The Moos Room™

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[cow mooing]
Brad Heins: Welcome to The Moos Room. Brad Heins here. Actually, by myself today. Just wanted to do a quick podcast myself and give you an idea of new thing that we just started doing here at our dairy in Morris. It's exciting. It's actually on-farm pregnancy testing. We don't have the veterinarian on today to maybe criticize or give his insight, but maybe we will in the future. I really wanted to talk about pregnancy testing and really where that's going in the future.
What really got me started on this was we've been milk pregnancy testing with DHIA in our herd here, checking some cows, maybe 45 days in milk or really doing it before we start drying off cows to see if we can find any cows that lost pregnancy before we dry them off. We've been doing some milk pregnancies checking for maybe about three years now. For us, it makes sense. It's very quick when we can do 200 cows with our DHI test and get the results back within a couple of days instead of having the veterinarian out and doing a lot of preg checking.
In February, I saw an article in Dairy Herd Management. It was about two dairies that were doing some on-farm pregnancy testing. These are larger farms, over 1,000 cows. They were doing some blood testing with an on-farm pregnancy test. I'm like, "Wow. I need to try that out, see what it is, see if we can do it," so I ordered some kits to see what it is. Basically, these are blood tests. I got two different kinds. One's a cow-side test. You take a blood sample and you can read it in about 20 minutes.
You can tell if the cow is pregnant or no, open. The first test that I got was a single test. These come in single packets. It's really like a pregnancy test. Some of us are used to either COVID test. You take a COVID test that you got at the drug store, and you can do an easy test. This was relatively easy. How does it all work? These on-farm pregnancy tests are looking for pregnancy-associated glycoproteins or PAGs. Some people may have heard PAGs before in blood, and you can maybe test these animals, cows, or heifers 28 days post-breeding through about 70 or later. We did some later ones.
It really, for us, didn't matter what time it was. Really, what we had to do is you take a blood sample and that can be challenging, taking a blood sample if you're not used to it from a cow or heifer. You have to take it when the animal's restrained because it can be difficult. We take the blood from the tail vein and we use purple-top tubes. These are EDTA tubes. Basically, it doesn't coagulate. If you use a purple-top tube, you get faster results because the blood doesn't coagulate.
If you use a traditional red-top tube, sometimes you maybe have seen your veterinarian use those, those you have to centrifuge and use the serum, so it's a little bit more difficult. If you're interested in trying them, you need a purple-top tube. I think you can get them from a veterinarian or some other stores. You take a blood sample and within a few minutes after the sample, you can start processing the results. You basically put a little bit of blood in the device and you add this solution within a couple of minutes of putting the blood in, and then you wait 20 minutes and it shows you some visual results.
It gives you two lines. If you see a control line and the other line, the test line, the animal is pregnant. If the animal is open, only the control line appears. It's really easy to determine whether the animal is pregnant or not. We have used these single test on a few animals. Actually, we did about eight yesterday as we speak. Wanted to just reconfirm some animals. They were maybe rechecks on a milk pregnancy. I do like the blood a little bit better. The milk is great. I like the blood. It seems to be a little more accurate for our farm. We did some rechecks to see if they were pregnant or opened. Within a half hour of taking a blood sample, we had our results.
Unfortunately, these rechecks were all open, but that's the way it goes in dairying. They can work really well if you're just checking a few animals. We have another cow that was very interesting. She was declared pregnant. She was supposed to go dry and we did a milk pregnancy test. The milk pregnancy test showed that she was open or needed to be rechecked. Then we had the vet out and maybe sometimes with a calf that's far down, you can't quite feel it. It happens. We took a blood sample to see what was happening because it was like, "Well, this cow's got to go dry. What are we going to do? We need to figure this out fast."
We did a blood sample on the signal test and she come back pregnant, so we dried her off. Relatively easy. 20, 30 minutes later. We didn't have to have a veterinarian come out just for one animal, so it really saved us on time to capture those. The other one that we did-- so there's two tests. You can use a rapid visual pregnancy test. This is for doing a few more animals. This one is more of an enzyme ELISA test. Basically, you use the same thing. It's looking for PAGs in the blood.
You use purple-top tubes. Here you can really do a lot more samples. It's a little more efficient. Takes some more time if you're doing a lot of samples, but we can do 96 samples at one time. I did that one day. We talk a little bit about that. We checked 80 heifers, and we can do this test on 80. To do 80 single tests would take a lot of time and effort. The single tests do cost a little bit more money for us. We did this with about 80 samples. You basically have your blood, you need some distilled water, and you put it into these small little wells, and you have to do some washing of the samples with the distilled water. You need to use-- there's three or four small chemical vials that create reactions in these tests.
It takes almost an hour to do this for when I did 80 head. It really comes back and it gives you a shade of blue. If the small little vial is blue, the animal is pregnant. If the vial is clear, it's open. Now, you can get some rechecks. It's like, "Well, is that really blue? Is it really clear? Is it not?" Well, those are ones that you probably need to recheck. It's certainly not perfect. I'm always a little leery about trying to figure out preg testing. I don't want to screw this up and have animals that are pregnant when they're not, or have animals that are declared open when they're actually pregnant.
What we did is I took these 80 heifers. We did the blood samples. We actually took two blood samples and send them to a lab that does BioPRYN testing. We used a lab for BioPRYN testing on our heifers before with blood samples to look at pregnancy or whether they were open. We sent 80 tubes to the lab for testing, and then I took and did the 80 samples with the IDEXX test. It actually come back quite surprisingly.
It took me a little time. I was new at this and being able to do this, but it was very accurate with the lab testing. It came back and I was only off by one animal. The lab had called her pregnant, and I had called this animal open with a recheck. It was like, "Is it blue? Is it clear? Is it not?" I determined that this animal needed to be rechecked when the lab said it was pregnant. We called her pregnant. Out of 80 animals, I was only maybe off by one. It was quite interesting to see that we can actually utilize this stuff to determine pregnancy in our heifers or cows with quite accurate results.
It really worked well for us. Now, some might ask, "Okay, what is the cost on these tests?" The single tests are around $5 or a little bit more per animal. If you use the solutions with some of the chemicals, and the wells, and the washing that maybe take a little bit more time and effort, then that's about $2.50 per animal. It can be in half. If you want to take the time to do that, and if you're doing a lot of animals. If you're doing single animals, I think the individual cow side test is perfect. You can test animals, get accurate results in 20 minutes. It's really simple.
It takes a little bit more time and effort and thought to do the other test if you want to do more, but the single test's perfect for any dairy, beef. I think you can use them in sheep or other ruminants too. If you're dairy or beef, these single tests are wonderful compared to rectal palpation or ultrasound. Obviously, you get timely results. Within a half hour after you have taken a blood sample, you know if this animal is pregnant or not. Tests have been accurate. There's lots of science behind them and being able to figure that out. They're accurate and timely. Really, you can save on labor.
Before, just having a lot of people, or just a couple people can help take these samples. One person can process them in a short amount of time. It's very efficient, very labor saving. I think we have saved costs by moving to these blood samples, away from veterinary palpation. Some veterinarians might not like to hear that, but it saves time for a dairy farm to do that, and effort. Really, I think this is the first time that we got into it, but it might help us with some of our breeding protocols as we get into the future, being able to figure out what might happen. Really, we have the sensor systems.
Everybody knows about all of our sensors that we have. We actually validated some of these results, some of our open results with our sensors. If we saw that the cows were open, it's like, "Okay. Well, let's go back and check." After we've bred, has this cow come into heat again? Is the activity system showing that she's had some heat cycles? We were able to validate the open cows with some additional heat cycles that these cows have. I really have some trust in these OnFarm Pregnancy Tests. I really think they're going to be the future with pregnancy testing on farm, and being able to save labor efficiency and cost in our dairy or beef operations to get animals pregnant.
In the end, we've tested out our Alertys pregnancy testing kits. They're from IDEXX. I think we're going to be moving that way in the future. We're going to be doing some blood sampling and milk samples, and really see where this goes in our herd. Maybe look forward to hearing some thoughts. If anybody else has tried these OnFarm Pregnancy Tests or if you want more information on using that, let me know and I can probably help you out and help you get started with pregnancy testing on farm.
As usual, if you have any scathing rebuttals on my on-farm pregnancy testing, let me know. If you have any other comments, questions, feel free to let us know at The Moos Room. That's T-H-E M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu. Thanks and have a great day.
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