The Moos Room™

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;11;01
Speaker 1
Come.

00;00;11;03 - 00;00;37;06
Speaker 1
And welcome to the newsroom. Brad again here, coming back from the Minnesota State Fair. It is a Sunday evening, actually recording this the day before it comes out. It's been a crazy week at the state fair. My kids were showing animals there and I was working with the for each program, helping with judging contest, workshops, ups, the dairy show, you name it.

00;00;37;06 - 00;00;59;11
Speaker 1
I was helping out a lot of my colleagues in the dairy program and helping the youth of Minnesota advance in their dairy projects. My kids did show there. My daughter had a registered Holstein two year old cow and my son had a crossbred aged cow. And I think they realized how much work it is to show a cow at a fair.

00;00;59;13 - 00;01;21;13
Speaker 1
It's a lot of work. You're always milking, always cleaning up after them. It's just a lot of work. And I used to show a long time ago, and we all know how much work that can be. But it was interesting to see the show happen and get the idea of what's going on in the show. Did my kids do okay?

00;01;21;13 - 00;01;46;23
Speaker 1
Well, my son was second in his class out of three, so I guess you could say he was the middle of the pack and did all right. And my daughter and fortunately was at the end of the pack. In a junior two year old class of about 20 registered Holstein cows. And it was tough. The registered Holstein ring at our state fair is very competitive.

00;01;46;23 - 00;02;12;20
Speaker 1
There's lots of good cows out there. The cow that we showed was maybe eight inches shorter than the rest of them. She's a grazing cow, so by far not the biggest, but she milks quite well. She's still milking 70 pounds, so she does well and we'll continue on with the showing. But alas, a little update on on showing at the Minnesota State Fair and we all enjoy it.

00;02;12;20 - 00;02;36;22
Speaker 1
It's a good time and trying to get back to the real world, but I wanted to give kind of an update, and I haven't done one of these in a while about what's kind of happening and where we are with research and extension here at our dairy in Morris. And what has Brad been working on with others and colleagues throughout the summer?

00;02;36;22 - 00;02;55;21
Speaker 1
And some of these, you will definitely hear a little more in depth on as the fall progresses. Once we've kind of finished some of these things and kind of an idea about where I'm going in the future. It's fascinating, and I think it will help a lot of farmers that are thinking about some of these issues, too.

00;02;55;21 - 00;03;18;05
Speaker 1
And what what we'll try to go through. One of the biggest ones that I've worked with was virtual fencing, and I was talking with some farmers, even at the state fair this last week about virtual fencing. I think there's a lot of excitement about virtual fencing. People are obviously concerned about the cost of it. It is not the cheapest technology in the world.

00;03;18;05 - 00;03;41;11
Speaker 1
We have no fence. I have it on about 30 heifers right now and have had them on for about the whole summer. And what did I learn? What is interesting, because when you first put the collars on, obviously you have to train them with the boundary and a smaller pasture, and I don't know if they liked it a lot.

00;03;41;14 - 00;04;06;15
Speaker 1
It was interesting to see how these heifers were trained to be able to respect that virtual boundary and how they went about that. As time went on in the training pasture, they got better. They listened to the audio cues much more. They weren't getting shocked as much as what they were at the beginning when I first put the virtual fence on.

00;04;06;15 - 00;04;26;28
Speaker 1
But once I took them off the training pasture and moved them out to a much bigger pasture, it was like I was retraining them all over again. They were not listening to the audio cues. They were probably getting some pulses a little bit more than what I really wanted them to. And one day I had some escapees. And did they really escape?

00;04;26;28 - 00;04;52;01
Speaker 1
No, I had a perimeter fence around them, but we had brought some other heifers down to an adjacent pasture, and they decided they were going to go see what was happening with those heifers in the other pasture. And I started getting wild notifications on my phone that everybody was out and they were escaping and they were runaways. So I think there's a lot to learn about virtual fencing now.

00;04;52;01 - 00;05;12;24
Speaker 1
I don't hardly get any pulses from those animals. Obviously, they're getting some ruckus once they get closer to the virtual fence, but I think they've been trained quite well. And again, these are just heifers and I really just put them on to see if it would work, what I could do with it, what kind of data I get back from the virtual fence.

00;05;12;26 - 00;05;32;25
Speaker 1
It is fascinating, and I think we're going to continue on with it as we go even into next year. Maybe I'll put it out on the winter time on some heifers, maybe try to graze some fall grazing cover crops or cornstalks or you name it to see how well that works. But I think I'm going to try it in milking cows next year.

00;05;32;28 - 00;06;02;20
Speaker 1
That is the key. And talking to some farmers at the state fair, that is probably going to be the game changer for a lot of things. Heifers, it's probably easy. You know, you can throw them out in the back 40, forget about them, fence them on your phone with the app or however you use that. But if you can get it on milking cows and figure out how to move cows much more easily from to and from the parlor and in the pasture, I think that's going to be the real time saver.

00;06;02;23 - 00;06;32;04
Speaker 1
So we're going to keep on doing that into the future here. Another one that I've asked about, that kind of has created a little excitement as well, is working with a horn fly vaccine. Company med gene, I've talked about this before a little bit. We dosed about 175 or so cows and heifers this summer, early May. It's a two dose vaccine to try and get rid of the horn flies on these cows, or at least reduce the number of horn flies that are produced in the pastures.

00;06;32;04 - 00;07;01;01
Speaker 1
So now we've counted flies every two weeks. And my poor students have done a wonderful job in recording the fly loads on all of these animals. Every two weeks we counted 150, 175 animals. And so what have we seen a little snippet? Yes. Have we seen some reduction in corn fly numbers? Of course we have. How much? I'm not sure yet.

00;07;01;01 - 00;07;24;01
Speaker 1
I need to analyze all of the data that we have. Plus we have about another month yet before the horn flies really disappear. You know, at the end of August here, we still see some horn flies around through the end of September, and it could get hot again here as well. One thing that really compounded some things with the horn fly vaccine study was the weather.

00;07;24;04 - 00;07;51;08
Speaker 1
And as you know, we've had a lot of rain and weather out here in Western Minnesota. So has the weather contributed to the horn fly load? Of course. But we've had some hot parts of the summer as well that have really brought out the flies. So I'm going to really look at the data on that. And probably early this fall, do a full podcast on my fly vaccine study.

00;07;51;08 - 00;08;17;22
Speaker 1
I think it's wonderful stuff that we have, and I'm really looking forward to excitement to see where that goes and probably continue to use it into the future. We've also been working with, again, Edgar Voltaic, Solar Shade. We've developed this 20 kilowatt portable shade system for our cows. So we follow the cows with this shade all day, every day.

00;08;17;22 - 00;08;43;27
Speaker 1
The cows are underneath that, and they can really get out of the sunlight and the solar radiation to help reduce heat stress. So I've been out there many times, and we're watching the behavior of those cows, how often they use the shade structure, and just to kind of see what happens to those cows throughout the summer in a grazing environment and how they really utilize that structure.

00;08;43;27 - 00;09;09;06
Speaker 1
The question that we how I always get is, do they make a mess underneath the solar panels? And I think here they probably do make a little bit more mess underneath compared to a fixed solar system where there's maybe more land to graze. So we put this big solar system in the pasture, and we had 20 cows underneath it in two parts.

00;09;09;08 - 00;09;38;23
Speaker 1
And yes, when it gets hot and steamy out, they stand underneath the solar panels. They defecate, they urinate. And you can probably see that a little more bare ground. When you pull that structure out of the way and move it to the next paddock, but it really doesn't affect the productivity of that grass. That grass comes back, it grows really well and we really haven't seen much bare ground after we had moved the shade structure.

00;09;38;23 - 00;10;00;08
Speaker 1
So I think the cows have really done well underneath that. They've reduced some heat. Stress helped alleviate some of those issues that we see in a grazing environment. And in the future we're going to do more agro voltaic. So I think I just got a new grant to put up vertical bifacial panels. So kind of a European design to see where that goes.

00;10;00;08 - 00;10;26;19
Speaker 1
And we'll put it in our pasture and see if we can use that to generate more electricity or use that for grazing and maybe haying or you name it for our cows on pasture. I've had a graduate student work on some parasite projects, so this is kind of an interesting project that we are looking at working with Isaac Hagan on Saint Paul campus, and we've been going out to herds, scoring flies.

00;10;26;19 - 00;10;56;17
Speaker 1
Obviously the mantra of the summer is fly scoring. So we've been scoring a lot of flies this summer and really trying to detect parasites as well. Internal parasites. So I've had a student drive around to I think we're at 11 farms this summer. Obviously these are grazing farms, collecting manure samples, genotyping all of these animals, and they've been counting the parasite loads in the manure of some of all.

00;10;56;17 - 00;11;29;08
Speaker 1
I think all of these farms, some have more parasites than others. And, it's quite interesting. One farm that we had went to, we looked at the manure from their heifers. My graduate student was astounded at the number of parasites in those heifers that were grazing. So we'll see. We're trying to see if there is some correlation between genetics and parasite load, and how parasite load might affect future productivity of cows.

00;11;29;10 - 00;11;52;00
Speaker 1
And you know, I'm not just talking internal parasites. We we call ecto parasites. So that's flies mange, you name it. So we've been really looking at that over the winter and into the summer here. And we'll have some interesting results by the end of, of the summer here on number of parasites in a lot of these animals and, and to see where that goes.

00;11;52;02 - 00;12;21;27
Speaker 1
Heifer feed efficiency is another project that we've worked on this summer. So we've acquired some precision feeders that we can actually measure the accurate dry matter intake of animals, whether it's lactating cows or dairy heifers. So I have just kind of a trial going on here at Morris that I started in early July, just to see how much intake heifers have, you know, how much feed are they actually eating?

00;12;21;29 - 00;12;45;27
Speaker 1
I think sometimes those of us that have heifers, we forget about them. It's like, oh, there's the you know, just feed them and they'll be fine. But we're trying to figure out how to feed those heifers more efficiently, how to efficiently gain body weight. Do we need to feed as much to get that body weight? So we've been looking at that.

00;12;45;27 - 00;13;10;29
Speaker 1
We also have some methane collectors in there collecting the greenhouse gas from these heifers. You know, methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen. And I have about 16 heifers here at Morris Holstein and some cross breads. And it's interesting to see the differences in feed intake of these heifers. Some of them are really high. Some of them are quite low.

00;13;11;05 - 00;13;33;14
Speaker 1
I'll tell you the there's not really much difference if you look at it. Maybe on a body weight basis, I think those heifers are eating what their body weight is a percentage of their body weight. But we're just going to try and figure that out. And it's sort of the precursor to what we're going to start here about the 20th of September.

00;13;33;14 - 00;13;59;02
Speaker 1
We're going to haul these precision feeders and methane greenhouse gas collectors to our southern research station in Waseca, Minnesota. And there we're going to put it on Holstein heifers. So trying to figure out the genetics of feed efficiency in heifers and just to see if we see the same things. And what is heifer feed efficiency, and how can we efficiently feed these heifers?

00;13;59;04 - 00;14;24;21
Speaker 1
Because we really need to know what their intake is. And these feeders have accurate intake of these animals. We've been collecting this data all through the summer. So we're kind of doing some pen studies there as well with the Holsteins there. I think we have well over a couple hundred Holstein heifers on a study. They're now looking at feed efficiency and genetics for those animals, obviously from a pen basis.

00;14;24;24 - 00;14;55;19
Speaker 1
But we've genotyped all those Holstein animals and we'll be able to get some good feed efficiency numbers on those animals. And we've been weighing once a week, and it's kind of exciting to see that we, you know, we don't really talk about heifer feed efficiency much. It's really all about the cows. And when it's costing a lot of money to feed those heifers, I think trying to figure out how to cheapen rations and make them more efficient will help all of us in the long run.

00;14;55;19 - 00;15;23;23
Speaker 1
So lots of heifer feed efficiency studies happening right now, and we're pretty excited about where those are going to go. Also working on some mastitis stuff. We have struggled with mastitis and somatic cell count here in our dairy herd this summer. It's been kind of crazy. Somatic cell count is kind of all over the board from 180 to 400, depending on the weather, and it rains here every other day.

00;15;23;23 - 00;15;47;00
Speaker 1
And when we get rain storms, it's not just a couple tenths, it's inches. So we've struggled with that. So we're working with OCL lambs, like I've talked about that before on this podcast and trying to figure out if we can use that as a first offense for mastitis instead of running to antibiotics right away. And I'm quite excited about that project, and it's going quite well.

00;15;47;00 - 00;16;13;26
Speaker 1
And we're actually doing some milk sampling tomorrow or today, Monday morning, as we go out, to actually see if we can reduce clinical mastitis and somatic cell count in these animals that have struggled with mastitis over the summer, kind of some up and coming projects that we're going to work on. Isaac Hagan and I were both geneticists, so we work well together and have kind of starting some new projects.

00;16;13;29 - 00;16;40;09
Speaker 1
One, we're looking at inbreeding and how inbreeding in Holsteins has contributed to reduced health or increased health costs. So we're working with our data from the Waseca herd, where they raise well over a thousand heifers a year. Like I said before, we've genotyped all of those. We have all of the health information on those animals, and we're going to see does inbreeding affect that?

00;16;40;11 - 00;17;04;06
Speaker 1
You know, as the Holstein breed becomes more inbred and we know that that's increasing, how much is that affecting their bottom line for health and economic IX? So inbreeding in Holsteins is a topic we're going to explore. And then Isaac and I also received another grant to start looking at pulled genetics. I think polled is increasing quite rapidly.

00;17;04;06 - 00;17;23;23
Speaker 1
And we're going to try to look at that. We're going to look at all of the breeds from all over the world. See where the pulled genetics are, and kind of create some benchmarks for pulled genetics, what's happening in the dairy industry on a pulled front. And then maybe do some studies here at our research herd looking at pull genetics.

00;17;23;23 - 00;17;50;02
Speaker 1
Do they experience less pain. Do they have behavioral changes. You know, is the behavior different in a pulled animal compared to one that's been deformed? And then does the production differ in pulling animals versus ones that have been drawn. So we're going to be looking at pull genetics. I'm quite excited about that. I just got that grant about a week ago, and I'm really excited to start looking at pull genetics.

00;17;50;02 - 00;18;08;04
Speaker 1
I think it's one that's really needed in the dairy industry right now. So many people are asking about it, and the few that people that I've talked about are, are pretty excited about the pull genetics work that we're going to do. Kind of last an idea that I've had for a long time, and that's processing our own milk.

00;18;08;04 - 00;18;31;06
Speaker 1
And so we're going to start exploring that. You know, I have no idea what I'm doing. No idea. I have no idea how to go about this. But we have been exploring that. We have a market, obviously, we've been exploring the markets, trying to figure out what dairy products we can produce from our university herd, whether it's organic or conventional.

00;18;31;09 - 00;18;52;13
Speaker 1
And I think we're going to settle on ice cream, butter, maybe fluid milk or some sort of yogurt into the future. We're not really going to do cheese, you know, all once in a while we may make some cheese curds, but we are not going to venture into the cheese. Cheese is just a different beast that I'm not sure we're prepared for.

00;18;52;19 - 00;19;12;05
Speaker 1
Not that we're really prepared to produce our own dairy products. From I heard anyways. But we're going to try and we're going to go through all these steps. We're going to record all of this stuff so I can really help producers. There's a lot of people thinking about this, you know, how can we diversify our dairy farm and our business to survive?

00;19;12;07 - 00;19;36;27
Speaker 1
And people are talking about milk processing, but I don't think any of us know how to do that or what to do. And I've been talking to a lot of people on trying to figure this out. So we're going to venture into that this fall. Our university has a small pilot plant, so we can produce small batches of ice cream or butter or fluid milk, you name it, on our Saint Paul campus.

00;19;36;27 - 00;20;01;08
Speaker 1
And then we can kind of sell that to our market and see where we can go and where we can grow. You know, I'm a cow guy. I am not a food scientist. So we're going to try and I'm not going to fail. We're going to go into this and I'm going to do well. And so I can share, you know, the ups and downs of processing your own milk from your own cows.

00;20;01;11 - 00;20;20;04
Speaker 1
But I'm excited to see where that goes. You know, it start. I don't think it's just about, you know, how can we make ice cream? We got to talk about branding and transport of milk and food safety and marketing. So we're going to explore all that and we're going to find out the solutions to a lot of the questions that the farmers are asking.

00;20;20;04 - 00;20;40;22
Speaker 1
So I'm really excited about processing our own milk. Hopefully by Christmas time I'll have some ice cream that will be able to sell and maybe some butter. But I think that's where the future is, especially for smaller dairies, you know, worth 300 cows. And I think that's where we need to go is processing our own milk to be able to survive in the dairy industry.

00;20;40;24 - 00;20;58;10
Speaker 1
So with that, and I want to bore you any more, but hopefully you learned a few things on some of the projects that we've been working on, kind of a little update about, what we've been doing at our research center and kind of what to expect with some of the podcast in the next few weeks about some of the research.

00;20;58;10 - 00;21;23;21
Speaker 1
And as we finish this up and we'll go in depth on many more of these subjects. So with that, if you have any comments, questions, or scathing rebuttals, feel free to contact me at the Newsroom. That's tag CMO s r o m at under edu or find us on the web at University of Minnesota Extension live stock or U of M Rock dairy.

00;21;23;24 - 00;21;30;08
Speaker 1
And with that, we'll see you next time. Hi.