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Jenn Bentley, IA State Dairy Field Specialist, joins the OG3 to discuss her favorite topic - dairy calves! This is part 1 of 2 with our time with Jenn. In this episode, we go through benchmarking health data and the importance of colostrum.
Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.
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Joe Armstrong: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG3 is here and we have a guest first time in a long time. Unfortunately, she's not from Minnesota, she's from Iowa State. Jennifer Bentley is with us. Jen, thanks for being here today.
Jennifer Bentley: Thanks for having me on. Don't hold that against me living in Iowa. I am pretty close to the Minnesota border there. I'm a dairy field specialist housed in Winneshiek County, so not far from you guys there in Minnesota.
Joe: Jen is a calf expert and I'm going to throw this out there. This might be the first time Bradley's gotten us guests.
Emily: Yes, I think so.
Bradley: Maybe. You may be right.
Emily: We are right. You are right. What a fantastic guest to get.
Joe: It's very good.
Emily: Jen, when Brad suggested we have you on as a guest, I was like "Yes, we have to, we have to." I have had the opportunity to work with Jen for, gosh, most of my Extension career. We've known each other for quite some time now. It's great to have you on. Yes, she is the calf expert, all things calves, and so excited to dive into that. First, we have a guest, so you know what that means. It's time for the super secret questions. Jen, your first question is this. What is your favorite breed of beef cattle?
Jennifer: Oh, goodness. [laughter] You threw me for a loop. I thought you were going to say, what is my favorite dairy breed? I'm going to say Angus.
Emily: All right.
Joe: Do we have the color associated with that?
Jennifer: Black.
Joe: Black, okay. I will certainly take that because that puts us ahead of Hereford's. First time in a while. Black Angus with nine now, Herefords with eight, Black Baldy with four, Belted Galloway with two, Scottish Highlander two, Red Angus two, Pinzgauer with one, Stabilizer, Gelbvieh, Brahman, Chianina, Charolais, Simmental named Laurie, Jersey Normandy, and Shorthorn.
Emily: Big victory for black Angus today. Super secret question number two, Jen, and you'll be happy about this one. What is your favorite breed of dairy cattle?
Jennifer: It used to be Brown Swiss because I had Brown Swiss as my 4-H project, FFA project, and then when I started working on some farms that had more Jersey, I really fell in love with Jersey, so I'm starting to be partial to them now.
Emily: I have to say you didn't realize you were doing it, Jen, but that was a really slow burn to get Jersey.
Joe: Oh my God, I was so nervous.
Emily: Just seeing the suspense on these two guys' faces was really incredible for me. I'm disappointed with the vote for Jersey, but [crosstalk] it happened.
Jennifer: I'm glad to help out.
Joe: Jersey's such a good-- You're my favorite guest. All right, Holstein's at 15, somehow still leading the way. Jersey's at 11, Brown Swiss at 5, Montbeliardeat a 3, Dutch Belted 2, Normandy 2, and one Guernsey named Taffy.
Bradley: I'll continue to get the guests so we get those Jersey numbers up.
Joe: Yes, thank you. Thank you very much, Bradley. We needed that. I'm really struggling with Holsteins being that far ahead.
Emily: I don't know why you're so surprised by it.
Joe: I'm not, but disappointed. I'll say disappointed.
Emily: [laughs] Not mad, I'm just disappointed.
Joe: Exactly. Way worse, right? Today, one of the things that we wanted to cover, and it's one of the things that we haven't talked about yet, and I'm surprised we haven't talked about it, and it's this idea of having benchmarked data for calves. In a calf operation, there's all sorts of different things you can keep track of. The first step is actually keeping track of them, which is very helpful. Having these numbers in front of us to say, "How is my operation doing? What are some goals for certain things on the farm?"
One of the things that we haven't talked about or what are those actual numbers for some of this health data and other things you can keep track of when it comes to calves? Fortunately, Jen's here to walk us through all of that. Jen, when we're talking about diseases and different things that we see with calves, what are the big things that we keep track of and what are the goals we're trying for in a calf-raising operation?
Jennifer: I would say that first 60 days, that's pretty intense for a calf raiser because there's a lot of things that go on between what are we feeding them, how are we housing them, how are we keeping things clean? That can all bring a whole host of issues when we talk about disease all the way from maternity pen to the calf barn. Things that we can start to monitor is what are our growth rates looking like in those first 60 days and what are our treatments and mortality rates are probably the biggest thing that producers are benchmarking themselves against to see where they're at or how their calf program is doing throughout the year is those things.
Joe: With weights, this is something that I always get questions on and on the beef side when we're talking purebred and seed stock eyes, they're taking weights on newborn calves all the time. Whether or not they're accurate, it's a whole nother different discussion or reported correctly, all of that, but I feel like it's so hard to get a producer to do that one extra step. It's hard enough to do just one extra thing at birth tagging even. How do you convince guys that they need to get that weight?
Jennifer: That's a good question. I think if you want to look at your overall performance of your calf program, it doesn't have to be every day, every single calf. You have a newborn calf, let's weigh it. You don't have to do that every single time, but maybe it's seasonal, so you pick four times a year you're going to do a set of animals and see where you're at. You take a group of 10 or 12 calves and get those weights on those calves during that time that they're born. Two months later, do it again. See where you're at. Eventually, you're going to build yourself a trend line for your own farm.
You'll be able to see what's working seasonally, what's working day to day and that is a hard thing to get out there and weigh those calves. It's probably not something that producers are going to look at doing on every single calf, particularly large herds. I think it is becoming more mainstream. We are seeing herds implement a small scale in the barn. As they bring calves into those calf barns now, they're just locking them right into the scale, and then when they leave the barn, they're doing the same thing. I think it can become routine.
Joe: I love that. I think if we could get it to be routine, I would love to see just a weight into the barn. Basically, a birth weight and a weight out of the barn, a weaning weight. However you guys want to do it, but I love to see that birth weight and weaning weight because of what we know about average daily gain in that pre-weaning period and how much it affects lifetime performance, and how good of a metric it is for our calf-raising facility. I love that. I wish we could get more people to do it. What about weight tapes? How do you feel about weight tapes and are they worth messing with it all?
Jennifer: Maybe Brad or Emily would have opinions on this as well. I think they'd probably be fairly variable as far as accuracy. If you want a real true number, I think you really have to do a scale.
Joe: Brad, you got an opinion on weight tapes?
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Bradley: Oh, everything. Actually, we did study about that once where about eight of us put all of our data together because we'd all weight tape calves and heifers for a long time. We actually found that the weight tape is actually pretty good. If you don't have a scale, it's probably good enough for managing heifers. If you don't want to spend a lot of money, weight tapes aren't cheap either. They're 30 bucks or something like that, but you can certainly get by with a weight tape and get pretty close to the correct weight. If you have a scale, that's good. If you don't, weight tape is second best.
Joe: I like that. That's good to know and that's something I didn't know. I just assumed that weight tapes were variable, like Jen said, and it probably depends on who's using it. The same person every time might be nice so that they're using it the same way. Consistency's going to be big, but yes, that's good to know. Now you got to keep track of that thing. It's a little easier to misplace than a scale, but if you have one, that'd be great. I think the key is what Jen said, that you're establishing something for your farm. You're still creating a trend line. It's still a consistent tool if you're using it correctly.
Good, I learned something. I didn't know that, Brad. Good. We've got weights. In and out, we've got our average daily gain. You talked about mortality. That's a big one obviously. No one likes dead calves. They're a big investment and it's going to happen, we know that. A realistic goal isn't zero, but what is a realistic goal, Jen?
Jennifer: If you look at past NOMS, we've come a long ways in our calf mortality. I have the numbers from 1992 NOMS was 10% death loss on farms across the US. 2014 was 6%, so we're getting closer. Ideally, we would like to have that less than 2%. I think we're making great strides in mortality. A lot of that is because I think we're learning a lot about early life management in the last probably 5,10 years. The importance of colostrum has come a long ways as far as how much and the quality. We've got testing tools now that have really helped us improve that death loss.
Joe: People are just paying attention to calves more than they ever have, which is hard to do. We've talked about it on this podcast before, to be good with calves and to do it really, really well, it's going to be boring and it's supposed to be boring. The same way every day, the same time, consistent, everything the same. Yes, that's boring. Some people really don't like working with calves. I'm one of them, I'm not a big fan, but the money talks now. We have enough information that that's the future of your herd. That's money in your pocket if you do it right. One of the things that we talk about all the time with mortality is then morbidity as well. That'd be just your overall treatment. Where are we at with that?
Jennifer: As far as treatment, originally, we were seeing for scours, our gold-industry standards were looking at less than 25% treatment rate for scours. We've elevated that benchmark to we want that less than 15% of all our calves to be treated for scours. Then pneumonia, we want to see less than 10% of our herd.
Joe: Perfect, yes. I was always really shocked when I read that 25% number everywhere. Like you are saying, you just need less than a quarter of your calves you should treat for scours. That was way too many in my opinion. I think what it led to is actually people looking too hard for scours and treating calves that didn't have scours. Loose stool is not scours. We know that. There's some correlation there, but they don't mean the same thing.
Just because you're loose doesn't mean you have scours, especially because you're drinking nothing but milk, so you got to expect it to be loose. I was always really surprised by that 25%. I'm glad that you're recommending that 15% because that seems way more realistic to me.
Jennifer: When you think about long-term, especially with pneumonia too, if you think about calves that have pneumonia early on in life and how much of that sets them back, those first few lactations in their milk production string, we really lose a lot of milk with those calves with pneumonia. Really elevating that benchmark to less than 10%, I think, is critical to make sure that we're bringing in some healthy animals.
Joe: Well, and if there's beef guys listening there too or maybe they've checked out because it's the dairy episode, but it matters there too. We see the same thing in the feedlot. You got early pneumonias causing poor gains in the feedlot, poor performance, all those same things. This is not exclusively a dairy conversation. These things that we're talking about and what we're going to talk about in a little bit about how to get to these numbers and how to be better, it all applies. It all definitely applies. We've covered mortality, morbidity, growth rates, so we've got our numbers for scours and pneumonia.
It's amazing to me, Jen, that we have these numbers and they're really important, and I can't get a lot of producers to just record what's happening in the calf barn. How do I convince someone to keep track of these things and write it down and make sure, I don't even care if it gets into the computer, but it needs to be written down somewhere, how do I convince people to do that?
Jennifer: Buy them a notepad and a pencil. It can be as simple as that, that when you walk into the calf barn, you have that. Even a dry erase board plastered on the wall, if it's just something that gets erased, at least it's up there for maybe a month you see it just to keep track of those things. A piece of paper on the side of the fridge of the maternity barn, so you can keep track of when that calf was born and how much colostrum did it receive, who fed it, and what were the conditions like when you were feeding that calf.
Then you can really, again, start to base some trend lines for your own farm and see where, okay, nighttime feeding, we're not getting colostrum into those calves until after the night feeding is done versus maybe before the start of the night milking, so now those calves are delayed four, eight, six hours before they get colostrum. That's a trend line that can build over time and you can see that in failure of passive transfer. It becomes a trending point for your employees too because you can actually show them, "Hey, this is what's happening during the night shift.
Calves are not getting their colostrum, so this is what's happening to these calves." I think if producers or their employees can see the information, visibly see it, that makes a huge difference in them wanting to try to improve things on the farm.
Emily: I think it's great that you mentioned that, Jennifer. I really love the idea of giving it some visualization so that other people involved can see what's going on. I think that will increase buy-in, and especially if you are a farm that depends a lot on employee labor, especially for calf care or whatever it may be, that's really essential to making sure you're holding people accountable, and if there is a problem, you can work with them to solve it.
Joe: I have a hard time going in and trying to figure out what's wrong if I don't have those records. You can, but your ability to arrive at the correct answer or at least pinpoint where you need to look is so difficult when you don't have the records. When you're on farm and you're looking at what's going on, you're almost guessing if you don't have the records there to back up what you're thinking. Which is fine, sometimes you can guess right, but you're so much better off in getting things narrowed down and improving and knowing what's going on if we have those records in place.
It's such a great logic puzzle to figure out how it's going to get done. Whiteboards, I think are a huge piece of it. It helps a lot. A notebook just out in the barn works great. I've seen flashcards assigned or a little three by five note cards assigned to each calf. That works pretty well as well. It's just such an important thing. If you're not doing it now, you really, really need to just get started. That's the very first step in all of this, in improving your operation for your calves is making sure you have those records written down somewhere. We can't avoid it. We've said colostrum 50 times now.
We got to talk about it. Colostrum, number one thing we can do, number one predictor of lifetime performance is getting good colostrum into these calves, so let's walk through those four cues of colostrum, Jen.
Jennifer: Before we get started with that, I think going back to some of that NOMS information about calf mortality, I like to use the term survivability now versus mortality, let's look at how many calves are surviving, but we've improved because of our colostrum management. I think we're going to see another jump in improvements in treatment rates because we are going to take that next step with our colostrum and making sure we get even more IgGs into those calves.
In the last few years, the Dairy Calf and Heifer Association and the NOMS have worked to build some different benchmarks or categories to make sure that producers can achieve this even better with calf health, and so making sure still we're getting that colostrum into those calves as soon as possible. That quickness, again, we're looking at, so within the first couple hours of life. I know sometimes it can be hard when you're there for a milking shift and you have a calf that's born, but if you look at long-term, what that's going to do to your milking string, that extra 10 minutes that you do before your milking shift is going to make a big difference two years.
It's hard to see, but the value is there to get that colostrum minimum right away. Then you want to look at quality. We have a couple of different quality testing measures now that we can use. Some are pretty simple. We still have the colostrometer. That's a pretty easy way to measure colostrum. You have to be sensitive to what temperature that milk is when you test it. It can be sensitive to breaking, so you want to make sure you're not dropping it, the hydrometer that you put into the colostrometer.
Sometimes that's not the best tool on some farms anymore, and so we've moved more towards looking at using a handheld refractometer or maybe a digital Brix refractometer that are more an instant number for producers to use with the milk right on the refractometer or the Brix and you get a quick reading. It doesn't take very much time to know whether or not, "Yes, I can use that milk," or, "No, I need to look at something else to feed my calf before I can move on." Taking a look at that quality and just always making sure that we reach for that goal of more than 50 grams per liter of IgGs in that colostrum.
That's going to provide the best quality colostrum to those calves every time we feed them. If we're looking at a Brix refractometer, we want to make sure saying greater or equal to about 22% is your cut-off for that high-quality colostrum. Then looking at quantity, so this always gets to be a big debate about quantity. Depending on if you're measuring for quality, that can maybe help determine what your quantity is going to be. Typically, we're looking at about close to four quarts of colostrum at that first feeding is what we want to strive for.
Obviously, if you have a smaller animal like a Jersey, she doesn't weigh as much, you may be able to just feed her three quarts, but again, looking at if I have 50 grams per liter or about 50 grams per quart of IgGs, if you take that times four, that's about 200 grams of IgGs that you're going to get into that calf. That's really what we're striving for now is that 200 to 300 grams of IgGs within that first feeding. Again, that's a debate. Maybe Brad or Joe have comments on quantity as well.
Bradley: I think you're right. I think four quarts is a good benchmark to start with. It depends on breed size and there's a lot of things to consider, but I think that's a good benchmark to start with on everybody.
Joe: I agree. I think the big thing is I don't like to change the volume and I like to keep it as simple as possible. If you've got quality information, then okay, you can figure out how to get 200 to 300 grams in. I think for me, four quarts is good and I think you shouldn't really decrease that volume very much. The only time I would play with it is if you've got a really small calf, and then I would still feed colostrum at the next feeding. The second feeding would have colostrum coming too. I'm a big fan of four quarts at the first feeding, two quarts at the next feeding of colostrum so that we get two feedings in of colostrum at the very least. Is that something you recommend most often, Jen?
Jennifer: Yes. I would say yes, that four quarts, two quarts the second feeding is most often pretty common for producers to do. Then your other cue is the squeaky clean that's been introduced here in the last few years is making sure we have clean colostrum that we're feeding our calf because we're really defeating the purpose if we feed dirty colostrum to our calf. Where we don't want them ingesting manure, things from the maternity pen. Making sure the same equipment that we're using for our milking parlor is as clean as what we're collecting for our colostrums.
That can be difficult sometimes too because we might have a hospital pen where we're using different equipment that maybe doesn't get used quite as often. How clean is it? Making sure that's always sanitary before we start using it.
Joe: One of the things, and reading through some of the things you've written, Jen, that I was very surprised about because I'm told all the time by farmers that "We collect it clean, we don't need to pasteurize, we don't need to do any of these things because we're just clean and we're good," is how often when you were sampling that and in the data it shows that it's not clean and people are not collecting it clean? That was really surprising to me. It was amazing how many samples came back really, really, really contaminated.
Jennifer: There was a study a few years ago with Iowa State University, and actually, this was a nationwide study on colostrum samples. The combination of cleanliness and the quality of the milk, only about 40% of the samples came back that they were clean and that they were of high quality. That leaves a wide-open window that where's that other 60% low quality or dirty milk that we're using on those calves?
Joe: There's a lot of room for improvement, so we'll call it an opportunity. That's what we'll call it. I think that's what Jen's talking about is that we can improve our calves even more if we can get those numbers improved as well. We talked about colostrum, that's the best thing you can do for these calves overall. If you're not making sure that's right, the rest of it is so much less important. You've got to get that right first. Let's stay on that management trend and say, "Okay, what else should I be doing in my calf barn for these calves to really make sure that they succeed?"
What's up, everybody? This is Dr. Joe Armstrong. We had way too much to cover when we talked to Jen and we're going to be back next week to finish this conversation. Lots more about what you need to do in your calf barn to be successful, and then we'll get into what Bradley really wanted to talk about, which was automatic calf feeders. We'll get some info from him and from Jen on what to do there to be successful as well. As always, if you have comments, questions, scathing rebuttals, send them to themoosroom@umn.edu.
That's T-H-E M-O-O-S R-O-O-M @umn.edu. Catch us on Twitter @umnmoosroom and @umnfarmsafety. Catch Bradley on Instagram @umnwcrocdairy. Thank you for listening, everybody. We'll catch you next week.
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