The Moos Room™

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[cow moos]
Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. OG3, we are talking pregnancy again, pregnancy in cows for sure, make that clear.
Emily: Yes, let's clarify, pregnancy in cows.
Joe: Pregnancy in cows. We are working on, following up on our last episode where we talked about the different methods to pregnancy check or pregnancy diagnosis. We're talking about when to preg check, why to preg check today, that's the big thing. We're going to talk beef and dairy all in one episode because we're just that good. I have Emily and Brad here, so why not?
Emily: Yes, we're just getting after it, getting two birds stoned at once.
Brad: I'll definitely give you my opinion.
Emily: Oh, we know you will.
Joe: There is always opinion. [laughs] The upper left hand of my screen is always just full of opinions. It's good.
Emily: Yes. That's why we keep you around, Brad.
Brad: Oh, yes.
Joe: Got to have-
Brad: Backed by science.
Emily: Yes.
Joe: -have someone to argue with, that's always the key to this podcast.
Emily: Brad is the opinions, Joe is just the base information and-
Joe: [laughs] You make me sound so boring.
Emily: -I'm just here for a good time. [laughs]
Joe: You make me sound so boring.
Emily: Well, yes, yes.
Joe: Maybe I am, I don't know.
Emily: I bring the fun, that's what I say.

Joe: It's true, it's true. I can't deny that. Okay, let's talk about beef cattle. I want to talk about beef. I feel like we haven't talked about beef enough for too long.
Emily: [sings] Let's talk about beef, baby. Let's talk about you and me. [laughs] All right.
Joe: Yes. I forgot about that.
Emily: What about beef?
Joe: What about beef, when to preg check, that's the big one. I don't know if you guys know it, but it gets really really cold in the winter in Minnesota. I hate pre-checking cows in the cold. That's going to preface what I'm saying here just because I don't like to preg check in January, February because it's way too cold to be doing that. It's not all that fun and we've already defeated the purpose of the preg check, in my opinion, if we get that far out. We mentioned this last week, the reason to preg check is we're looking for the open cows.
Guess we want to know who's pregnant and how far along and all of that, that's really good stuff to know. The big piece is that we want to know who's open, who's not giving you a calf so you can either not feed them all winter or feed them differently so you can make a profit off that animal or, at least, not [unintelligible 00:02:39].
Emily: You know what, Joe? Girls got to eat.
Joe: Girls got to eat.
Emily: Let those open cows be.
Joe: Girls got to eat but they're not productive, so you got to put weight on them so you can get rid of them in the spring if you want, or get rid of them right away so you're not feeding them all winter. When to do that? In my opinion, it's earlier the better. Earlier the better because that's less feed that you're spending on those cows, or there's more time you're putting them in a different spot so they can gain weight.
For me, that means 30 days after the bull's out or 30 days after you want your calving window to end. I'm not saying you have to take the bull out. You can leave them in and then your vet can decide your calving window based on how far along everybody is. I prefer ultrasound to do that.
Emily: Really?
Joe: Weird, right?
Emily: Really? Huh.
Joe: Weird. I prefer ultrasound when preg-checking beef cows, too. Again--
Emily: Why would that be, Dr. Joe?
Joe: Yes, weird, right? A little biased from the veterinarian, but here's the deal. I can tell you about twins. I can tell you about the viability of the pregnancy, not just whether she's pregnant or not. I can give you very accurate age, especially if they're fairly early. That's another reason to preg check early. If they're between 30 and 60 days, I'm comfortable giving you within five days of their age on any of those calves. That's the reason for the ultrasound.
Emily: Something that you briefly touched on, but we were talking about a little bit off air earlier, Joe, was that you can tell if something is wrong, if something is wrong with the calf or development, or I think you're talking about fluid in the uterus, the heartbeat, all of those kinds of things. Do you want to talk about that a little bit briefly?
Joe: Yes, for sure.
Emily: Because I think that that's something that we often forget about, that it's not just a pregnancy, but we want to make sure it's a pregnancy that is going to make it all the way.
Joe: Yes. There's always going to be some loss but with ultrasound, you can tell what's going on with that calf, like Emily said. Yes, the first thing you do with an ultrasound is you're checking is their pregnancy there or not. Then you're looking at the fluid, you're looking at the heartbeat, you're looking at everything else to make sure that that calf looks normal and has the potential to go to term. You're looking for anything that would make that not a thing.
That's the big thing with these twins. I see this on the beef side a lot. You get those twins in there and yes, they're pregnant and there's twins, but you can see that it's not going to go to term either because there's no heartbeats there or their fluid is wrong. That's really valuable information. It's just one more cow you don't need to feed all winter so 30 days after the bull is out, I like to check everybody. If you have a 60-day calving window, that puts all your pregnancies between 30 and 90 days at preg check.
Brad: Just once? Just pre-check once?
Joe: On the beef side, yes, just once.
Brad: Just once.
Joe: Yes. On the beef side, yes, that's the way to go. Just once is fine. If you're getting into really really high-dollar animals or you're looking at that kind of thing, maybe you got to do it twice. The big thing that we're looking at on the beef side, especially if it comes down to facilities as well, going through the chute it's not a benign process all the time. There's stress, there's a lot of different things involved, and minimizing that as much as possible is the way to go, especially if your facilities are not super good. All right, Brad, what do you got for me? You got rebuttals to my ultrasound. Do you have comments?
Brad: I--
Emily: Yes, let's hear it, Mr. Opinion.
Brad: [laughs] I do not have any rebuttals for your ultrasound. Beef is probably good. Dairy, it's a little bit different and preg checking and number of times to preg check and how you do that as we discussed in previous episode.
Joe: Yes. I think the big thing with the beef is my thought is if you're going to do it once and only once, you might as well get as much information as you can and be as accurate as possible. That's ultrasound to me. All right, let's talk about the dairy side. On the dairy side, like Brad just said, it's a little bit different. We're not preg checking just once in the ideal setting. Some people still do, that makes me hesitate. With a high-producing dairy cow who's got a metabolism that's through the roof, has a lot of metabolic stress on her, there's just a lot more issues that can come up and a lot more pregnancy loss that does happen.
Just to give us a little context here, about 30% of all the embryos, all the fetuses on the dairy side are going to be lost. Now, most of that happens before in the first 16 to 17 days, where we can't even detect there's a pregnancy there to begin with. About 10 to 15% occurs between day 17 and day 42. Then after day 42, only 5% of those losses happen. That's the context for when we preg check and why we choose certain times. Now, the earlier, the better because of days open being expensive. There's some caveats to that because of when we see these losses. I know Brad wants to check at 24 days, 22 days.
Brad: Exactly. Right after the heat cycle.
Emily: You have to check right after they've been bred.
Brad: That's right. I want to know right at conception if that [unintelligible 00:08:08].
Emily: 12 hours. [laughs]
Brad: Exactly.
Joe: That's a good point.
Brad: Time is money. Time is money.
Joe: Time is money but--
Brad: It's all about grant dollars, I'm telling you.
Emily: Grant money, grant money, grant money.
Joe: It's true. You've got some of that piece where you're like, "Yes, time is money because we don't want to waste days open," but because of the potential for embryonic loss, that's why we do wait sometimes. Now, we can check at 28 days, but a lot of people choose to check at 32 to 35 days just because there's less chance of embryonic loss at that point than there is at 28 days. There's a little bit of a trade-off. I tend to think if you're checking weekly on the dairy, let's say you have heart health every week, you can get away with going lower.
The further you spread things out and you're going every two weeks, once a month, once every six weeks, that's when you have to bump it up a little bit, depending on how comfortable you are, how risk averse you are. Then you're definitely adding double-checks on everything. That would be my opinion. You want to be checking once early, once in the middle, and then someone should be checking in some way at dry-off.
Brad: Here's opinion time. No, not really.
Emily: Here we go.
Brad: Here's my thought. What I think is ideal, at least, for our situation in the dairy that I'm in charge of, we preg check at 28 days ultrasound. That's what I like. We fudge a little bit, but sometimes, those 27-day preg checks are re-checks anyways but 28 days, but we're preg checking every two weeks during our breeding season. We check those cows at 28 days, and then they're getting checked again at 42 days, if they're bred first calving season. Then we do a final check. Some of those cows, they're 90 days. Some cows are only getting 45-day checks. That's ultrasound, all ultrasound, maybe some blood, add a little milk to confirm. Brad likes to spread it out, not use one method, but I also like--
Emily: He likes to keep everybody happy.
Brad: That's right. I like to know those cows before they go dry so we've been burned. It's sudden, you got this cow that's pregnant, you've checked her at 150 days and it's like, "Oh, she's pregnant." You dry her off, and she doesn't care. Well, I've wasted a lot of time and money, and effort with this cow, so we do a final kind of check with milk just before dry off to confirm, it's a cheaper method, we can do it with milk and then it confirms it or it might catch one or two cows. We do it within our breeding season, so then if we need to or want to, we can rebreed those cows. That's what I like.
We used to have the vet come out and check final preg check before these cows went dry and it just seemed like a lot of work and effort. The milk seems a little bit easier for doing something like that. Nothing against the vet and doing the checks at the end, but milk, it does make it easier to get those checks. You can do 60 cows and you don't have to use any labor or anything, it just comes with the milk test.
Joe: I'm a big fan of using the milk and the blood at that later check, that dry-off check. The dry off check is very similar to the beef check in general. Now, we're checking before we put all these resources into an animal and they go to our dry period, and they've got dry cow antibiotics and a teat sealant in them if you're conventional. We're putting them on our most expensive ration when they come into the closeup and then, they go through and they sit there for a long time. If you're not checking very carefully, they can be there a long time and be open and getting fat, doing nothing for you. You put a lot of time into it.
It's the same thing on the beef side. You've got an open cow, you don't know about her, and you feed her all winter expecting her to do something for you in the spring, and she does nothing for you. Now you've fed her for no reason and you fed her in a way that didn't really potentially make her more valuable by putting weight on very quickly. I think it's really important to do that check. I can't add any value with that check and with ultrasound.
Brad: You're right.
Joe: If they're that far along five, six months, ultrasound does you no good. I don't even put it on when I'm doing dry checks, I just use my arm. I think that blood, milk, especially milk is a great way to do that dry-off check. I think that's a perfect spot for that test. Perfect spot for it. Now, there's going to be a weird thing every once in a while. There's going to be a mummy, there's going to be something like that, but that's so rare.
Brad: Sometimes, we'll get a recheck or something. You get back milk and you're supposed to dry his cow off and you'll come back, recheck, and it's like, "Whoo, no, now what do I do then?" Then usually have the vet come out and where they can do a palpation check to make sure and confirm it because milk's not perfect either.
Joe: No. No, but I think that that's a really good schedule to take. I like that schedule, like Brad said, 28 to 32 days on the first one, some kind of recheck. I like to extend that recheck out to 60 days if people want fetal sexing. It just makes a little more sense to me. You get just one more piece of information that you didn't have and why not? That makes calling decisions a little bit easier.
In some cases, if you've got two cows that are pretty identical, but I have her once carrying a bull, then it gives you a little more information down the road. I think that's the way to go and then, yes, check before dry off. That would be three times for pregnancy checking on the dairy side. That sound about right, Brad?
Brad: Ye, three is probably pretty good, then you're able to catch the early ones, mid ones, and then, if you have some late ones, it's about perfect.
Joe: The only other thing we should talk about real quick when we're talking about timing and why we're seeing this embryonic death during these time periods is what causes that, why are they doing that? Some of it is just going to be inherent to the process. There's going to be chromosomal abnormalities that cause an embryonic death, but some of it is under of our control and there's pieces of it that are, that stress in any form so handling heat, cold, those kind of things increase that. Then disease as well, especially things like mastitis.
They've been studies to show that when we give lutalyse, prostaglandin, we're killing that CL. In a cow, pregnancy is CL-dependent, so that kills pregnancy if there is one. There's been some studies to show that when a cow gets sick with mastitis, they actually release their own endogenous prostaglandin and that kills the CL and you lose your pregnancy. Disease plays a piece of this. Stress plays a piece of it in any part. Those are the things we need to control. Mastitis is a big one mostly because it's one of the most common diseases. Emily, what's the key to preventing mastitis?
Emily: Cleanliness.
Joe: Cleanliness. Oh, man, we're right back to it. Prevention, cleanliness.
Emily: Oh, geez, shoot.
Joe: Ah, geez.
[laughter]
Joe: There's a lot of things that go into it. We're talking about when to preg check, why to preg check. The big thing is that preg check, basically, it makes your whole system more efficient. That's the point of preg checking. I'll put my plugin again. The other point of preg checking is that your vet is on your farm regularly and can ask you questions, talk to you, answer questions, look at things, observe things, or a set of outside eyes that isn't there every day.
Emily: They can charge you money.
Joe: You've got to pay them, part of the game. Part of the game.
Emily: Girls got to eat.
Joe: Girls got to eat, it's just how it works. I think that I like that short, sweet episode. I don't think there's much else to talk about. Any other questions? You guys got questions on the beef side? Why we do things we do?
Brad: Are producers using other methods in beef? Are they using blood maybe? Milk would be difficult to do in beef cattle. [laughs]
Joe: Yes.
[laughter]
Brad: I wouldn't want to try it. I'm not going to try it.
Emily: We use milk to preg check all of our beef cattle.
Brad: I wouldn't want to be milking Chianina cow and try to get to see if she's pregnant or not.
Joe: Story time.
Emily: Yes.
Brad: [chuckles]
Joe: I know. Have one or I had one producer, I don't think he has cows anymore, he had a set of Charolais, big, big Charolais that came into a stanchion every night. They came into a stanchion barn and actually got locked up in stanchions. I had been there a couple of times to treat a couple of cows and you could milk them. It was unreal.
Brad: Wow.
Joe: They were calm. They weren't as calm as dairy cows, but they were in stanchions and they were standing there just fine. That is the only time I have ever been able to milk a beef cow without wearing all sorts of protective equipment and having-
Emily: A helmet? [laughs]
Joe: -yes, a helmet, gloves, pads everywhere, just wrap yourself in bubble wrap. That actually worked out pretty well. Other than that, no, people are using blood. The big piece that I will say and I think we mentioned it last week too is if you don't have access to a veterinarian. I'm not talking you just don't want to pay the veterinarian, I'm saying there just isn't one available.
Emily: Which happens, it is a problem.
Joe: Happens, yes. We're not short on large animal practitioners in the country, I don't think. I think we are short on areas of the country that can support a large animal veterinarian, and the distance in those areas gets so big to cover and there's just not enough work there to support a veterinarian. Situations like that happen and yes, I'd much rather you use the blood test to figure out if an animal is pregnant than just not preg checking.
There's so much more that comes with this, I'm thinking about right now vaccines at preg check and things like that on the beef side and when the timing of those things. On the dairy side too, we probably should get into vaccine schedules and how that all works as we're talking about timing on things. There's a bunch to talk about, so much to talk about. We also have to talk about repro protocols at some point. There's a bunch out there. They're all over the place. Again, the best part about the cattle industry is that everything is different, it's not cookie-cutter. That's where your vet comes in, your veterinarian comes in, helps you with all that.
Emily: Funny how that works.
Joe: Yes, tries to help you pick the best protocol for your situation, all of those kind of things. With that, we're just going to wrap it up because I'm done talking. All right.
Emily: If you want us to represent your farm, send us a T-shirt and we'll give you a-
Brad: Exactly.
Joe: T-shirt.
Emily: -shout out on the podcast. I'm a size medium.
Brad: Emily, got a T-shirt. You got a T-shirt, where was this from? From some farm?
Emily: Yes, from a dairy in Wisconsin.
Joe: Oh, Wisconsin, why?
Emily: Friends of mine.
Joe: That's [unintelligible 00:19:20].
Brad: Where's mine? Where's mine? I gave you jackets, I gave you T-shirts, lots of stuff, I gave you microphones, but I get nothing.
Emily: [chuckles]
Brad: I get nothing.
Emily: I am a taker, Bradley.
Joe: A taker.
Emily: Can we wrap this now?
Joe: Okay. Sorry, wrap. If you have comments, questions, scathing rebuttals, send them to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That is T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: Catch us on the website, extension.umn.edu, and on Facebook @umnbeef and @umndairy. Thank you for listening, everybody. We'll catch you next week.
Emily: See you.
Brad: Bye.
Emily: I don't want to be you.
Brad: Bye.
Emily: See you later, alligator. After a while, crocodile. [laughs]
Brad: I gave you jackets, I gave you t-shirts, lots of stuff, I gave you microphones, but I get nothing. I get nothing.
Emily: [laughs] I am a taker, Bradley.
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