The Moos Room™

Joe Armstrong: All right, everybody, welcome to The Moos Room. We are back. It's the OG3, not stuck with just Emily and I today. Dr. Bradley J Heins is back.
Emily Krekelberg: Brad is back in the house. Hey, yo.
Bradley Heins: Got rid of my show junkie last week on the Show Circuit and I'm back to the real world.
Joe: Which is good. We're welcoming you back. Hopefully, everything went well at the show and well you said that--
Emily: Now, how did your kids do, Bradley?
Bradley: They did good. It's a little county fair. They did well. They weren't champions, but you don't need to be champions all the time. Not everybody needs [crosstalk]
Emily: Did your oldest show his cow?
Bradley: He did show a cow 10 days fresh. She was maybe a little on the heavy side, a little condition for the show, but she's milking that off now. I am a dairy farmer as well, milking one cow in the morning and the evening.
Emily: Your son's crazy cow.
Bradley: Yes, that's right
Joe: That's awesome. I'm glad that you take work home with you at least.
Bradley: I do take work home with me.
Joe: Good deal. Well, we're back to continue our discussion on mastitis. Emily and I started that last week. Today, we figured we'd come back to it because we have our tenured professor here with us today, and it's important to give his take on it as well. We're going to be talking a little bit, again, another potpourri episode, a little bit-
Emily: Potpourri.
Joe: -on mastitis so that we can cover the bases because there was things that we didn't get to last week, and we should cover them before we have real experts on in the future as guests.
Emily: I think a thing that we didn't really cover much, I can't even remember if we've mentioned it, but also we're really glad to have Bradley here as we talk a little bit more about mastitis management on organic herds because, of course, I think whenever we think mastitis were just like, put a tube in there. Not that that's bad. Make sure it's the right one, culture your milk. Of course, in an organic setting, that is not an option. There are other methods or different treatments that can be used in organic that may also be an option for some of the conventional dairy farmers out there too.
We were saying this before we got started. Anything that organic dairy does, a conventional dairy can also do. It doesn't work and vice versa though, as organic dairies can't use what, Brad?
Bradley: Antibiotics.
Joe: Antibiotics.
Emily: Antibiotics. I was mocking Bradley for how he pronounces it, which is mean of me. That's really a big reason why we're glad to have Brad back, other than just that we missed him a lot.
Joe: I think when we talk organic, like Emily said, whenever I've been involved with organic farms, it's just a big focus for me on prevention. Hopefully, Bradley can back me up on that, that there's-- because you're limited in what you can do for treatment, you just have to focus so much on preventing things from being a problem in the first place.
Bradley: Prevention is my number one. Whether you're organic or conventional, you want to prevent mastitis from happening, obviously. It affects lots of different things, even somatic cell count in the bulk tank if you're having to dump a lot of milk, you name it. Even from an organic perspective, we get paid a little bit more money for lower somatic cell count. It's even imperative for organic farmers to pay more attention to mastitis and somatic cell count than what it is. For me, prevention is number one. Trying to prevent mastitis from happening is much better than trying to look for a treatment.
Emily: That seems to be our general theme here on The Moos Room, prevention.
Bradley: What do we do about it? How do we prevent things? That's what everybody's going to ask. Well, yes, how do we prevent it?
Emily: Well, if it's on a dairy farm, it usually comes back to the C word.
Joe: The C word. We want you to be--
Emily: Cleanness.
Bradley: Cleanliness. You are correct.
Emily: Be a C-word. Be clean.
Joe: Be clean. We talked a lot about that last week when we were talking clean and dry pretty much everywhere, if you can, which, like we said, that's easy to say, harder to do. That's really what we talked about. I think today, we're going to try to get into some of the more, I would consider control or monitoring things that we can do as well as talk a little specifics on things that are specific to the organic operation that Brad runs up in Morris and talk about how that could also apply to conventional dairy.
I know the big one that we didn't really, even-- we touched on it, but we didn't really go into it last week was culturing. I know Bradley told us before we started here that he's running the University of Minnesota Easy Culture System. Give us a little overview of how that's helped you, Brad.
Bradley: I tell you how we really started about it because, in our conventional herd, we use antibiotics, and we can use that for mastitis. Part of the reason was we were just using different drugs to treat without really knowing what bugs these cows had, whether they had E coli or Staph or some other infection. We were just using the same thing. We all know that some of those drugs tend not work for some but not for others. It was like, well, we're wasting a lot of money on drugs when we don't really need to.
About a year ago, we actually started using the Minnesota Easy Culture System. It's from the University of Minnesota. We use the tri-plate system, so it has three plates or three sections on a culture plate and you can do this actually on farm. You don't need to send it into a vet or send it-- you can do this yourself. I bought a little incubator off Amazon for a couple hundred bucks, and we use the cultures because you have to incubate them overnight. Basically, we started culturing our own so we can figure out what sort of-- or get an indication of what sort of pathogen is there.
This culture system, we're able to detect gram-negative and gram-positive, and we can detect maybe some Staph or Strep species, things like that. It's really helped us to hone in on what mastitis pathogens our cows have because not every cow has the same one.
Joe: It really lets you focus on treatment, like Brad's talking about because you don't need to treat every mastitis. If you grow gram-negative or there is a no growth on that plate, you don't need to put a tube in that cow, and that can save you quite a bit-- It's not necessary to treat gram-negatives with a tube or the ones that don't have any growth that show up on the plate. It's really, really effective in helping you cut down and be a little more judicious with that antibiotic use.
Bradley: I think that's helped us as well because sometimes we get-- if you see maybe a few flakes in a cow, we test it, and if there's no growth, it's like, well, then we don't need to treat it. We didn't waste our money on treating a cow and dumping your milk for three or four days when we maybe didn't really need to. That's probably helped us as well. Emily knows how much our somatic cell count bounces around out here on this dairy.
We have our challenges, as some dairies do, but we're pretty consistently below 200,000 for the last six months since we've really started putting more of a judicious effort into culturing and using the right antibiotics and watching it more. That really helps us in our conventional herd. We also culture the organic cows too, just see what mastitis bug is there. We can't treat them, but we can at least find out what's there and what's going on.
Joe: That's super important. You got to know what bug is there because that gets into what Emily and I were talking about last week with environmental versus contagious and being able to find the source of some of that mastitis and get ahead of it and go find the cause of where it's actually coming from, and then cull cows if you need to based on what you find.
Emily: Yes, and if you know what the issue is, and you can work to prevent future problems. I do want to back up slightly. Bradley, you were saying how your conventional herd right now is about 200,000 for somatic cell count. Joe and I talked ever so briefly about somatic cell count on the last episode, but we didn't really dive into the numbers and what the numbers mean and what's good, what's bad, what should people be shooting for.
Of course, there are standards set forth for this, and then there are also individual co-ops or creameries, have what they prefer to see. Who wants to kick off that conversation?
Bradley: I'll tell you what my goal is. My goal is to be around 200,000 or less. That's what I really like to see all the time. Now, that is certainly not happening. In our organic herd, I'd like to be at 300,000 or less. The real goal is to be lower than that. That has its challenges all the time, but that's what I like to set as goals now. Some people could think of me and go, "Oh, 200,000, that's way too high. I need to be less than 100,000." Well, I think every farm is different. I should say pasture-based herds, not necessarily organic but pasture-based herds, tend to run a little bit higher because the cows are out in the environment. A pasture herd is probably going to be a little bit higher, but our conventional herd. As I look today, it's 150,000. We're outside outdoors and we're doing quite well. Our organic herd is little over 300,000 right now. It's challenging to figure out what's going on.
Emily: For me, and the work that I've done in extension and prior to that, related to somatic cell count and that kind of no quality on dairies, I think that if it's a really big problem in the herd, conventional, organic, pasture-based, whatever it may be, that 200,000 is a good goal to get to start, but then yes, I like to see it hovering around 100 up to 150 and yes, you get those dairies and we were talking about that a little bit last week, Joe, that I mean there in the double digits solidly always.
Yes, I would say that 150 to 200 range. You're not going to have to worry about penalties or other issues with your co-op or your creamery, wherever you're sending your milk. I do know that there has been some different issues in trying to switch what the actual standard is. What is the absolute highest that will be accepted at a plant? I know that they had tried. I was maybe still in college or very early in my extension career. They were trying to get it from 750 to 400. That was not happening then. I honestly don't know, is it still 750, which is bonkers high.
Bradley: It is high.
Emily: [crosstalk] Personal opinion. Bradley, tell me, are there different standards for organic milk? This is something, I don't know, or 750 for all milk?
Bradley: Well, yes, you can't go above that because they have to follow European standards, so you have a rolling three month of, you can't be over 400,000. There are some standards there. I like to think about it a little more from economic standpoint and a dollar value because obviously the lower your somatic cell count if you're conventional organic, the more premium you're going to get. Organics, it's at 300,000. If you're running average 300,000 for the month, you get no premium.
If you go over 300, they deduct, and if you're under, then the more premium you get. That's why I like to say 300,000 or lower for organic. Otherwise, they start taking premium away. Why take money away from your milk truck if you don't have to? It's free bonus money for you doing a good job with prevention or cleanliness.
Joe: Like Bradley said, if you can get there, and most of what we're talking about is, it's hard work keeping calves clean and dry and comfortable. Just doing that alone and working hard in the parlor to prep correctly and milk correctly and do that kind of thing, you can get there. Now, the only thing that I add to that, and we haven't really addressed it last week or yet today, would be chronic cows. That's my first step when I look at somatic cell. At least in my opinion, that's where I go first.
If I have a high somatic cell, I start looking for who's been high for a while, who's always high and comes and goes, but has repeated offenses. I look for chronic cows when I'm starting to look at that kind of thing. If you run some numbers on it, it could be pretty surprising how big a percentage of the somatic cell count one cow can account for in a tank, especially on some of our smaller herds. That's where I go first.
Emily: I've seen individual tests of chronic cows and they are regularly a million, over a million. It's like, yes, if you get rid of this one cow, and again, especially if it's a smaller herd, you can drop your cell count by 500, 600 just from one cow in some cases.
Bradley: Yes, I would agree. The chronic cows are the problem. I got a story. I always got stories, right?
Joe: Story time.
Bradley: Story time.
Emily: Story time with Bradley.
Bradley: When I started here 10 years ago, it'll actually be 10 years in 10 days that I started here in Morris.
Joe: You're so old.
Bradley: I know exactly.
Emily: We'll have to have a party when we can all be together.
Bradley: Not a young guy anymore. Somatic cell count was high, and about a year after I started, we were just having consistently 600,000 to 700,000 somatic cell counts, and it was bad. I talked to our colleague Jeff Reneau. Some people might know Jeff Reneau. He's [unintelligible 00:14:50] [crosstalk] guy but he's the good mastitis guy. He did lots of stuff with mastitis. We cultured every single cow here at our dairy, and it came back 30% positive for Staph aureus, which was, wow, what do you do there?
We set out to cure that, and that goes back to the chronic cows. Those Staph aureus cows were chronic cows. I just set off and we started culling cows, not a large number, but we started cherry-picking the cows and getting ready those high chronic cows. We have very little Staph aureus in our herd now. It's still here, but not very much anymore, but I was culling cows with 4 and 5 million somatic cell counts that were milking 90 pounds a day. I was culling good cows, but I just had to, to get rid of that Staph aureus.
I know that's a tough one. I've worked with some farms before and it's hard to go into even say a small 60-cow herd and go, "Yes, you need to cull 5 to 8, 10 cows because it's bad." [crosstalk]
Emily: Especially when they're those good high-production cows.
Bradley: Exactly.
Emily: That can be hard. Like you've said before, Bradley, and Joe and I were talking about this last week too, with most things on the farm, it comes down to economics and yes, she's making you money, but she's also losing you money and hurting things for you overall too. Sometimes you just have to make those tough decisions.
Joe: You always hear that. It's like it's always the good cow. It's always the good cow that has these issues. Sometimes it is because if they milk more, they're at higher risk for a lot of those kind of things. They have more stress on them metabolically. They're at higher risk for those kind of things. It does tend to be those cows that we need to watch out for. Staph aureus is a pain. We mentioned Prototheca last week being a huge pain to deal with for different reasons than Staph aureus, but Staph aureus is contagious.
Cows don't necessarily-- they're not always high. They rollercoaster on you with their somatic cell count and they can fly below the radar a little bit, and while they're doing that, continue to infect other cows. It's an issue. Staph aureus is a tough one to deal with, but culturing is a great way to go. You can treat, there are treatment options in a conventional dairy for Staph aureus. Cure rates are fairly low compared to a lot of other bacterial mastitis organisms. It's a tough one.
I don't like saying that but yes, getting a handle on it is a process of culture, treat, and culling to get a handle on it, and you can drop your somatic cell significantly by doing that.
Bradley: Culling cows is a good way to help reduce those. We've also started vaccinating animals for mastitis. Sometimes in the wintertime, our cows will get some nasty E coli cases, and those are like the death of a cow. We have lost some cows because of E coli. Actually today, we are vaccinating for E coli. We're using J-5 vaccine for our cows to see if we can make a difference and help reduce mastitis due to E coli because E colis are the worst in my book for a mastitis. It just can really kill a cow and really reduce production really fast.
Joe: Yes, E coli or those gram-negative, you would consider that toxic mastitis. E coli, Klebsiella, those kind of things that you see that quarter get hot and heavy watery mastitis, where the cow is affected systemically, that is a killer. The vaccine is great and it doesn't necessarily reduce incidents of cases or the prevalence of how many cases you're going to have, but it reduces the clinical signs when they do get or do have a case of mastitis so that you're not losing cows. You don't have deaths.
Bradley: Right. Yes. I'm not saying it's going to cure it, but it may help prevent at least the really bad cases if we do get a case or at least it's not going to kill a cow, I hope.
Joe: It definitely works and it works well. I'm a big proponent of it, and I don't know if we've ever talked about it on this show. There's some perception out there that organic dairies can't use vaccines. That is totally untrue. I am a huge, huge proponent of vaccines in general. Bradley might argue with me on that statement whether I'm a proponent of vaccines, especially on organic dairies, they are crucial, crucial to success because you have to take advantage of every tool you have on the prevention side.
Bradley: I agree. We vaccinate for some mastitis. Like I said, we've talked before about vaccinating calves and stuff. We do use more vaccines here just because I think it helps from a preventative standpoint.
Joe: Culturing is a huge piece of this, especially when you're worried about coliform mastitis. That would be E coli or Klebsiella mainly. Because the vaccines that we have available for E coli mastitis don't necessarily cover for Klebsiella, which is very unfortunate but there are specific Klebsiella vaccines that are available if you need to go down that road. The first step is knowing which one you have. Culturing will be able to help you with that and identify that on your gram-negative section of your plate.
Bradley: One of the other things that we do use around here is we can put a sensor in it.
Joe: Yes, always.
Bradley: Well, I haven't said that a long time.
Emily: I was waiting. I was waiting for that. Put a sensor in that.
Bradley: We have some unique sensors out here that we can-- so I have the Afimilk systems in our parlor. Now, not every farm has Afimilk, but there are some producers that have Afimilk, so we can use-- that has conductivity in it, which is an indication of mastitis. We can look at conductivity in our cows to see who maybe has some mastitis issues and some of the other sensor systems. If a cow really has bad mastitis, it may start picking that up maybe 12 hours before you see clinical signs.
They'll see a drop in rumination or a drop in eating behavior, the cow's getting sick. That's where you'd pick it up there. It's not foolproof, by no means. We can go back and look and go, "Oh, yes, she started not feeling so great there. There's clinical mastitis." Not saying that the sensor is not going to say, "Yes, this cow has mastitis." It maybe is going to give you an indication of there's something not right with this cow. Maybe you need to watch her or check her out.
Joe: Yes, to follow up on sensors and technology in general, I think it is important to note that that stuff is super helpful if you have access to it. It's great. There is so much you can do with just paper records and tests as well.
Bradley: I agree.
Joe: It's amazing how simple it can be. Most of the time when we start with a somatic cell issue on a dairy from the veterinary side, the first thing we do is like, "Well, I need to see records. I need to see cows. I want to see who's high, how long they've been high, how much they're contributing to the tank." Even if you have paper records, I can find that, but you should be opening your reports that you get from DHIA.
Because usually, I find a drawer of just unopened envelopes of reports when that's where I start is trying to find where's the most recent unopened envelope. That's where I usually try to go. There's so much information there on paper records that can get you started. It's a little more work to work through them and--
Emily: That's the reason they still send them to you.
Joe: Yes. I'll put my plugin for testing, especially on some of our smaller farms just to have a handle on that.
Bradley: I agree you want to test. DHI does provide that somatic cell count test to be able to do that if you don't have access to some of these other technology items. How will you know what cows are causing the problem if you don't test them really?
Joe: I see it on dairies a lot where people aren't looking for mastitis, so they don't find it. It's hard to find it if you're not looking for it if you're not stripping and looking to see what's there and really paying attention in the parlor. Yes, you can have pretty low clinical mastitis if you're not looking for it. It can sit there and be there. You got to look for it to start. That's step number one, make sure you're identifying cows that potentially have it culturing, but even just stripping in the parlor to make sure you're looking for it.
Bradley: Now, if you have robots, maybe different.
Joe: True.
Bradley: If you have robots, this is where your sensors and conductivity are going to help to be able to figure out what's going on there because you're not out with the cows, you can't strip them, so you're looking for decreased rumination, decreased activity, and maybe high conductivity to tell you which cows have clinical mastitis. That's for robot herds. There is technology to do that, if you do have robots.
Joe: Emily promised that we'd start talking about organics at some point here when we're talking about water options for organic farmers. We've said prevention, vaccine, cultures. Those are all things you can do to prevent/control. What about treatment on an organic dairy? What do we have available?
Bradley: There's maybe a few things that you can do. I think some farms use frequent stripping so that's maybe not necessarily a treatment. You can frequently strip out the quarters to help clear the mastitis. Some farms use-- and we do on our organic dairy use a lotion or a peppermint minty lotion to be able to maybe increase blood flow to the udder to help reduce swelling. Obviously, if you have mastitis, you're going to have a swollen quarter. We try to reduce the swelling, increase circulation to help fight that off. There's also another product that we can use.
I won't get into it, but there is some recent research done, where you can use an injectable into a cow's udder that contains some olive oil and other things that may help with the prevention of mastitis in organic animals. There's lots of things. Like I said, it comes back down to prevention, and that's probably cleanliness.
Joe: Last question before we wrap because we've got some time constraints today. Someone has to leave us. Organic dairies, can they use an internal teat sealant dry off?
Bradley: No, they cannot use an internal teat sealant. Those are not approved. Not yet. I've tried to have them look into it to get it approved, but they are not. I think if we were able to get them approved that might provide benefit, but no, not allowed.
Joe: You're in such a unique position having the organic and the conventional side by side. It'd be nice to see if we could look at indications of maybe udder health during the dry period that would allow us to see is it something that's coming a lot from that dry period that's hurting the somatic cell count.
Bradley: Right.
Joe: Okay, well, good. I think we've got all sorts of stuff that we talked about today. There's plenty more when we go down this road of milk quality and mastitis. We'll have guests on. We'll talk about more in-depth. We still have to get to dry cow therapy. That's something that's coming up over and over again and we need to address it. Today, I think we're going to wrap it because that is plenty to think about.
Emily: Potpourri.
Joe: Nice potpourri of mastitis prevention control treatment. If you have questions, comments, scathing rebuttals, send them to the themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: In addition to that, you can find us on the website at extension.umn.edu and on Facebook @UMNBeef and @UMNDairy. Thank you for listening, everybody, and we will catch you next week.
Emily: Bye.
Bradley: We just can't use antibiotics.
Joe: And certain manmade [crosstalk]
Emily: Why you say that very weird, Bradley?
Bradley: What do you mean?
Emily: Say antibiotics.
Bradley: Antibiotics.
Joe: Antibiotics.
Emily: Antibiotics. That's basically what you're saying.
Joe: Antibiotics.
Emily: Antibiotics.
Bradley: You're making fun of me?
Emily: [unintelligible 00:27:31]. Rules don't apply to me. I could say words however I want.

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