The Moos Room™

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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. We are here today with a special guest. We have Dr. Sandra Godden today. She is a professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota. We're talking about selective dry cow therapy. It's definitely something that's in the news. It's something that's been on everyone's mind as we try to look for different ways to use antibiotics judiciously. We're really excited to have her on. She's been doing research on this, has done research on a lot of different stuff, too much to list everything here, but we're super excited to have her on to talk about this topic and the new research that was just done, papers came out this year, 2020. Thanks for being here.
Sandra: Thanks, Joe. Happy to be here. Very excited to share this information with you guys.
Joe: Emily and Brad are also here.
Emily: Yes, hi. By the way.
Joe: We have the OG3 here together with Sandra. We have two questions we ask every guest. We have to do those first. That's just how it works. The first one, we always start opposite order of your knowledge base. We need to know your favorite beef cow breed.
Sandra: Oh my, I guess that would-- My favorite beef cow breed would have to be Herford because they, at least in practice, were the ones that were least likely to try to kill me.
Emily: Oh.
Bradley: Yes.
Emily: That's good reasoning.
Bradley: That is two for Herford now.
Joe: Two for Herford. Bradley is the Herford man.
Sandra: A limousine would be at the other end of the list of most [inaudible 00:01:42]
Emily: All right.
Joe: Yes. Maybe we should start asking everybody that question at least I would agree.
Emily: Yes.
Joe: All right. Herford. That is a good answer, according to Bradley. That puts Black Angus at 3, Herford at 2, Keonina at 1, Brahman at 1, Stabilizer at 1, and Black Baldie at 1. All right. The other question, if you can probably guess, is what is your favorite dairy breed, which is somewhat times a little more controversial, but there is a right answer, just as we've established?
Sandra: Yes. I'm sorry, but I have to go with Holstein. I grew with them. Even though jerseys, they're a close second, they're really cute, they're really fun, I still have to go with the good old Holstein.
Joe: That is disappointing, but we will accept it. Jersey was the correct answer, but Holstein is also okay, I guess. We've got Jersey at 3, Holstein at 3, Dutch Belted at 2, Normandy at 1, Brownstrasse at one and Montbelliard at 1. That's where we stand. Jersey Holstein back tied up. Unfortunately, Brad and I are disappointed.
Emily: I like it. I feel like Dutch Belted floats in with the two.
Sandra: They're a dual purpose.
Emily: Yes. [unintelligible 00:03:00] black and white, classic, timeless. The Holstein is timeless.
Sandra: Yes, we're looking for class. That's right.
Emily: Yes. Me and Sandra, we got to figure it out.
Sandra: You could have said Pinzgauer, but then you'd have to add another category to your list.
Joe: No, I will take Holstein over that. That's, like I said, slightly disappointing, but yes, I understand the choice, definitely understand the choice. All right. Let's get into what we're actually here to talk about today. The two very important questions are answered. We're here to talk about selective dry cow therapy. Really the big thing that we need to throw out there right away is that we have currently the common practices, blanket dry cow therapy, where every animal in a non-organic herd is treated with antibiotics at dry off and the teeth sealants, hopefully. That's where we are currently. Now, I think it's important to know why we got there. Sandra, can you explain why that was how we were doing things or how we have been doing things?
Sandra: Sure, Joe. There's good justification historically for the practice of blanket dry cow therapy and it goes back several decades. Decades ago, we, North America at least, had a relatively high prevalence of staph aureus and strep egg in our herds. These are contagious pathogens that are difficult to control and can be easily transmitted from cow to cow, usually at the time of milking. Treating every quarter of every cow like a dry cow therapy at dry off was one of our key strategies to get those contagious pathogens under control.
Also, historically, we had less control of other mastitis pathogens. When it came time to dry cows off, there was a relatively high prevalence of infection in the herd. Given that, it just made sense not to try to think too hard about it, we're just going to treat every quarter of every cow. It played a big role in getting those contagious pathogens under control. That was historically, though. However, over the last 15 to 20 years, if you look at cell counts in the North American dairy herd, we have trended down steadily.
Producers are doing an awesome job of improving milk quality, reducing mastitis and the impacts of mastitis in the herd. Now, when we look at the prevalence of infection in herds at dry off, a strep egg is almost eliminated, almost eradicated in North America. Staph aureus, it might be present in herds, but typically at a very low prevalence and we've got a relatively low prevalence of infection in quarters. Maybe only 15% to 20% of quarters have an infection at dry off. It's harder to justify thinking that we need to put an antibiotic in every quarter of every cow.
Also, what else has changed is we also have tools now to protect untreated quarters from new infections during the dry period and that would be the teeth sealant that you mentioned. We've got that tool to add our toolbox, if you will, to help prevent new infections. Also, we now have rapid, convenient, inexpensive tests that we could apply at the time of dry off to make decisions as to whether or not a cow is likely to be infected or not to make those treatment decisions. Historically, those things were lacking, but now we've got all the tools, the stars are aligned, and I think it's time. We can do this.
Emily: We've kind of moved from a it's better safe than sorry type mindset to we know we can make a well-informed decision, so we're going that route now.
Sandra: Yes, that's right, Emily. Selective dry cow therapy is not for every herd yet. There are still some herds that do have a higher prevalence of staph aureus, let's say, or a higher prevalence of infection overall and they should probably focus on getting those things under control before they consider something like selective dry cow therapy. A relatively high proportion of herds in the US and Canada now are ready and could easily manage these programs if they wanted to take them on.
Joe: It's definitely something that's picking up steam. Right now, I would say we have 80% of herds in the US that are still using blanket dry cow therapy and probably only about 10% that are using selective dry cow therapy. Obviously, that doesn't add to 100. There's 10% that are not using dry cow therapy. It is going to pick up steam. I think it has to pick up steam, especially with the studies that have come out. We've shown, or I didn't do anything-- Sandra and some of the other people that did the research have shown that economically, it makes sense, a lot of sense.
I think it is important to know like Dr. Godden was saying, it's not for everyone. I think that's something that comes up over and over and over again when we look at anything that's out there. There's nothing out there, really, that's for every herd all the time. There's definitely some specific things that need to happen for her to be ready to implement this and it starts again with knowing what's going on with infections and mastitis on your farm. Where do we start there, Sandra? How do we get to that point where a herd is considering is this for me or not? How do they make that choice?
Sandra: Sure. Yes. That's the first important question that every herd has to or manager or owner has to consider, is this selective dry cow therapy right for me, for my herd? This is a conversation that we hope owners and managers will have with their veterinarian and get the veterinarian's input on helping to make that decision. We have some basic ideas about what herds are probably suitable candidates for selective dry cow therapy and I can go through just a quick little short little list here, if you like, Joe.
We suggest that their annual average bulk tank somatic cell count be less than 250,000 cells per milliliter. The reason being if they've got a low bulk tank cell count, that probably means they have a lower prevalence of infection at dry off. There's fewer cows infected, there's a greater opportunity to reduce your drug use. The second point, we recommend that the herd have reasonably good control over contagious pathogens, that being low, very low numbers, or low prevalence of staph aureus and strep egg.
The occasion a cow pops up with a staph aureus and hopefully we can detect her through somatic cell counts during rotation, maybe clinical flare-ups and culture in clinicals and we can find and deal with those in other ways, but we do want good control over the contagious pathogens. The third point, Joe, you already mentioned this, is use of a teeth sealant at dry off. If we don't give an antibiotic at dry off, one of the actions of antibiotics at dry off that was so helpful, one was to cure pre-existing subclinical infections, and we've already addressed that. The other action is it actually prevents new infections during the early part of the dry period while the gland is in looting. Well, if we don't treat that quarter because it's not infected, we're missing that protection, at least in the early part of the dry period. That's where the teat sealants come in to offer protection throughout the dry period. Our study didn't do this, but other selective dry cow therapy studies have attempted to do selective dry cow therapy without benefit of teat sealants and they didn't work.
You need to incorporate a teat sealant routinely to protect your cows, particularly those cows that weren't treated with antibiotics. Other considerations, we want well-trained personnel using the correct techniques, aseptic hygienic techniques to infuse whatever treatment is assigned to the cow in the quarter. Then we need to have the ability to monitor the herd going forward to make sure that it's working for us. That's, again, where the veterinarian can come back in to help monitor.
Joe: I think to me, I know we talk a lot about labor on this podcast and employees and staff and it really does all come back to that. For me, that's the biggest piece. Having well-trained staff that are going to buy into this. Bradley talks about it all the time. If staff don't buy in, if employees are not in on what you're trying to do, it's not going to work no matter what. Even something like activity monitors. We talked about activity monitors during our heat detection episode. Brad, didn't you say even some of your employees didn't trust your heat detection on your activity monitors for a while there, too, and that that really was a challenge?
Bradley: That's right. The workers have to be able to see results, too, and that's the problem. They want to see results today. Even with dry cow treatments, it's at least 60 or 45 to 90 days or more before they see results. By that time, they forgot about what we did.
Joe: You need that employee buy-in. I would say personally, I put that number one. Then along with that, being able to monitor the program to make sure it's working and that things are going well. That helps you, like Brad said. It helps your employees, too. If they can see it's working and they can see some benefit from it, it's going to help them buy in even more.
Emily: I want to just jump into the meat of it, which I feel like this is probably where you were going, Joe, but I've just been very, very excited about this. I really enjoyed looking at the papers and the different work that we were sent prior to recording this episode. Sandra, something for me that I found really interesting because I had a general idea of selective dry cow therapy. In the research that you've been working on, I know that you've used two different parameters to select the dry cows that got the therapy. I believe you referred to them as culture and then algorithm. Could you just really briefly explain the differences between the two and what parameters you were using within each of those to make those decisions?
Sandra: What was unique about our study as compared to other studies, most other studies used an algorithm-based approach. What that means is they used historical records for the cow to make a decision at dry off as to whether or not she was likely to be infected. Those records include two things: DHI testing cell count data and clinical mastitis events. Using a combination of cell count history and clinical mastitis events in that current lactation, you can come up with a reasonably good prediction of whether or not she's likely to be infected. It's not 100% accurate, but it's close enough.
For those herbs that are on a routine DHI testing program, this is stupid simple. You've already got the cell count data, hopefully, you're recording clinical mastitis events. You just run that list the day before dry off or the day of dry off and you can pick the cows from that that are more likely or less likely to be infected and make that treat no treat decision. In fact, Minnesota DHI starting in November is going to start generating a report. I think it's called the DHI-370 Flex Report, or 370 Flex Report that will go out to eligible herds and will list all cows due to dry off in the next 45 days that they consider to be good potential candidates for no treat teat sealant only based on their cell count history.
The producers are still going to have to look at that list and go back and look at their clinical mastitis records and just double-check to make sure that she hasn't had two or more flare-ups that lactation. That algorithm-based approach is really, really simple to use. It's really easy. You've already paid for the cell count data. There's no additional cost. You just have to look at the list. That's the algorithm. Really, really simple.
The other approach that we evaluated was a culture-based or culture-guided approach, because we recognized that not all herds are on a DHI testing program. They won't have that somatic cell count data to look at. How are they going to make the decision? At the University of Minnesota and elsewhere, too, over the years, we've encouraged people to use rapid culture systems to make strategic treatment decisions for clinical mastitis events. The Minnesota easy culture system, bi plate or tri plate, some farms have adopted it and use it in their on-farm lab.
In other situations, the farm might not have an on-farm culture lab, but the local vet clinic offers those services and can quickly culture the clinical sample, turn it around, you get the answer the next day, and you make your treatment decision. For clinical mastitis, that's worked out really, really well for people. Properly used, people can reduce their drug use by 50% treating clinicals or not treating clinicals during lactation because we know not every clinical needs to be treated. Well, we're basically just taking that idea, that rapid culture system, and modifying it, adapting it for use for selective dry cow therapy decisions.
What those producers would do, and this will require a little more labor, Joe, back to your employee buy-in thing, and we recognize employees are busy, but this one will require a little more labor. A few days before dry off day, you're going to need to go out and collect septic quarter samples from all the cows you intend to dry off, plate them on the Minnesota forecast plate, that's the rapid culture plate that we've developed for this purpose, incubate them for about 36 to 48 hours, interpret them. The idea is you're going to just simply be looking for growth or no growth. If a quarter has bacterial growth, we don't care what kind it is, you're just going to treat her with antibiotics. The quarters with no bacterial growth will not get antibiotics.
Then all quarters, of course, will get a teat sealant. It requires a little more labor each week to collect the samples and do the cultures. For herds that haven't invested in the DHI testing program, this would be an alternate approach. In our study, where we compared both the algorithm-guided and the culture-guided selective programs against blanket dry cow therapy, both programs worked. They were equally effective to blanket dry cow therapy and they worked equally well. They both reduced drug use by an average of 55%, which was really impressive.
Joe: That's a big number.
Sandra: Yes, it is.
Joe: Yes, 55% is big.
Emily: Yes. I'll say as we've discussed in some of our past mastitis episodes, all of us here at the Moose Room are proponents of culturing individual cows especially-
Sandra: Oh, great. Good.
Emily: -on that bulk tank culture. That's great to hear. I just remember I read that and I thought I would've never thought about having two different methods that way. I think that that's really interesting. You hit on a good point as we've talked about labor and employee buy-in and how difficult that can be sometimes with some of these. That leads into a question that I had, and that is about strategies for dairies who want to transition to a selective dry cow therapy plan for their herd.
Thinking of it from two different contexts, one being dairies that are currently just doing blanket dry cow therapy and then as Joe mentioned that 10% that are not doing any dry cow therapy, but are maybe thinking, "Hey, this might help get my somatic cell count a little bit lower. I don't want to spend a ton of money on drugs, and so I only want to treat the ones that really need it." When thinking about that transitioning to this method, do you feel that you would see more dairies using the algorithm method to start, or for those that have maybe never done treatment, that they should just go right for the culture. Just curious what your thoughts might be on that.
Sandra: That's a really good question, Emily. The answer's probably, it depends. It just depends on the herd, their resources, like you mentioned, labor, time, their record-keeping system, their enthusiasm for adopting anything, and probably the veterinarian needs to be involved. I don't think there's a pat answer for that, Emily. I think the veterinarian should get invited in and be involved in going over all of those considerations and figuring out what's going to be the best strategy for this herd, because different herds are going to have different strategies or different approaches or different priorities. Saving labor or not. If they want to save labor, then I think starting somatic cell count testing, routine DHI testing would be recommended and you could maybe get three months of testing under your belt. I know in our study we're actually recommending a whole lactation's worth of tests, eight tests or more per year to make an individual cow decision. Maybe to get started, if they got three months of testing under their belt and they had good clinical mastitis records historically, maybe that would be enough to get started three months from now using that dry Flex Report.
Joe: I think a lot of it, to me, it really does come down to the DHI. A frequency of tests is going to make a big difference on a lot of this. If you are already testing quite a bit and you have that data already, I would advocate for using the algorithm-based method because we saw the same reduction. If you're a smaller herd or you don't test very often, then I think there's a lot of value in the culture because we can still get the same thing accomplished. I think DHI is very important and I think that a lot of people probably undervalue what they provide, but I think that, again, it's not going to fit everybody, so you have to make your decision based on what's best for your herd.
I think the other thing that I really wanted to point out while we're still on the topic is quarter sampling is the culture method that we used in the study. There is a dramatic difference when you move to composite samples in terms of reduction of antibiotics. It's still valid. It's still definitely valid. There's still a reduction in antibiotic use, but it's not to the same extent as if you were to use a quarter sampling method.
Sandra: That's right, Joe. There have been other studies, one or two other studies that collected a composite milk sample. They put four-quarters squirted samples from all four quarters into a single vial, mixed the milk together, and played at that. With that, you can decide if the cow is infected, but you don't know which quarter. Because there are fewer quarters that are infected than there are cows, if we can make quarter a level diagnosis, then we have a greater opportunity to reduce drug use. I'm thinking of one Canadian study that plated or cultured composite milk samples. They reduced drug use but by less than 30%, 28%, 27%, or something.
It was a reduction, but it probably was not enough to make it cost-effective. Whereas with the forecast plate developed here at the University of Minnesota by plating individual quarters, making quarter-level decisions, we saw an average of 55% reduction. That more than paid for the program. There was a positive net return. We haven't talked about the economics yet, but that's another consideration. There's the logistics and labor considerations and what's easier to implement, but there's also an economic consideration or payback to producers who can successfully adopt these programs.
Joe: The break-even is a big piece of this. That's why one of the main reasons I wanted to bring up the composite sampling is that you do see a reduction in antibiotic use, but the break-even is a lot messier. It doesn't necessarily pencil out and it's going to depend a lot on your farm and how things are going and how well you control mastitis already. Just, that's the point I wanted to make, that there's a big difference in quarter sampling versus composite sampling when we talk about this.
If you do have DHI already, the algorithm is not any different. To me, culture is the gold standard and it probably always will be to me, but the fact that algorithm works just as well is actually really, really nice. Another way to get more out of your DHI records and save some more money and still be just as effective in controlling mastitis. That's the other piece we haven't really talked about yet is that there wasn't any increase in mastitis in these herds, correct?
Sandra: Correct. Yes, that was the most important bottom line. For these programs to work, we have to have no worse utter health next lactation than blanket dry cow therapy. Blanket dry cow therapy is our reference, our gold standard program. To adopt selective successfully, we can't be making things worse. We can't be missing cows that really needed to be treated. The sensitivity of our program, the ability to find and treat cows that do need to be treated, that's our first most important criteria. We were successful. Like I mentioned earlier, we followed all of these cows into the next lactation. By the way, this is a multi-herd, multi-state study.
In each herd, there were three treatment groups. One was the blanket dry cow therapy control group, one was the algorithm-based selective group, and one was the culture-based elective group. We've randomized cows within each herd. In the next lactation, we followed them to 120 days in milk. We followed milk production, somatic cell count records, clinical mastitis events, calling events, death events, looked at all those potential outcomes that are of obvious economic importance to producers, and there was no difference among the three programs. That's perfect. That's exactly what we wanted to see.
Joe: Bradley, what are you doing up at your place? I know obviously, you're not treating your organic herd, but on the conventional side at dry off, what's going on there?
Bradley: Oh, where do I start? I changed all the time. When I started at Morris, it was blanket dry cow therapy. We did that. Then we have the organic herd, which we can't use any dry cow treatments whatsoever. Then at one point, I'm like, "Why am I even spending money or wasting time trying to treat dry cow therapy in our conventional herd when we don't do it in the organic herd and we don't see too many of an issue?" I stopped treating anything for a couple of years, no teat sealants, no nothing. Then after a while, I decided, "Oh, now it seems like infections are going up after 30 to 60 days after they curve again, so maybe I need to look at that."
Sandra: Funny how that happens.
Bradley: Exactly. Then I'm like, "Maybe I need to go back," and we started using blanket dry cow therapy again, as well as teat sealants to help that out. Seems to be working better now. I have thought about selective dry cow therapy and trying to figure that out and do we need to treat, but it all comes back to labor and time. We're not a large herd, 300 cows, but is it easier for the employees just to go down the line and give all 10 cows or look at those? I still haven't, in my mind, to only treat cows that have issues. That's why I was on a Minnesota DHI webinar the last couple days where I heard Sandra talk about their DHI report where they talk about that, which cows to treat.
That might be a good option for us, because it's always like, "How do I decide? Is 300 the best or is 350 cell count?" One other issue that-- I shouldn't say an issue, but one other challenge that I think all dairies probably face with culturing is you have to remain clean, utmost cleanliness because you can infect milk samples really fast, and then it can throw everything crazy. You see that sometime where it's got every bug in the world and does the cow really have that or is it infected from another cow or something like that?
Sandra: That's some thoughts. Yes, so Brad was just referring to contaminated samples. That's absolutely true. If you don't collect a clean sample, garbage in, garbage out, you're not going to get good results and it's going to look like everything is infected and you're not going to reduce your antibiotic use at all and that's a failing program. I do have some thoughts about that. That's where the vet can come in and train people to collect samples and monitor the contamination rate. I think veterinarians don't make enough use of food animal, large animal technicians.
I think this would be a perfect niche for the local vet clinic to train their technicians to come out, do a really consistent clean job of collecting those samples, go back plate the samples in the lab, in the clinics. Maybe the farm doesn't have it on lab. Then they could even come back on dry off day two days later and well-trained people we know can dry these cows off with no problem. There's another possible approach for her that maybe doesn't have DHI data, maybe doesn't want to start DHI testing that leaves the culture-based program for them. If they don't have the time or they're not confident that they can correctly, as you say, collect samples, do the treatments, et cetera, maybe there's a role for the vet and vet technicians to step into this niche and help people out.
Joe: I think technicians are very underutilized in what they can do. We spend a lot of time training these people to do things very confidently. Yes, they can be put in spots where they're doing these things by themselves without direct veterinary supervision to do that. They're very talented people that can handle it just fine. As Brad will probably point out, they don't cost as much as having the veterinarian on your farm. We get expensive, it's hard to deny that, but that's a great option.
Emily: I feel a new side business brewing here. [laughter] We can hire out vet techs to go do that. I was going to ask Sandra economics are probably the number one in influencer to switch to selective dry cow therapy as they should be. I know it all comes down to the bottom line and looking at the costs and that kind of thing. I also wonder, andwe may have to edit this out. I know it's a hot-button issue for some people, and that is on antibiotic resistance. By using less antibiotics, you're hopefully avoiding building up a lot of resistance to that and herds. I was just wondering if you looked into any of that or just have any thoughts on that.
Sandra: No, there are three main reasons why the dairy industry should be looking at selective dry cow therapy in the individual producers. The first is a legitimate concern about antibiotic use and antibiotic stewardship in food animal systems. We know as a general rule, and this is true of animals, cats, dogs, cows, people, it doesn't matter the animal, the more we use antibiotics, the more selection pressure we put on, the more likely we are to create resistance. If we can identify opportunities to reduce that risk, whether it be mastitis or calf pneumonia, or whatever, we should try to create practical systems or approaches to doing that.
Reducing the potential for creating future increased resistance to antibiotics, that's the first reason to do this. We haven't seen a big shift or change in antibiotic resistance patterns in mastitis pathogens over the last 20 years. They've been pretty constant. That doesn't mean to say that tomorrow some plasmid might not jump into some new bug and we create something new. If we can reduce antibiotic use, that's a smart thing to do. The second reason to think about this is just the consumer perception of antibiotic use in, again, food animal systems.
If we can show them that we're making a good faith effort to identify and reduce antibiotic use where it works, then we should be doing that. Selective dry cow therapy is a perfect example of that. Then the third reason, which you've already mentioned, is economics. It is actually economically advantageous for producers to do this. With our data set, we crunched the numbers. We compared the economics of blanket dry cow therapy against both the algorithm-based approach, which was using the DHI cell count data, or the culture-based approach, which obviously required extra labor to collect milk samples, culture, the samples, et cetera.
Well, with both the selective programs, they both had a positive net return. They saved money as compared to the blanket. This varied from herd to herd, but on average, the algorithm-based program saved the producer $7.85 per cow. That's big. That's really, really big. The reason that was is because we considered the cell count data a sunk cost. The herd was already paying for that. For the other reasons, they used DHI cell count data during lactation.
It was essentially free to us to make these dry count or dry off decisions. It was essentially free. You just have to look at a list, say, treat no treat, and go. That was big. $7.85 a cow. The culture-based algorithm approach was also positive, but it was smaller. It was a $2.14 savings per cow, so much smaller because obviously, we have to invest a little bit of money into the labor to collect samples by the culture plates, read the plates, et cetera. It was a smaller positive return, but it was still a positive net return.
Joe: My favorite economics professor, John Fetrow, he was constantly pointing out that despite everything, you wanting everything to be an economic decision, not everything is an economic decision. The fact that we are saving money and there's other reasons to do this that have nothing to do with economics, to me, it makes a lot of sense. Again, it's very conditional on well-trained employees and being able to do everything correctly.
What I hear the most when people are against the use of selective dry cow therapy is this is going to cause a problem for my dairy somatic cell count's going to go up. I do all these things because I'm not managing that the way I used to and I have a potential for that. I can't argue with that if you do this wrong. Because if you have poor infusion technique and aseptic technique when you're drying off cows, I agree you are going to have a problem with this. If you do this all right, it's beneficial pretty much across the board.
Emily: Yes, we talk about that with almost everything I feel like of it all comes down to management. If you are a poor manager, these new-fangled things, ideas, technology, whatever, they're not going to work. You cannot overcorrect poor management with more stuff. Yes, I think that that's a really great point, Joe. Yes, 7.85 a cow, that's huge. Even 2.14. If you milk 1000 cows, 2000 cows, that adds up relatively quickly, I think.
Sandra: Yes. Can I share some cool numbers with you, Emily?
Emily: Yes.
Sandra: 7.85 a cow, the next question is, how many cows is that in my herd? Back in April and May, when we were first bringing our results to Minnesota DHI, they asked that question. How many herds would it really impact in Minnesota? How many cows would it impact in Minnesota? They ran the numbers based on the cell count data. They calculated that in April and May of this year, 2020, 59% of herds would be eligible according to their annual average cell count data.
Within those herds, 79% of cows would be eligible not to treat in April or May. That came out to a 10, 043 cows in April and May alone would not have received antibiotic. The caveat to that is the farmer still needs to go and look at the clinical mastitis sheet and make sure that there aren't some cows there that may be at a low cell count, but have some clinicals. It might be slightly less there, smaller number, but over 10,000 cows in Minnesota in April and May alone would not have needed to be treated.
Emily: That's a lot of money.
Joe: That is a lot of cows and a lot of money on the table. Even what if you say 10% couldn't be treated, that's still 9,000 cows. That's a lot of cows that it would've affected. That's a lot higher than I expected. That's a lot more herd that were eligible than I expected, which talks to your first point that we're doing a really good job and farmers are doing a very good job with the somatic cell count. Those are cool numbers.
Sandra: Yes. I think, I can't remember the exact number right lately, but the average somatic cell count in the average Minnesota herd is under 200,000 now. We're doing really good, really well.
Joe: I'm going to attribute it to all of Emily's extension articles about mastitis.
Emily: I'm sure that that's it. You are welcome, dairy farmers of Minnesota. [laughter] I do really want a quick comment on, you made a good point, Sandra, and Joe said it too, the economics aren't everything. I think that they are a really big driving force in a lot of the decisions that get made today on farms. I also do, and we talked about it before on the podcast, this idea of social responsibility. To me, I just think that that's really important, and thinking about what antibiotic resistance could mean for the future of the industry. Thinking about it now, trying to get ahead of it almost if you can, I think is both responsible and fiscally economically makes sense for these farms. Yes, I am sold, I'm a believer.
Sandra: Yes. If you could go out and tell the consumers at your field day next summer, "Hey, in the last year I've reduced antibiotic use in my herd by 35% or something," wow, that looks really good for the industry.
Emily: Yes, exactly. That has a really big impact.
Bradley: Or just go organic and you don't use antibiotics though.
Emily: Yes, right.
Bradley: I just had to throw-- [inaudible 00:38:03] [crosstalk]
Emily: Go organic and put a sensor in it.
Bradley: I just had to throw that in there.
Joe: Organic is not the solution for everyone, just to be clear.
Sandra: There's a place for everybody in the industry, right?
Joe: Oh, absolutely, yes.
Bradley: I agree. I don't deny we should reduce antibiotic use. If this is one way that we can do that, then we should all do this.
Joe: Yes. It's a big thing. It's a big deal. I think we've covered almost everything. The one thing I wanted to let everybody know out there is that there is a cost calculator that goes along with selective dry cow therapy that the University of Minnesota created. It is on the Dairy Know Website, which is the College of Veterinary Medicines Ruminant Group Dairy website. That is dairyknow.umn.edu. That's D-A-I-R-Y-K-N-O-W.umn.edu. Check that out. That's a great tool. You can put in all your different parameters for how much is this going to save you if you do this. Thank you again, Sandra, for being here. We really appreciate your time today and talking about this today.
Sandra: My pleasure. Thank you.
Joe: If you have comments, questions for us, scathing rebuttals, or scathing rebuttals that we can forward on to Sandra, send them to the moosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M.umn.edu.
Joe: Check out our website. There is an article to match this extension.umn.edu, search for "selective dry cow therapy," you'll find that article. Check us out on Facebook at UMN Beef and at UMN Dairy and check out Emily's YouTube channel. Plug it for me quick.
Emily: U of M Extension, Farm Safety and Health.
Joe: Perfect. I always get the name wrong for whatever reason, so I always have to have them do it. Thank you, everybody, for listening. We'll catch you guys next week.
Emily: Bye.
Joe: Bye.
Emily: Joe, how did it feel being the second smartest person?
[music]
[00:40:02] [END OF AUDIO]

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