You can listen to Brad and I walk through the background, and what the problem was at this farm, and the recommendations we were planning to make.
Emily: If we didn't, like myself, listen to Episode 144 and aren't going to go back and listen to it before we listen to this episode, what are the essentials we need to know? What did you and Bradley cover last time to set up this case study?
Joe: Most of what we found was on the management side. We walked through the whole system to figure out what could be possibly going wrong and where were calves breaking and having issues. Most of what we found was calves were breaking between five and nine weeks and they were getting sick and then dying in that timeframe, which was right around weaning which was being done at six weeks. Our main recommendations were to feed more milk and potentially a different kind of milk because they're feeding a 20/20. We were hoping to see a 24/20 or a 26/20, preferably a 26/20, and then move the weaning age later if we could.
Those were the main things we were looking at with this heifer grower and we think would make the biggest difference.
Emily: Where are we today now? I think we have some answers to some questions.
Joe: Some of the answers that we have, what we were waiting on was diagnostic lab reports to see if what we had historically found at this farm was the same that we're finding now. It turns out that it is. We were worried about Salmonella Dublin and that is what we found with the diagnostic reports was that salmonella was the diagnosis for why these calves died. I say that "maybe" with a little bit of air quotes because really why these calves died, my opinion was due to management issues that we needed to fix. Salmonella Dublin is the culprit or the end result of probably some management things that needed to be fixed.
Where we're at now is that we went to this farm and we said, "Hey, here's what we recommend happens." That starts the conversation of what's actually going to happen because you can always offer, here's what would be the gold standard, and then you have to make it work within the logistics of that farm, the economics of that farm, all the different things. Space, we talked about being a huge difficulty with most of these farms. That's where we are now.
We've confirmed it is Salmonella Dublin that's probably causing our issue at the end, but it's probably, based on our review of the system, a management issue that we need to fix.
Now it's how do we get as close to the gold standard as possible without breaking the bank or running short on labor. All of those things.
Bradley: Let us remind everybody what Salmonella Dublin does, and what's it doing to these calves, and when are they catching it, and what age? I think that might help with how we move forward with this just in case we forgot.
Joe: Salmonella Dublin is a bad bug. It does cause pretty severe disease. Like we talked about last week, it looks a little different than a normal respiratory bug. To me, you see as more of a systemic illness rather than it being isolated to the lungs. You traditionally don't see a ton of coughing. You just see calves that look like garbage. They have a high fever. Usually, we see some sort of diarrhea along with that. It spreads everywhere. It goes to pretty much every organ, all the lymph nodes, everything. It's a bad one.
When you open these animals up, a lot of times they do have liver failure and they appear like highlighter yellow. All of their fat appears highlighter yellow which is just a sign of liver failure or icterus. That's what we're dealing with.
The age that we see it, it's usually around any stressful events for that calf because it's usually there and around potentially a problem, but doesn't rear its head until we have some immune suppression in some way. That's what we're seeing with this farm in my opinion, is that weaning at six weeks and dropping to half milk at five weeks and then having calves start to get sick at five weeks and die anywhere between five weeks and nine weeks, that perfectly lines up with weaning being the stressor.
The goal is to figure out how to remove that stress, get the calves better to begin with before they get there, and then hopefully not have a problem at all.
Emily: Joe, I think you did a nice job explaining that when you were talking earlier about how, yes, the calves died of Salmonella Dublin but there were probably other reasons that that was what took them down. To me, it sounds like maybe some of these management errors were the cause and then the effect of that was the Salmonella Dublin. Sounds like your recommendation is really looking at those management practices and figuring out what can be changed there to see if that helps with the situation.
Joe: That's where we're at because unfortunately Salmonella Dublin usually becomes fairly endemic in a population. Once it's there, it's there. Your focus has to be how do I prevent the stress that kicks that off into having an issue. There's a vaccine as well. We can get into that discussion later. All in all, the solution is management. It's not through a needle.
Our recommendation which we talked about last week was to feed the calves more milk and a different kind of milk. The minimum that we want to see is a gallon twice a day or three quartz three times a day. We talked about how much we hate two-quart bottles. That's a big discussion. I hate two-quart bottles.
When we come to the heifer grower, we have to have that in the light of okay, how are we going to make this economically feasible for them? Where are we willing to compromise to get as close as we can and still do the best by the calves?
One of the ways that we talked through with the heifer grower was what kind of milk are they going to feed. We recommended 26/20 but 24/20 was very available and easy for them to acquire someone they were already working with. That one, we were willing to say, you know what? If we're going to feed a higher volume, which they were, let's go ahead and go with the 24/20. That's an easy compromise to make, especially if we're going to commit to feeding more volume. That's one of the compromises we've made.
Is it absolutely ideal? According to the research we have, no, but it's a lot closer than we were before. That's what we're trying to focus on is these big improvements and then we'll come back, monitor and see if it is working or not because that's a big piece of this as well.
Bradley: It's always tough because you talk of heifer grower, obviously costs come to mind. It's like, "Oh, well if we feed more and feed a different replacer, the costs are going to go up." I understand that. However, we've probably lost more money in calves dying or other health problems, future milk production than what it would be if we just had a little bit more milk in the beginning and maybe reduced our death loss or our scours or respiratory problems. Sometimes, yes, it's nice to think about the economics at that point in time, but there's always future consequences that may cost you more than just feeding a little bit extra at that time.
Joe: The trickiest part with a heifer grower in my opinion from the dairy side of things is that there's basically a two-year lag before you see the effect of what's going on on the calve side. You don't see that animal enter the milking population and see the results of how well your heifer growing operation did until then.
If calves aren't dying at a super high rate but they potentially aren't growing very fast and they're getting sick, that can be harder to keep track of and then, all of a sudden, you have a problem two years down the road and you're stuck with that same grower or you got to fix things and then you see potentially, another lag before it's fixed because now you've got two years' worth of animals that were raised that way if you're not keeping up on it on a fairly regular basis, and that's going to hurt production for the dairy.
From a heifer grower standpoint, you want to be thinking quite a ways down the road so that when you deliver a product, which is what you're doing at the end of the growing phase is delivering a product back to the dairy, that product better be good or your reputation goes downhill. Pretty tough balance like Brad was saying with economics of trying to make money as the grower but deliver a product that's going to work really, really well for the dairy at the end of the day.
One of the other things we talked about was weaning age, and I think that was really critical. Brad and I talked a lot about what we would want it to be if we got our choice. That varies widely across the industry, but the later the better really becomes the answer in a lot of ways. Balancing it economically, I think somewhere between eight and nine weeks is a good spot to start.
When we came to the dairy and said we want a minimum of seven weeks but eight weeks would be better, nine weeks would be even better than that, the heifer grower just couldn't do that because of space. The way they manage these calves is they want them to wean and then stay in the barn for an extra week so they can be watched after weaning. That allows them to be flexible like we talked with weighing grain to make sure that those calves are eating a certain amount of grain before they are weaned and it gives them a little flex in there.
They were pretty stuck on wanting it to be seven weeks. That's up for debate. That's just what we landed on because it works for their labor in their space but we're going to try seven weeks at weaning, so half milk at six weeks and then weaning at seven weeks instead of half milk at five and weaning at six. Then they'll stay in the barn for another week where they can be watched and then they'll go into small groups. Again, a little bit of a compromise, but space is space. That's the way it works.
Bradley: I think that seven weeks is a good compromise because industry standard is eight to nine weeks, but if you're going to feed more milk to these calves, I think it's probably a good compromise for the heifer grower and I think they'll see improvements, less disease, better weight gain and maybe in the future they will bump it up to eight or nine weeks. We'll wait and see.
Emily: I think the important thing here is that they were willing to compromise and at least being able to change something maybe not right up to the amount that was recommended, but still working towards that. I think that we need to not have all or nothing thinking in that, oh, I can't do the 26/20 so I'm just not going to do anything. I can't do a 26/20 but I can do the 24/20. I can bump up to seven weeks. I think those things are important to think about. You need to move towards a goal no matter how small the step is.
Another thing I wanted to get into that Joe already alluded to a little bit is vaccinations. We know there is a disease, we know there is a vaccine for it, we're very excited and we want to use it. As we know from the many, many, many times you have stood on your soapbox and talked about vaccines, it isn't always the tool that you need. I'm just wondering if you can dive a little deeper into that discussion and possibly when a vaccine would be useful.
Joe: This one is difficult because Salmonella Dublin has very mixed evidence on whether or not the vaccine is effective and it's really difficult to know if you also change management issues at the same time. If I start the vaccine and I change management at the same time, how would I know which one is working? You would have to eventually drop the vaccine and see if something changes. Now in this case they were already vaccinating for Salmonella Dublin and they were still having horrible issues. Now like a lot of vaccines, we're not trying to prevent infection. We're trying to reduce clinical signs of the disease when it does happen.
In a lot of cases we're seeing once these animals get sick, they're dead. There doesn't seem to be any in-between in this case. I think there is a little bit of an issue in how they were giving the vaccines just because they were stacking stress a little bit. Some of it was geared towards handling and when you give the vaccines because they were already being handled anyway, but they were picking up these calves between two and three, four days old, and then as soon as they arrived after the trailer ride to a new environment with calves they didn't know, they were dropping them off, putting them in a new environment and on the way, vaccinating them.
To me, we're stacking the stress of movement, new environment, everything of that stress with vaccination. During that time period it's not really the appropriate time to be vaccinating calves because of the way we know their immune system works. We try to avoid that specific time period that they were vaccinating anyway.
I don't want to bore anybody with the details of slogging through the logistics of how is this going to work and the labor and trying to balance when you're handling calves and deciding how to prioritize where you're going to stress them because you're going to stress them at some point. We reworked things with keeping all that in mind to try and delay when we vaccinate, so the calves have a little less stress, and they have time to get in their new pen and get up on milk and get up on feed before we stress them out with a vaccine.
Then we changed some other things again to try to not stack stress with weaning especially. We moved the horning procedures and those things earlier and some other vaccines around just to get that away from the other stressful events in that capacity. I think that's where I'll leave it because there was a lot of back and forth and compromise and labor logistics considerations when this was all said and done.
There were some really good things that heifer grower was doing and I think we covered some of that last week. I think it's really important if there's any young veterinarians out there thinking about doing this kind of thing, going to your clients with this, if all you do is come in and tell them all the things they're doing wrong, that's a bad idea. Every operation's doing a lot of things right or else they wouldn't be there. They wouldn't be in business still.
You got to find those things as well. It's really important to point that out. This heifer grower specifically was doing an excellent job of cleaning and disinfecting, immaculate, which is crazy that they were still having problems with something like Salmonella Dublin, but they were because of the other management issues, but they were doing an excellent job cleaning, disinfecting. We reiterated that while we were meeting, went over what they were using, how they were doing it, their all-in, all-out and how awesome that was, and how hard it was to get other people to do it that way. I think it's really good to point out they're doing that super well.
They were also communicating super well with the dairies where they're sourcing calves. I think I might have said this wrong on our last episode about this. This heifer grower was actually taking blood and doing total proteins on all the animals so they could report back to the dairies how their classroom program was going. Excellent idea, time investment, but super value-added service that you can provide to your dairy as a heifer grower. They're going to continue to do that because that's really, really great.
You got to point out the good. You can't just focus on the things that need to change because they were doing a lot of things very, very well.
Emily: Those things that they're doing good, that's what you can really use to help support the other changes. It's more building up on those things like Joe was saying, and we just need to make sure we're using all of our tools in our toolbox like we always say here. I think that that's an important point.
Bradley: They also keep very good records on their calves. They really have low health problems, low scours, low respiratory problems. There's just a little hiccup going on but overall, this heifer grower raises nice calves. I think that's one thing that shows as well, they are a great heifer grower and they raise great calves with low disease. It's just once in a while some farms- and we all have these farms. It happens in Morris too. Like whoa, we got something going on. We need to figure this out and make it better and improve.
Emily: Joe, what is next for this heifer raiser? I feel like we've had some recommendations made, some changes have been made, some improvements have been seen, but I imagine there's still some more to come.
Joe: Absolutely. Anytime I make recommendations like this, I really want to know what happens because that tells you whether or not you were justified, especially with this place like Bradley was saying, they have really great records. We're going to be able to see the change with data, with not just a subjective everything seems better. We should see differences, whether it's average daily gain or treatment, everything. We're going to see a lot of changes, and it's going to be cool, is what I'm trying to say.
I'm kind of nerding out when I visit areas like this or heifer growers like this because if I make a recommendation and I can see the change, that just is awesome. It makes me feel so good that I actually went to school for a long time and it meant something, and I'm able to help this producer be better and it's a meaningful change.
Of course, when we have numbers like that, we can also use it to justify recommendations in the future. We can put more economic data to these decisions. It just is a great way to justify my schooling and then all the other things that we do in extension when we can see that our recommendation resulted in a very tangible change.
Emily: I'm glad you got your money's worth, Joe [chuckles]. I would say this is a little bit of a sidebar and going to sound kind of cheesy, but that's really what extension is about, is this idea of applied research of we have some ideas. Let's see what works. Let's use them. Let's keep track of the data so we have something to look back on. It's so cool that that's what we get to do as part of our jobs is I think of just these little research projects with farms. It's super cool.
Joe: The changes that we made or that we're trying to make now, they're going to take a while to take effect and to really get an answer because we have to allow them to work for a while, and allow calves to grow and work through the system before we can get that data back and see if it's making a difference.
That's where we're at. We're going to keep track of this farm, not going to forget about it, but part three might be ways in coming because we got to let things develop so that we can see if these recommendations are making a difference.
Emily: Don't be waiting on the edge of your seat for part three, but we will follow up on this. We will circle back. We're going to wrap it there. If you have questions, comments, or scathing rebuttals about today's episode, you can email those to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Joe: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Emily: You can also call and leave us a voicemail for a chance to be featured on a future episode of The Moos Room. That number is 612-624-3610. You can also find us on Twitter @UMNmoosroom. For more about Extension, you can visit our website, extension.umn.edu. Bye.
Joe: Bye.
Bradley: Bye-Bye.
[music]
Emily: Yes, I'm not sure what I should be asking next.
Bradley: Hey, hello--
Emily: I was-- [crosstalk]
[laughter]
[cow moos]
[00:23:00] [END OF AUDIO]

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