The Moos Room™

00;00;11;03 - 00;00;37;16
Brad
And welcome to The Moos Room. Brad. Back again? Yes. I'm here again. By myself. Emily, I don't know. I don't know where she's at. She's, been quite busy doing a lot of things. It's coming down into spring and working with farm safety and mental health. Mental Health Month is in May. We have some guests lined up for that, but very busy.

00;00;37;16 - 00;01;05;29
Brad
So it's just me just ranting about whatever I might want to think about and some things that have really affected us. And and what I think about on a day to day basis. Yes, I might be a college professor, but I certainly get intricately involved in the dairy here, as many of you know, and I have dairy animals myself, and that's another story for a different day, but one that I've been kind of thinking about lately.

00;01;05;29 - 00;01;33;23
Brad
And it's been driving me up the wall a little bit, and that's our automatic calf feeder. And so today I wanted to maybe just discuss about our experience with our auto feeder when we started with it, why we did that, and some of the things that are going on now and, and, what it can do and what are the great things about it and some of the, the challenges.

00;01;33;26 - 00;01;58;17
Brad
So let's talk about feeding of calves first. I think there's quite a few things that I think about. It kind of went back to why I ventured into this auto feeder, aspect in the first place. One if you want to raise healthy dairy calves, you have to think about attention to detail. Obviously, there's many tasks for every calf.

00;01;58;22 - 00;02;25;03
Brad
Not every calf is the same. Some need more hand-holding than others. Some have disease, some don't. So there's a lot of detail that's going on. Betting. We have to think about clean and dry bedding all the time. If the bedding is wet, we're going to have sick calves. So dry bedding, important cleanliness pens, feed water, grain buckets, you name it.

00;02;25;03 - 00;02;45;24
Brad
Cleanliness is probably the key component to raising healthy dairy cows. I don't think I can stress that enough. I think that's one of the things that happens at our dairy when we get some calves that are sick, it's like, well, what's going on? You go back to it. It all goes back to cleanliness, cleanliness, cleanliness, cleanliness, obviously dry.

00;02;45;24 - 00;03;13;03
Brad
You want things that are dry so calves can be comfortable and healthy. I think about feeding utensils, equipment, buckets, nipples, bottles, whatever you're using to feed calves, you have to wash and sanitize that equipment a lot. Member cleanliness all goes back to cleanliness environment, which is the housing fans in barns. What is the environment like? Is it wet?

00;03;13;05 - 00;03;34;25
Brad
Can you smell methane? You name it, it all goes back to the environment. And obviously if you pay attention to all of these aspects, you get lots of good growth. That can have effects on milk production into the future. So let's talk about auto feeders and why we went that way. Well, it it started a long time ago.

00;03;34;28 - 00;03;59;26
Brad
We have been raising calves at our research center in groups since I started. My predecessor, Dennis Johnson, was a big proponent of group feeding of calves. So group feeding calves before group feeding was even popular. And it was in groups of ten in a super hutch. And it worked out really well. Now back then they were feeding calves once a day.

00;03;59;28 - 00;04;25;09
Brad
And there's good things and bad things about once a day calf feeding and we did once a day calf feeding for a long time, but I just didn't think we got the growth out of them that I think we needed because calves couldn't drink. At least what I thought couldn't drink 8 to 10l in one sitting. So we were already group feeding these calves and sort of taking a lot of labor to do it.

00;04;25;11 - 00;04;49;04
Brad
We were feeding a lot of milk. They were using five gallon buckets to bring the milk down. You know, some days they would bring the workers would bring 35 gallon buckets down just to feed calves. That's a lot. It was very labor intensive. Took a lot of time to do that. And so it was like, how can we be more efficient in our labor?

00;04;49;04 - 00;05;15;18
Brad
Labor is expensive. So I started thinking about those ideas way back in 2015, 2016, I started exploring automatic calf feeders. I had went to quite a few farms that were using them. Some farms didn't like them, some farms loved them. I tried to think about getting a used auto feeder because some farms were like, it doesn't work, I'm just going to rip it out.

00;05;15;21 - 00;05;40;18
Brad
The calves are terrible. I really did a lot of homework to try and figure out what feeder I wanted to use and where I was going to go, so in the end, we ended up choosing Holman Lao. That is the feeder that we have it obviously German company, there weren't that many of them in Minnesota, let alone the US at the time that I got my auto feeder.

00;05;40;18 - 00;06;01;26
Brad
Why did I choose this feeder? Because it had the ability to feed whole milk and milk replacer. At the time, we could do both. A calf could be on Microplace or the next calf could be on whole milk if I wanted to. Cleaning was probably the most important aspect of it. We could. It does a lot of cleaning.

00;06;01;26 - 00;06;28;28
Brad
It does a lot of washing with the nipples after each calf. Yet we could set it up to clean however many times a day we wanted to. As far as a full system wash, I just thought it did a better job of cleaning things than some of the other systems at the time that I that we bought this, it also had a calf guide, which was, aggregation of the data from all of these calves that I could use in some of my research study.

00;06;28;29 - 00;06;51;24
Brad
So obviously I had ulterior motives as well from a research perspective. But we've used the calf guide a lot in monitoring calves. We can monitor it on our phone right now. And but at the time we could only monitor it on a computer in the barn. Being said, we still was able to get a lot of data from this and it worked well with a milk jug.

00;06;51;24 - 00;07;10;24
Brad
So which is a bulk tank, small bore tank that we can cool the milk in. So it was worked really well with that. It also worked well with a milk taxi that we got. So we also have a pasteurized milk taxi. This feeder also had the ability at the time to have way scales on it, so it could weigh our calves.

00;07;10;24 - 00;07;32;10
Brad
So it did a four front weigh scale. As time went on, I've upgraded the feeder so we can feed for calves at one time. Now we have four stalls. We can feed four calves at one time. Back when I got it, we could only feed two calves at a time. If we had four stalls. So the technology has certainly advanced.

00;07;32;13 - 00;08;08;01
Brad
We really started a doing all of this way back in 2016. So almost ten years ago is when I started exploring these auto feeders. So when I first started, so in April of 2017, so eight years ago is when I got our first home and Lao feeder was an HL 100. The model that was using I got two stalls, two feeding stalls and I got a milk jug which was a double tank, and I also got a milk taxi and I really loved the milk taxi and I still like it today.

00;08;08;01 - 00;08;29;06
Brad
We've used it in many different aspects, so the milk taxi will pasteurized milk so we can set it up to pasteurize and it will automatically cool the milk for us. So we could pasteurized the milk overnight. And that will be cool 55 degrees in the morning. We can do all of that automatically. We could also feed calves individually with it.

00;08;29;06 - 00;08;50;27
Brad
We could feed calves in our group pens. So we use that on some other research studies outside of the auto feeder. So I think probably the best thing that I ever purchased with all of this was that milk taxi, because it's been so versatile with pasteurization. You know, I wanted a pasteurization unit because obviously we have Joanie's in our herd.

00;08;50;29 - 00;09;13;20
Brad
There's no doubt about it. I want to be able to have reduced the risk of ponies in our herd. So we we bought the pasteurization unit. The system also has, a powder dozer on it, so we can, if we wanted to put some different feed additives. It also has a liquid dose here. If we wanted to put some liquid in it.

00;09;13;22 - 00;09;36;24
Brad
You know, if I wanted to add electrolytes from a liquid standpoint, electrolytes from a powder standpoint, we could do that. And the feeder worked well, grew wonderful calves off of the feeder. And but there was always challenges with it. Maintenance was always a big thing. It seemed like it was always there were always errors in the system.

00;09;36;26 - 00;10;10;01
Brad
You know, there's daily maintenance. And I'll admit, sometimes, we didn't do a very good job of cleaning it every single day. And so things would come up and there were lots of different aspects that went around with that. So a couple of years later, in March of 2019, I got a calf start instant calf feeding facility. So it's an all enclosed facility that you can put the stalls inside, that you put the feeder inside the bulk.

00;10;10;01 - 00;10;33;21
Brad
It's all enclosed inside a small unit, and so the calves are away from the feeder and basically the stalls are just outside of the the feeding room. So everything is contained in this small little unit and it has water hookups, a sink and you name it. So it was very good. I got that in March of 2019 and it worked really well.

00;10;33;24 - 00;10;57;04
Brad
And it's still to this day, still working really well. However, the feeder that I had in 2019 did not have the ability to feed four calves at a time. I had four stalls and I could only feed two calves at a time. Every stall had a calf in it and it was only feeding two calves, so some calves were not getting fed and I didn't like that.

00;10;57;07 - 00;11;24;29
Brad
So I upgraded in June of 2020 to a human now calf expert. And so it's a Quadra flex system where I can feed four calves at a time, and that's what I like. So when every calf is up there in a stall, if they're allowed, they can be drinking. So that was almost five years ago when I've upgraded to that calf expert system.

00;11;25;01 - 00;11;56;04
Brad
And over the years we've had things. I've actually had two milk taxis at one time. One was not a pasteurization unit. I didn't necessarily like it. We just used it for feeding. I really sold on the pasteurization of that. And that's what I like about the milk taxi. So one of the other things that I like is the calf guide, where we can see all of the information, you know, we can log in now, I can log into my phone on an app and be able to look at the calves.

00;11;56;04 - 00;12;23;29
Brad
I can see how much they're drinking, how much they're consuming, what their drinking speed is, what their body weight is. So we can watch all of this on a day to day basis. We know how many refusals they've had, how many visits they had. We can watch that all on our phone basically, so we can get notifications when calves are not doing well.

00;12;24;01 - 00;12;47;15
Brad
It also gives us notifications when the system is not working. So there's lots of different aspects that you can utilize in this calf feeding system. So we've used our calf feeder from many different aspects. So here's a couple studies that where we've used it and I've and then we'll we'll talk about some of the heartaches that I've had at the end.

00;12;47;18 - 00;13;11;15
Brad
So we wanted to see how well calves did just by using this system and seeing if we could feed milk replacer and whole milk at the same time and see what actually happened. Well, so we had 40 calves of each, 40 on whole milk, 40 on milk replacer, and in the end, calves grew the same, whether they were on whole milk or milk replacer.

00;13;11;17 - 00;13;38;29
Brad
Basically what we found was that on average, our calves were about three minutes, two and a half to three minutes in the stall per visit. So basically consuming what they were allotted at the time, two liters per visit is what we gave them, which I've changed now. I let them come in about 2.5l now per visit. I think more milk at a time is much better.

00;13;38;29 - 00;14;08;04
Brad
They're not maybe starving, they're not bellowing as much. Probably the biggest thing that I did with this feeder was I wanted to be able to feed calves ad libitum. So drink as much as what you want and to see what would happen. And we compared that to calves that were just drinking eight liters. Now when you do that, you'll notice that obviously the calves that are allowed to drink as much milk as possible, they just grow better.

00;14;08;07 - 00;14;35;29
Brad
They were growing two and a half pounds per day. Average daily gain. Calves on our eight liter diet were about 1.9 pounds per day, so two and a half pounds per day. That's a lot of growth on ad lib. So how much milk did these calves consume? Well, about 406l across the nine week time period and 567 in an ad libitum feeding.

00;14;35;29 - 00;15;03;18
Brad
So they consumed 160 more liters of milk per calf. And if you think about that from a gallons perspective, that's 44 gallons of milk, which is quite a bit about 379 pounds of milk. More in these ad libitum calves. They were just drinking more on average. If you think about consumption across the nine weeks, they consumed about ten liters per calf per day.

00;15;03;18 - 00;15;25;24
Brad
So they're going to drink more, no doubt about it. And they did much better. If you think about it from an economic perspective, if you can get those calves to grow, well, two and a half pounds plus on the ad libitum auto feeder, it does pay for itself. Even though it seems like they're drinking more milk. You just get better growth out of them from a growth perspective.

00;15;25;24 - 00;15;56;16
Brad
So I do that still. I feed some calves. I feed on an ad libitum basis. Some calves are not. We just kind of try and figure that out. But now where we've I've kind of settled in at ten liters per calf per day. So about two and a half gallons of milk per calf per day, if I think about it, when we started feeding calves in a group situation, when I started here 15 years ago, we were feeding four liters of milk per calf per day, four liters.

00;15;56;16 - 00;16;21;00
Brad
That's not very much milk. So it's changed a lot as we've gone across time. I was at four liters and then I went to six liters, and then we moved to eight liters. And then I went ad libitum. And now I'm kind of settled in at that ten liters of milk. So what about the body weights? Can you use these body weights to monitor calves in the answer?

00;16;21;00 - 00;16;50;28
Brad
The short answer is yes you can. So basically what we did is we weighed these calves once a week. So I actually did this study during Covid. So I weighed all these calves by myself once a week. And then compared them to the weight that the auto feeder was saying. And they were all actually pretty close. So basically it was providing the weight that I saw from the scale was about the weight that we saw from the auto feeder, from the forefront scales.

00;16;51;00 - 00;17;11;12
Brad
Now, there were two calves that it was just off. I could never figure out why the calf would. I would be 200 pounds and the auto feeder would say it's 100. There were just two calves that it maybe it was how they stood on the scale, how they did that. I'm not really sure. My guess is that's what it was.

00;17;11;12 - 00;17;33;22
Brad
They just weren't getting good weight. So out of 80 calves that I did, 78 of them were perfect. So it really worked to be able to monitor the body weights of those calves. Now, if you think about it from an economic perspective, you could say, well, these things are really expensive. Yes, as I got a grant to do this project, if you add all of this stuff up, it's really expensive.

00;17;33;22 - 00;18;09;07
Brad
The auto feeder 15 $16,000, the milk taxi $16,000, the bulk tank $10,000. The stalls 3 to 4000 apiece. It's really expensive. I figure I have $50,000 plus in my auto feeder to get my auto feeder working, but I think it's been good. There's been many challenges that have come along with our auto feeder. And one, it's it's it's sort of been driving me a little crazy lately, and things just wear out.

00;18;09;11 - 00;18;28;11
Brad
I'll admit it. Things wear out. A lot of these systems have plastic pieces, and now they're starting to wear out. But it seems like lately a lot of things have been wearing out. And five years later, obviously maintenance is is an issue. So we're probably spending a lot of time and energy on maintenance. We're replacing some motors and the bulls.

00;18;28;18 - 00;18;52;02
Brad
One was inexcusable on our part. A mouse was eating some wires, so we had to replace a a board in one of the stalls. So always be careful about rodents. They will eat wires and they will make your calf feeder not work. And we've probably learned the hard way on that control the mice population. Or you could have some problems.

00;18;52;02 - 00;19;21;09
Brad
This is electronics. They love to chew on the wires, they love to chew on hoses, you name it. But it's just been kind of frustrating lately with all of the maintenance aspects with it. So I've really been thinking about at some point, do I just get rid of it and get a new feeder instead of spending all of this money every time on replacing boards or replacing this, is it worthwhile to just five years, 6 or 7 years later, just get a new system?

00;19;21;11 - 00;19;48;25
Brad
Because I think the maintenance cost are really extravagant when we start thinking about it. So that's my main beef is is at some point the maintenance costs maybe outweigh the benefits of it. And I've heard farmers talk about that from a robotic perspective as well. So what about some of the the challenges that we've seen on our our feeder one is learning the software and the ID system.

00;19;48;25 - 00;20;13;04
Brad
Obviously from a worker training standpoint, it took a lot at a time to get people to go from bucket feeding of calves to really trusting the auto feeder system. And still today, I think some of them don't trust the auto feeder system, although there are Ceph experts as much easier in learning some of the software. Some challenges have been difficult in breaking worker routines.

00;20;13;06 - 00;20;34;26
Brad
Obviously, the routine has shifted, so it's less stressful in the morning because we had to get milk right away when we started milking at 6 a.m. to be able to feed calves, fill our 35 gallon buckets, but now it's less stressful, so we can pasteurize overnight and it's ready to go in the morning. So we've maybe shifted some of the routines a little bit later.

00;20;35;01 - 00;21;03;14
Brad
They don't feed calves as early because we're not necessarily feeding the calves anymore. We're dumping the milk in the bulk tank, getting new milk to pasteurize. It's just shifted our routine. Obviously, developing a feeding plan to control issues has been interesting. Like I said, whether it's 8l or 10l or ad libitum, I think some of the reason why I went ad libitum is to just see what happens on these calves.

00;21;03;17 - 00;21;24;07
Brad
Not every calf is the same, and being allow allow the calf to actually drink which you want. Some of these calves will drink ten liters per day and some will drink 18 to 20. Every calf is different. So and I think that's a benefit of the auto system. Probably the biggest thing that it's been a challenge is keeping the system clean.

00;21;24;07 - 00;21;50;05
Brad
Remember I talked about cleanliness at the beginning, keeping the system clean. I think a lot of the issues that we've seen on our auto feeder goes back to cleanliness. If we would just spend 5 to 15 minutes a day just cleaning some things, I think we would make things last a lot longer. So cleanliness is the biggest aspect in all of calf feeding, no matter what you see.

00;21;50;05 - 00;22;16;05
Brad
But I think overall I think we're happy with our our auto feeder. And I like I said, I continue to use that. We don't feed calves in super hutches anymore. Every calf that we have, every heifer calf that we've had, we've raised some dairy beef calves on the auto feeder. It raises wonderful calves, so we're going to continue to use it despite all of our our heartaches with cleanliness and maintenance and those aspects.

00;22;16;05 - 00;22;40;19
Brad
I think it makes good calves. So with that, I'd be interested to learn your perspectives on auto feeders or if you've faced any challenges or or if you like your feeders, or if you have any comments, questions or scathing rebuttals, feel free to let me know. At the moos room that GMO was our om. That, that edu.

00;22;40;22 - 00;22;57;03
Brad
Or you can find us on the web at University of Minnesota Extension Livestock or at West Central Research and Outreach Center on the web or, Instagram. And with that, happy feeding calves.