The Moos Room™

00;00;12;29 - 00;00;38;22
Brad
Welcome to the Moos room. Happy new year. It's 2025, and this is the first episode of the New Year. I hope everybody had a wonderful holiday season. You might be able to tell. My voice is a little hoarse today. It's always a joy to go to family gatherings and come back with a cold or virus, whatever you may have.

00;00;38;25 - 00;01;07;11
Brad
But we move on. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about a case study on a calf that we had at our research center, and what happened to it. Yes, we've we had a sick calf and it died on us. And I really want to go through some things about this calf and then get it a diagnosis and some things that we could have done and what's actually happening with this.

00;01;07;11 - 00;01;34;15
Brad
So it's an interesting case. It's happened before, but it's very rare at our research center to see this once in a while. We do. So let's talk a little bit about this calf. It was a conventional Holstein. So in our herd we have two herds here a conventional and an organic herd. So this was a conventional calf. So we could have done anything possible as far as treatment.

00;01;34;15 - 00;02;07;03
Brad
So we'll start there. So the Holstein calf, it was born October 1st. And for those of you genetics, it's a rapid out of a delta. So purebred Holstein registered Holstein calf at birth. We obviously we vaccinate for in force three respiratory disease once each. And we also give calf guard. This calf was disbanded on October 29th. So about four weeks after it was born.

00;02;07;08 - 00;02;30;11
Brad
And then at the end of November we started treating this calf. So on November 27th this calf wasn't look at looking good. I'd went in there, noticed this Catholic kind of skinny, looked a little down. Its head was droopy, ears were droopy. It just didn't look like a healthy calf. So we tamped it at at 102.4 temp. So a little bit up on temp.

00;02;30;13 - 00;02;56;02
Brad
And then we started treating it. So we first gave it some patrol and we also gave it electrolytes because the calf looked a little dehydrated. So we started feeding it electrolytes. And we were giving it electrolytes almost every day. So I should say that this calf was on our automatic calf feeder. So we'll we'll go through the the auto feeder information in a second.

00;02;56;02 - 00;03;21;12
Brad
But it was on our auto feeder and it wasn't drinking. So we were supplementing. We were supplementing it with electrolytes. And for some reason this calf wasn't drinking off the auto feeder. It would drink out of a bottle. So we were giving it milk and electrolytes out of a bottle, and it started drinking just fine. And then we were treating it again, giving it electrolytes.

00;03;21;15 - 00;03;49;16
Brad
November 29th we gave petrol. On November 30th we gave it new floor. Obviously noticed a little cough. What was happening in the calf and we continued to feed electrolytes every day for this calf for almost a week. And then on December 3rd, the calf died. Came in that morning, the workers came in the morning and the calf was dead in the pen.

00;03;49;18 - 00;04;16;10
Brad
So this calf was 63 days of age. They had not been weaned yet. We were winning at 12 weeks. The vet came out. The vet did a necropsy. And the only conclusion that the vet came up with was septicemia. And that's a really broad term. And it didn't really tell us much, but they took tissue samples and sent them into the University of Minnesota diagnostic lab.

00;04;16;12 - 00;04;39;18
Brad
And we got that report, and I'll go over that in a second. But I wanted to go back and look at this calf because I had a lot of sensor information. I had a lot of data on this calf. And could something have been caught earlier with this calf possibly. So if you look at weight. So our automatic calf feeder, it's a hormone law.

00;04;39;21 - 00;05;08;04
Brad
It has a forefront way scale. On November 17th it looked like it was starting to lose some weight here. Looked like about it was losing 10 pounds on November 17th. So remember that was ten days before we started treating it. This calf had a slight dip in weight gain. If you look at milk consumption from this calf on November 14th it started going down.

00;05;08;04 - 00;05;34;17
Brad
So we feed ten liters. So this calf was going right along at ten liters a day, no problems drinking everything. And then on November 14th. So this was again two weeks before we started treating this calf. We saw a sharp decrease in milk consumption down to about 6.5l per day. So clearly something was going on. It wasn't drinking as much as what it should have.

00;05;34;19 - 00;05;58;27
Brad
And November 20th we're down to five liters. So this calf is drinking half of what it did on the 20th of November. Remember on November 27th is when we started treating it. It had went back up a little bit, but then once we started treating it, it crashed on the day that we treated it down to about two liters.

00;05;58;29 - 00;06;29;05
Brad
Then we treated it. It went back up to about five liters the next day and then went down after that. So this calf had really started showing signs in milk consumption or lower milk consumption about two weeks before we started treating it. If you look at drinking speed, it looks like about the 17th, kind of around the same days that weight gain was down and we saw the consumption of milk go down, drinking speed starting going down.

00;06;29;07 - 00;06;58;09
Brad
So drinking speed is obviously an indication of sickness. So if the calf isn't drinking as fast, it's not feeling as well. And there's just a sharp decline in drinking speed for this calf. About November 20th is when it really started to go down, which was about seven days before we started treating this calf. Now, in a previous podcast episode, I talked about sensors on these calves, and I had put cow manager notes, an ear tag sensor on these calves because I was curious to see what what would happen.

00;06;58;09 - 00;07;30;01
Brad
Can you detect disease earlier? How does it correlate to information coming out of the calf feeder? Well, it is quite interesting to see what is happening in this calf on November 1st. We see a little bit of increase in and not active. So this calf is not doing as much activity. It's high. Active is down. What what happened around this time this budding.

00;07;30;04 - 00;08;09;23
Brad
So we spotted this calf. So it picked up a little bit of less this budding. But after that the calf didn't really recover. If you look at around November 5th is when we see a big decline in eating behavior in rumination, behavior of this calf down to almost nothing. And the not active behavior, or we could say lying around or just standing there increased a lot from November 1st, really started increasing about the 13th.

00;08;09;23 - 00;08;41;13
Brad
Remember, that's the day that we saw weight gain down milk consumption down drinking speed down to about the 13th or 14 to November is when you see these big drops, even in the sensor data. So it is interesting that I'm picking up sensor data information on this calf from an ear tag. Drinking speed, milk consumption. From the centers all about the same day, about two weeks before we started treating it.

00;08;41;15 - 00;09;05;01
Brad
Now towards the end, it appeared that this calf was maybe getting a little bit better, but in the end, yeah, it did end up dying on us. So like I said, we did a vet report or the vet came out and and did a necropsy on this calf so. Well. And I just got this back, before the Christmas break.

00;09;05;01 - 00;09;30;14
Brad
So this is kind of new information on this calf. So let's go over what the vet report says in in detail. So obviously this is our our calf. Some of the clinical signs that the vet had noticed or fever maybe some scours and a little bit of pneumonia. Remember we were treating it for possible scours as well as we treated it for pneumonia with new floor.

00;09;30;17 - 00;09;52;11
Brad
So this was a roughly two and a half month old Holstein calf. Says the history reports that this calf was sick for about ten days, which was when we started treating it not the prior information that we could have caught probably two weeks before that. But it said the animal had fever scars and a mild cranial ventral pneumonia.

00;09;52;13 - 00;10;19;10
Brad
So slight. Slight pneumonia maybe. So. The animal declined overnight and died. So the vet came out, did a postmortem examination and had noticed that deliver the kidney and the mystery lymph nodes were all swollen. So they took, lung, liver, kidney, intestine, colon and lymph node tissue and sent it to the University of Minnesota. That diagnostic lab.

00;10;19;12 - 00;10;46;00
Brad
And they did a bunch of tests to figure out what was possibly going on in this calf. Here's a few of the points from the vet reports. This was done by Matt Sturgis is a wonderful, a veterinarian pathologist. At the diagnostic lab, they did some special stains, basically found that there was no bacteria or fungi present in some of the sinuses.

00;10;46;02 - 00;11;17;16
Brad
If you look at the intestines and the colon, you'd notice that there was enterocolitis. And what is that? That's inflammation. So the intestines and the colon were inflamed obviously from scours probably. And inflammation. You noted that there was no significant growth in salmonella. So that was one of the things that we were maybe concerned about. Talking with the veterinarian before we had gotten this diagnostic report was, oh, maybe this is a salmonella case, which we don't really have on our dairy.

00;11;17;16 - 00;11;47;29
Brad
We haven't seen it in a long, long time, but you never know. But this was salmonella negative basically. No. No growth of salmonella. It also noticed that the enterocolitis. So the inflammation was most consistent with a bacterial infection. But it also states no significant growth in the colon or in the intestine of salmonella. It showed that there was prior viral enteritis.

00;11;47;29 - 00;12;08;19
Brad
So which means there were no viruses detected in the feces from this calf. But it's possible that a virus could have been cleared at the time of death. No, that the report doesn't stay that. But we'll go and say that there was probably no viruses in this calf. If you look at the the lymph nodes, obviously they were swollen.

00;12;08;19 - 00;12;39;13
Brad
They were examined. It said there was a large amount of new antigens in them, in the sinuses. So it suggest that there maybe have something draining into the lymph nodes that is difficult to figure out. They did some stains in the lymph nodes and that didn't reveal any bacteria or fungi as well. So if we look at the kind of the final results and the interesting one comes at the end.

00;12;39;15 - 00;13;08;22
Brad
So if you look at it, no growth in the intestines, no growth in the liver, no growth in the lungs, no salmonella. We also they did some testing for coronavirus that was negative bovine viral diarrhea virus. So BVD that was negative leptospirosis that was negative. Looked at rotavirus. That was negative. So what is it. What's going on with this calf.

00;13;08;24 - 00;13;38;24
Brad
Well if you look at the parasitology the fecal exam they did some fecal floats and it shows up as a mirror species. Now what is that. What is a mirror. It's Cork city osis. So this calf had Cork city osis and we have seen this on our dairy before. It happens usually it doesn't get to the point where the calves are, are dying.

00;13;38;26 - 00;14;01;25
Brad
I have seen a couple calves before. Back when we were doing our raising our calves on on the cows compared to individual or group housing. We had a calf that was being raised on mom die of Coxsackie osis, kind of the same thing was getting dehydrated. We were feeding it electrolytes. It was doing better and then it just died.

00;14;01;27 - 00;14;26;07
Brad
Cork city Osis was the culprit. So let's talk a little bit about Cork City Oasis and what is it briefly, how it could be prevented? How could it have been prevented in our dairy. So obviously Cork City Osis it's a parasite. We know that there were no bacteria, no fungi found in this calf. So the parasites showed up.

00;14;26;07 - 00;15;03;26
Brad
So cork City Oasis is one of the top five significant diseases in cattle. Obviously some of the symptoms that you see include direita which are calf had had scours sometimes bloody. We didn't notice anybody scours. It had weight loss and potential neurological symptoms that lead to death. Sometimes these chronic cases result in reduced growth and they have many other secondary infections, possibly respiratory infections, which are calf showed as having a slight case of pneumonia.

00;15;03;28 - 00;15;39;14
Brad
So obviously this is a parasite. It's transmitted via a fecal oral route, often through contaminated feed or water or soil. The diagnosis for Cork City Osis is upon really fecal examination or post mortem. So when the calf dies. So there's many things that you see about Cork City Osis obviously you probably see this a little bit more in younger calves from one month to one year during stress or environmental changes.

00;15;39;16 - 00;16;06;14
Brad
The environment was changing a lot here, so it was getting warm and get up to 3040 degrees and then go back down to zero Fahrenheit or below zero Fahrenheit. So we had these huge fluctuations in weather here in Minnesota, obviously you see more infections in confined spaces under moist or warm conditions. So if warm up get cold, warm up, get cold.

00;16;06;17 - 00;16;26;04
Brad
And we just had a lot of moisture in the air, there were some days where it was so foggy, there was a lot of moisture in the air. So we what a what a great time for growing cactuses. And obviously you probably see it a little bit more in in the wintertime here in, in the upper Midwest, we talk about treatments for Cork City.

00;16;26;04 - 00;16;54;22
Brad
Osis what can we do? Well, probably some of the big things are management. Let's talk about management first. And we always talk about management and wanting to do that. Obviously maintaining clean well ventilated housing with proper drainage prevent overcrowding and fecal contamination of feet and water. So could there have been this could we do a better job of having a more clean environment in our calf barn, where automatic feeder is cleaning off the waters more often?

00;16;54;26 - 00;17;25;09
Brad
Yes, we can always do a better job. We're guilty of it as well, and our dairy cleaning always gets the last task to do. But we could always do a better job of cleaning. Obviously minimizing stress is probably a big thing as well. Now there's some medications that you can use for Cork City Oasis that are on the market, and a lot for calves comes in with caffeine.

00;17;25;12 - 00;17;49;08
Brad
It can be in the form of an iron A for either Remington or Bova tech. You can see that in in feed. So that really helps with our calves. We did not have remains under bowl attack in our in our calf grain because we are raising all of our calves in an organic system, feeding organic milk even though they are conventional calves.

00;17;49;10 - 00;18;08;03
Brad
So we don't have a or medicine in our calf grain. Something for us to think about into the future, about separating our calves. Can we do it? Do we have enough calves to do that? Does it make sense from a management perspective to separate our calves so we can at least feed some attacker movements into our calves? Well what else?

00;18;08;03 - 00;18;30;25
Brad
There's some other things you can feed. Corridor. That's probably one. One of the big things that people, use, sulfur is or elbon, can be, a big one or Dr. Cox. So we can do a lot of these things in the feed or in the water to help prevent Cork City osis or to help treat Cork City osis.

00;18;30;25 - 00;18;56;27
Brad
If we have an outbreak. But remember, probably the biggest thing is maintaining a clean environment that's not crowded. And obviously we're going to do a better job at that. One of the last things about treatment that I found was interesting. It's not approved by the FDA yet, but we had Pete Erickson now he was on before of our podcast talking about colostrum, and he does a lot of wonderful work on calves.

00;18;56;29 - 00;19;21;05
Brad
And he did a study in New Hampshire about feeding sodium butyrate to prevent cork city ulcers in calves. These were, diseased calves that they looked at were three weeks of age to 1 to 2 years of age, where they had direita, slow growing calves and sometimes death. This was in the Journal of Animal Science back in 2022.

00;19;21;07 - 00;19;50;03
Brad
What is sodium butyrate? Well, if we think about it, it's found in the human diet. It's present a lot in parmesan cheese and butter. And the most common source of sodium butyrate in the gut is from legumes. So they fed the sodium butyrate and it to help improve the intestinal lining, which counteracts some of the damage done by the cochlea or the parasites.

00;19;50;06 - 00;20;23;22
Brad
So their study showed that the sodium butyrate and its breakdown product, which is butyric acid, was effective as medicine or medicine in reducing Cork City. Osis in calves. So sodium butyrate supports gut health. It supports development and growth in calves and nutrient absorption. So although this isn't yet FDA approved for coxsackie Osis prevention, it certainly shows potential as alternatives to antibiotics into the future.

00;20;23;24 - 00;20;45;23
Brad
But like I said before, it all goes back to management. What could have we done? Could have we caught this calf earlier? I think we could have obviously some of the signs from our auto feeder and the other sensors were showing that probably two weeks before we started treating this calf, it was getting sick or it wasn't feeling very well.

00;20;45;25 - 00;21;06;04
Brad
So I think it's essential for us to look at if you have sensors, if you have auto feeders, if you have technology, just take a little bit of time every day to look at it. You can pick up a lot of information on these calves so fast, so fast. We cleaned out the calf barn afterwards to help clean up.

00;21;06;07 - 00;21;32;14
Brad
Obviously cleaning is is the essential thing. Cleaning water, making sure the bedding is dry. It's hard to control the weather with all of the moisture, but obviously proper ventilation helps out. So really management is the key and it's unfortunate that this calf died from Cork City Oasis. There were a couple other calves in the pen that kind of looked like the same calf did that we were treating, but they haven't died.

00;21;32;16 - 00;21;57;00
Brad
But they'll probably be stunted in the future. So I hopefully you've learned a little bit about what happened to our calf. It's quite interesting. It's not was not the typical rotavirus or CoronaVac virus or anything else. It was Cork City Osis in a two month old calf that had died, and that management and cleanliness are the key to stopping the spread.

00;21;57;03 - 00;22;30;22
Brad
So with that, thanks for listening and if you have any comments or questions about, our calves or what you heard, feel free to let us know at the Moos room. That's mos r om at Umkc edu. Or you can find us on the web at the University of Minnesota Extension, or find us at UMW Rock Dairy on Instagram or on WCR Rock website, and we'll see you next time.

00;22;30;24 - 00;22;35;04
Brad
Bye.