The Moos Room™

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Joe: Welcome everybody to The Moos Room, OG3 here. Today we're talking about pregnancy diagnosis. Today we're talking about all the different ways you can preg-check cows, why you should preg-check cows, all the different reasons we do that. Yes, Emily and Brad are both here. It feels good to have all three of us here yet again. That's two weeks in a row.
We're getting away from mastitis. We had two in a row on mastitis. We'll be back to it, I'm sure. Just need a quick break. That's why we're switching up the topic. There's not a whole lot of lead-in to this. I guess it's just how can you--
Emily: Just go for it. Pregnancy in cows. To clarify, we're just talking about cows.
Joe: We're talking about cows. That's a big clarification.
Emily: Right. [laughs]
Joe: There's four ways that come to mind right away for pregnancy diagnosis. There is palpation, so just palpation with your hand, transrectal palpation. Then there's the same kind of thing, but you include an ultrasound so you can see that image through the rectum and see the actual uterus on the ultrasound. Then we have milk and blood tests available to us as well now.
Emily: There is a fifth way to know if a cow is pregnant when she's in labor and you see hooves coming out.
Joe: Oh, that's true. If you see the calf coming out, she's pregnant.
Emily: You see hooves.
Bradley: You can bump the cow too. This is long before we get there.
Joe: I should have clarified early pregnancy diagnosis when it matters and you need to make the decision anyway.
Emily: Right, if you are not specific, I'll call you on it.
Joe: I know, I know. It's a thing. I need to work on it because Emily's helping me. She's helping me work on being more specific.
Emily: I'm your guide.
Joe: That's it. Yes, you can bump a cow. That usually doesn't happen until about seven months or you can actually feel the calf in there by sloshing everything around and feeling something in there. Yes, if there is feet sticking out the back end, she's probably pregnant as well. Early pregnancy diagnosis, when it matters that you need to know if they're open or they're pregnant, there's the four ways that I said.
Briefly, as far as limitations for each, by hand, I am personally comfortable down to 30, 32 days by hand. That's just using my hand. Now, that changes for every veterinarian. If I wanted to be 100% safe, I would say, 32 days is the cutoff to be able to tell by hand. Then with ultrasound, I personally am comfortable down to 28 days. I know some veterinarians that are more comfortable lower than that. I'm just not one of them. I think it's pretty dicey at that point.
Bradley: I push the limit on that. I want our vet to do it at 26 days and she will but it's not always perfect.
Joe: It's not, it gets a little tough. That calf can hide. They're absolutely just minuscule at that point. Even at 28 days, we're talking about something that's a 10th of a centimeter. It's just tiny, tiny. A millimeter long, that's a pretty small thing to be looking for at 28 days. That's limitation there.
Now, the milk and the blood test, we're going to talk about them together. Very similar test as far as how they're looking at it and how the numbers match up as far as how good they are at testing. We're just going to talk about them together. It's just a difference on how you collect it. Obviously, getting milk out of a dairy cow is pretty easy. Getting milk out of a beef cow is dangerous.
Emily: Not something I would want to do.
Joe: No. Some people's cows maybe, most people's cows, no.
Emily: Yes, that's true.
Joe: Very, very dangerous. If you got really tame, beautiful Herefords, maybe then you can get some milk, but I don't think it's safe anyway, so that's why we are including blood as well. Then heifers too. Obviously, heifers aren't milking, so you're going to need the blood for pregnancy diagnosis if you're going to use that on heifers.
Those are both listed as being accurate at starting at 28 days.
If you look at some of the literature when they're looking at sensitivity and specificity and how accurate these tests are, they're looking at it. Most of the data is for somewhere around 35 days, starting with those tests.
Bradley: What should we do? Which one should--
Emily: Yes, Dr. Joe?
Bradley: Exactly.
Joe: I'm super biased.
Bradley: I will give you my opinion, of course, as usual.
Joe: Do you want mine first, so you can then refute it?
Bradley: Yes, that's right. Let's have yours first.
Joe: Mine is biased. Obviously, I'm a veterinarian. I think there's value to having a veterinarian on the farm regularly. There's a reason that we're trying to call it herd health check. We're not there to just preg-check. We're there to help with everything else that's going on the farm.
See things that are there regularly, talk with a farmer. I think there's almost more value in talking during preg-check than there is in the pregnancy check itself. I'm biased. I want a reason for that vet to be there regularly. Ultrasound is more accurate than the other methods. I'm a fan of transrectal ultrasound. It's still the gold standard in my mind as far as what you should be doing. It doesn't cost any more than regular palpation for most veterinarians. I think that's the way to go.
What's yours, Bradley? Tell me what's up.
Emily: Bradley.
Bradley: Oh, so lots of things. I think every method can be used. I'll tell you why. We have used all methods and still continue to use ultrasound, blood, and milk, and here's why. I agree with you. I think ultrasound is great and I think we should have the veterinarian do ultrasound. The issue with milk and blood is they don't tell you what's happening on a CL, a follicle, anything like that.
The veterinarian can tell you what the ovarian structures are, and that's a benefit if you want to start a cow on a sync program, whatever, you can tell where they are. That's the benefit of, in my mind, the ultrasound. We use milk and blood. I'm just looking at a preg-check. During our DHI testing, we'll get milk samples and we'll run them through pregnancy test. I think they're $4 or $6, I can't remember what it is, but relatively cheap.
You get back some, but we preg-checked 100 the other day on milk, and I got 20 cows that are rechecked, so I don't know what they are. We use blood for heifers. We'll use blood for a final preg-check somewhere maybe four, five months.
Post-breeding, we'll use a blood to confirm pregnancy or we'll use milk to see if they're pregnant because we don't want to dry off cows that are open. We've progressed and are using a lot of different methods. I do like the blood best. I think the blood does much better job than milk. Milk is easy because they take it on test day and off you go.
With ultrasound, I like fetal sexing too. If you can have a veterinarian that's very good at fetal sexing, that's a good thing. Some like to do that, some don't like to fetal sex. It depends on the veterinarian and if they're confident in it or not.
Joe: Yes, I agree. There is a place for every one of them. If I had to pick one, it'd be ultrasound because of the added information you get. I can also tell you about twins, so that's something you're not going to get with a milk or blood test. I can tell you fetal sex, I can give you an age on that calf, which is important because I saw this morning, Bradley, you had the first calf born two and a half weeks early. Now, was that two and a half weeks early, or was that pregnant on the previous breeding?
I can pick that up on ultrasound, you know what I mean? I can let you know that stuff is happening. I like it. I'm biased, I'm a veterinarian. I want to be on your farm. Ultrasound is where I'm at, but there's definitely a place for the other ones, especially blood. I like blood test like Bradley said, and especially, we're in a situation where there's some areas of the country that don't have a veterinarian that's available. If you're comfortable collecting blood, that's a huge value to you to be able to use that test if you don't have access to a veterinarian.
Emily: I agree with Bradley on blood over milk test where yes, milk, that has the convenience factor. I can see why some producers would lean that way, but I think yes, milk will carry a lot of what's going on with the cow in her body. To me, blood usually tells you the things you need to know. Think of when we go to the doctor and they're not sure, "Let's do a blood test." Figure it out that way.
I also agree with you, Joe, in that I think being able to do the ultrasound just for all the different reasons that you gave, actual age, twins, what else is going on and what are the different structures going on in there. I think like you've already said, they all have their place.
Cost is a factor absolutely. If you don't have a vet out there and you miss something and now you need to do an emergency vet call, you didn't save any money.
Joe: Right. Like what Brad said there, he had 20 rechecks in 100. What do you do with those? You have to resubmit a test or have the vet out to check them anyway. I think the rechecks usually what the numbers are saying that rechecks are usually only about 4% to 5% of the tests. 20 is weird but not unheard of.
Bradley: Those are ones that I'm trying to preg-check down to 26 days.
Joe: I see. That's why, that's why.
Emily: Part of this you've done to yourself, Bradley.
Bradley: Oh, of course, of course. It's my own.
Emily: At least you admit it.
Bradley: I want to know if that cow's pregnant two days after I breed her.
Joe: Well, of course. That would be the best solution if you know that she's open or pregnant as early as possible. That's really the takeaway from a lot of this is regardless of what method you use, you want to be able to identify pregnants and opens as early as possible. We've been talking in dairy terms for a while here but as far as the beef side too, we're not necessarily looking for the pregnant cows. That's not the main focus of our goal when we're preg checking on the beef side for sure.
Similar on the dairy. We're looking for those open cows. Those cows are the cows that are important to identify. We need to look at those because on the beef side, there's not really a reason to be feeding that cow all winter if she's not going to produce a calf for you. If you are going to feed her, you might as well feed her knowing that she's open and get her fat and ready to go to market. That's what the real reason on the beef side.
That's my plug is to get it done early, know ahead of time, save yourself some feed. There's been situations the last few years where we're short hay and it helps you a lot to get rid of those cows you don't really need to feed.
Emily: Joe, what about false positives, false negatives, that kind of thing? Do you have any idea, maybe Bradley, on, like you guys said accuracy and all of those things with the different tests but then, making decisions based off of some of that stuff or knowing that that may be a factor?
Joe: The big thing to know is that there's definitely a worst situation in my mind. The worst situation would be a false negative. Meaning that the test says that she's open, but she's actually pregnant. That can end her career or as a milking cow, it can switch her career to a beef cow. That's a very bad thing to have happen. The tests are geared that way. They're geared to be more sensitive or have less false negatives.
Usually, the tester we're looking at between 2% and 3% on the milk and the blood test for false negatives. If you were to test 1,000 cows, 25 of those cows would be called open but actually be pregnant. That's a risk you have to be willing to take. A lot of people are doing the test twice. The chances of her being a false negative both times are very low. Doing it twice is the way to get around that.
Then you just have to weigh, all right, is it worth it for you to have to do it twice? Are you going to do it twice anyway? The issue is that then you're messing around with a lot of days open and days open are expensive. It depends on whose estimate you use but $5 to $8 a day for a day open that that cow didn't need to be open.
Emily: If you got 25 of them in your 1,000 tests.
Joe: Yes, 1,000 tests, then you'd have 25 cows that were pregnant but called open. The other way it works, it works the other way too. It's not as bad to call a cow pregnant when she's not but it's still a costly thing to do. That's running if you're looking at the 35 to 55 days carried calf window, then it's 8% of the time you're going to have a false positive. 8% of the time you're going to have a cow that's called pregnant but she's actually open. That's a fairly big number. That's why, again, I'm pushing the ultrasound but I--
Bradley: What about the other way I looked here, there is a cow, we ultrasounded her open at 27 days, and I did a milk test 55 days and she's now pregnant.
Joe: I'm not saying that vets are infallible but you're also--
Emily: Immaculate conception, Bradley.
Bradley: What do you mean? I thought that's--
Emily: That's our perfect.
Joe: We are not and you're pushing your vet pretty hard at 27 days. If you asked me to preg check at 27 days, I'd say 90% sure she's pregnant or 90% sure she's open. Then that's up to you to figure out if you're willing to take the chance.
Bradley: I know. This is a reason why I use milk and blood. I like to do reconfirms afterwards. That's why I like it because it helps reconfirm, and I caught a couple cows today that they were called pregnant at 35 days in milk, ultrasound, and now it says they're open. Well, if we don't preg check every time or get them at certain times, we're done breeding now. It's like, "Well, what do I do?"
Joe: I think there's definitely room and the way that I've seen it work, it depends, it's different for every dairy. I don't want to push this too hard because like I said, I think you should be ultrasounding. A combination of the two is very valuable and it depends on what the farmer wants out of it and the risks they're willing to take. A couple times I've set it up so that we're doing milk tests and/or blood tests up front at the early side.
Then I'm rechecking everything that was called pregnant or anything that was called a recheck at a time where we can sex the fetus. That way I've got both. I'm confirming pretty much everything. Because the test is more sensitive and there's less chance of these false negativ, you're still going to have them. That's an issue. That's definitely an issue. By having the vet involved on the second check at that 60-day mark, I think you're covering yourself pretty good.
Bradley: Well, I also think, "Here's my, we're going to put a sensor in it."
Emily: Oh God, here we go.
Bradley: In the future, they'll be able to-- Well they already have in some milking systems where you can run progesterone, basically do a milk pregnancy test every time that cow comes in for milking. It's very expensive now but in the future, we'll be able to tell progesterone on that cow when she comes into milk. We'll be able to tell exactly when to breed her. That doesn't mean she's going to be pregnant but we'll be able to tell breeding and maybe preg check and we'll be able to monitor her pregnancy throughout the whole lactation. Once it becomes cheap enough.
Emily: Would that be like an inline sensor and then connects with something with her tag or whatever so they know which cow they're looking at?
Bradley: Yes. It would be an inline sensor in milking systems. I know probably is going to happen in the robotic herds where you can have that information. It happens in DeLaval Herd Navigator, I think you're able to test for some pregnancy. Most people aren't running them daily because of the expense.
Emily: It's been quite a bit of inline milk sensors for somatic cell count.
Bradley: Yes, right.
Joe: I agree with Brad. We're going to see that. Here's where I put my plugin for veterinarians and veterinary students to change their skillset to not just palpating. You're still going to have to know how to do it. It is something that you should know how to do. Got to spend a lot of time learning it. That's unfortunate but it's just a numbers game. You got to do it.
You have to consider that there's got to be value in what you're doing on a farm as a veterinarian that does not include palpating cows. That's a real deal. That's a big change for the industry, for the veterinarian industry. It's happening. I think, like Brad said, technology's going to change the game and you got to find different ways to be valuable on farm. Bradley, have you ever palpated a cow?
Bradley: I have. I can preg-check at 45 days.
Joe: 45 days.
Bradley: Yes, the old-fashioned way, checking for slip. I can do that.
Joe: Where did you learn that?
Bradley: California.
Joe: All right. I was going to say it has to be, there's so many cows out there.
Emily: Get it down to 26 days, Bradley, then we can talk.
Bradley: I could, that's right. It'd be wonderful.
Joe: What are you doing?
Bradley: Hey, I learned a lot working on a dairy in California. Lots of things that-- Out there, nothing against the veterinarians but the veterinarians do a lot of preg checking and that's about it. Herd health is-- Everything is so different out there when you're on that scale. I did. I learned how of preg check out there and it was-- I don't do it much anymore. I don't know, I probably couldn't do it as accurately as what I could.
Joe: It takes a while to pick up. It takes a lot of numbers. California is one of the places we send vet students and where a bunch of my classmates went to learn in palpate. Some of those guys, that's all they do. They build in planned shoulder replacements, both shoulders towards the end of their career. It's not an easy job. Em, I'm sure you've palpated cows. You probably went to AI school.
Emily: Within AI school and I think it's a two-week program and you spend basically the first week just learning how to palpate cows and learning how to figure out what you're feeling for.
Joe: Initially, you're just throwing poop around or you don't know what�s happening.
Emily: Exactly, you're just praying the cow doesn't cough, that's the first thing. We would practice just with tracks and garbage bags in the classroom and then we went to a few farms, we went to a sale barn, and it was more of oh yes, these are open cows that are just going to be sold for slaughter and work on your palpating and getting comfortable with the gun and everything for AI.
I had one cow, it was an old Holstein cattle like one of the old grandma cows, swing big, all of that. I'm palpating her and I'm like, I think I feel a head or it was something fairly sizable and hard. I'm like, "Um." Then the instructor went in there, they're like, "Oh yes, this cow is pregnant, very pregnant," but they was just like okay then, I don't know what was going on with this cow because I don't think anybody would knowingly send a pregnant cow to the sales barn. She didn't seem like she was super mean or anything.
Joe: It�s quite the surprise when that happens but that brings up a good point, though. We're talking about human error and records and again, I'll put my plug in for ultrasound. I can tell you what's happening and you write it down right there. Information isn't changing hands a bunch of times and having the chance of being incorrectly put down on paper or transferred electronically.
Emily: Just so you guys know, every time Joe mentioned ultrasound, he gets a little check-
Joe: A little.
Emily: -from I don't know who but-
Joe: Oh yes, I�m sure.
Emily: -they send him a big envelope with cash.
Joe: Feel free if you're out there and you work for an ultrasound company, you�re listening. we could use a sponsor, that's fine.
Bradley: Here's a good question for you that I have thought about. Can you get your own ultrasound and teach yourself or learn yourself to do it? I'm getting an ultrasound for some project so can I just start doing it myself or do I need to go through lots of schooling like I already have to be able to do it?
Emily: Before Joe answers, I'm going to cut in to offer some brief color commentary in that I wish all of you listening could have seen both Joe and Bradley's faces because Bradley knows he's stirring the pot so he has the little grin and Joe looks ready to punch something.
Joe: No.
Emily: With that, Joe, your answer.
Joe: I knew this question was going to come up and it's a touchy subject. It's definitely been part of a veterinarian skill set almost exclusively for a long time. I have to be careful, I don't want to step on toes here, but I think if you can figure out a way to get trained, and I think it's important to be under veterinary supervision to do it, I don't think you have to be a veterinarian to palpate, I'll say that. I think you should be under veterinary supervision so that your skill set doesn't drift or any kind of protocol drift over time when you're teaching it yourself or you initially get it set up it's going to drift.
Should be questions that come up, all sorts of different things, but no, I don't think it's an exclusively veterinary skill. It's a numbers game. Before I felt comfortable like truly comfortable detecting pregnancies at 30, 32 days just by hand, it was thousands of cows, thousands. Then ultrasound is I added that later because I wanted to be able to do it without the ultrasound first. Ultrasound took a long time to get used to, that skill set it's a long one to build up.
Bradley: I agree. I just had to ask the question but ultrasounds are not cheap either.
Joe: No.
Bradley: They're tens of thousands of dollars so you're probably not going to make that up with a whole bunch of veterinary costs. I agree they have to be trained.
Joe: Well, an ultrasound is cool right now.
Bradley: It is.
Joe: We used it when we were teaching a lot and I had students falling in practice. We had screens, you can Bluetooth to them so they can see the screen while you're doing it. I tried to bring one whenever I knew there was going to be kids around at the preg check so they can watch what I was seeing and see the calf in there. Super fun, a great way to teach.
I could stand there with the screen and see what the student was seeing and help them and guide them through it. There's all sorts of different options for that. Again, this is the same kind of subject I brought up earlier. I think veterinarians should be providing value that is not just palpation anyway. If you're looking at your practice model, if you're looking at what to do, palpation is definitely still a big piece of it and you need to know how to do it but if that were to go away and your practice model just crumbled and it was gone,then you got some thinking to do I think.
I think you got to be thinking about what else you're doing for your clients and what else you're providing value for. Long story, I think if you're not a veterinarian you can do it, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think ideally it would be done under the supervision of a veterinarian, at least loosely.
Emily: Joe prefers you just call him and pay him to do it.
Joe: Yes, absolutely, of course.
Bradley: Exactly.
Emily: I can just come and bring snacks.
Joe: Snacks, hang out, sit in the truck when you get too cold.
Emily: Yes.
Bradley: There's nothing like preg check-in at Morris when it's 35 below zero and it's windy, all the wide open.
Joe: Nothing you can do about your one arm. It has to be free.
Bradley: You�re right.
Joe: It's warm while it�s in the cow but in between cows it's frozen solid.
Bradley: Exactly.
Joe: I think that's all we got really. I think we got most of it covered today. There's a bunch of options, there's a place for all of them. Joe's biased, he wants you to use ultrasound. Otherwise, please find a way to have your veterinarian out there regularly if you're not going to use ultrasound and preg check. Then definitely use blood when you can and milk when you can and definitely as a confirmation. It doesn't hurt especially at those dry-off checks.
There's less information you can get but if you're aware of that and you're willing to take the risk and some of the false positives, false negatives, it's definitely got a place out there. We'll get some more of this, there's more to talk about. We talked about just methods today for the most part but we got to get into more of the why behind preg checking.
Bradley: We'll talk about repro programs and all that fun stuff.
Joe: Oh yes. So much stuff and there's some new research out on the beef side that I'm excited about. Got to read the paper through yet. It's the stuff that we talked about with Andrew when he was on. Lots to talk about still back to this over and over again. Probably have some experts on at some point who know more than us on this as well.
Thank you for listening, everybody. If you have scathing rebuttals, comments, questions, ideas, send them to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: Please check out our website extension.umn.edu. Check us out on Facebook @UMNBeef and @UMNDairy. Thank you for listening, everybody, we'll catch you next week.
Bradley: Fly.
Emily: Fly.
Joe: There's a giant fly on Brad�s screen.
Emily: I know. I was like what�s going on?
Joe: Aaah.
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