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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.
00;00;11;03 - 00;00;40;20
Brad
And welcome to The Moos Room, Brad, here on an Sunday evening, actually, recording a podcast. Everything got crazy during the week, as it usually does this week. We had nice weather in the early part of last week, and then it got really cold and snowy, and now it's back to cold again. So it's Minnesota in February. One day it's summer out, the next day it's actually winter again.
00;00;40;20 - 00;01;02;02
Brad
But kind of some cool things happening at our research center. I put in a new activity and rumination system. On Wednesday during a snowstorm. I had Genex come out. We put in the need app system, so I'm quite excited about how that system is going to go. And and working for our cows actually put it on a caller system on, I didn't have your tags.
00;01;02;02 - 00;01;27;19
Brad
I got way too many your tags in our cows ears now. So we put in the color system and we're gonna see how that goes. You know, I'm kind of excited, but to see that system and I'll certainly talk about the need up system in the future and how that's working for our dairy. But I just came back from Gopher Dairy Club banquet in the Twin Cities in Saint Paul tonight, and there were some good awards.
00;01;27;21 - 00;01;57;08
Brad
Brandon and Kim grew from Cumberland, Wisconsin, got our Distinguished Service Award, wonderful Guernsey breeders, helping out the judging team, the University of Minnesota and doing all they can do, for the college students. And then, my mentor, Les Hanson, got the Golden graduate award at the Gopher Dairy camp. So a wonderful, award for him for all the years that he's, been a good mentor for a lot of students and grad students and everybody in the dairy industry.
00;01;57;08 - 00;02;20;18
Brad
So it was nice to be at the Dairy Club banquet and meeting some old friends and catching up there. But alas, enough banter to begin with. I wanted to talk about some weird things. Kind of some case studies, a few if you will, on some animals that I'm pretty open. We've had some issues here about lots of different things at our dairy farm.
00;02;20;18 - 00;02;54;20
Brad
I'm willing to share. I know a lot of farmers are not. They might be embarrassed or think they're bad managers because of some of the health issues that happen on their farm or these freak things, but I'm willing to share about some of these things. I'm certainly interested in sharing about what happens on our dairy and maybe giving some kind of tips, I guess, about how to prevent some of these things that we see on our dairy, because I'm guessing that it happens on more than just our dairy.
00;02;54;23 - 00;03;17;05
Brad
Well, we had kind of three cases that we're going to talk about, two that involved some calves. And I hate when things happen to calves because that's the future of our herd. And a lot of the good breeding that we're doing. And to lose a couple calves, can be devastating to any farm. And the other one is another bought, another cow aborted.
00;03;17;05 - 00;03;40;06
Brad
We've had a couple aborts going on, in, in some of our the herd again. But we'll talk about, what those are and well, let's talk about kind of our first, our first calf here and see what it was. So this calf was born November 14th, 2025. So this calf died when it was 60 days of age.
00;03;40;08 - 00;04;04;13
Brad
It was a crossbred calf. But kind of on my genetic study, it was out of lustrous, bull. So I was really looking forward to having more pulled animals in our herd. But it's always, something. But. So this was a pulled calf born in early November. Group housed with other animals. You know, we did a lot of the things that we normally do.
00;04;04;18 - 00;04;28;16
Brad
Calf hood, vaccinated gut first defense, calf guard. And then, about Christmas time, kind of December 26th, I guess it really had started to decline. You know, farm workers noticed this calf was starting to decline. It was not getting up to drink, having a hard time kind of just laid around a lot. So there was many, many things.
00;04;28;16 - 00;04;50;18
Brad
They looked at temperature of the calf. They they gave it Drax and they gave it exceed because maybe it had a temperature and we didn't know what it was was it scours. Was it something else? They were giving this calf electrolytes. We gave it penicillin, more electrolytes. It was kind of lame, I guess you could say. And, you know, they were giving it back.
00;04;50;18 - 00;05;15;03
Brad
And I mean, as well. So we threw everything at this calf to see what was going on. And then in the end, it kind of made the decision January 15th. So about three weeks after it really started to go downhill, that we needed to euthanize this calf and do a necropsy on it to see what was going on, what what was happening.
00;05;15;05 - 00;05;36;13
Brad
This this was a big calf. This calf weighed 250 pounds. It was really gross. He did really well. But the last three weeks kind of had some problems. Okay. So we did a necropsy. The vet came out, looked at this calf, started opening her up. Everything looked good, digestive system looked good. You know, I was there for the necropsy.
00;05;36;16 - 00;06;00;23
Brad
The lungs look really good. So no lung issues whatsoever, no pneumonias, no bacteria in in this calf. Everything looked good. No problems until we moved to the heart. So we looked at the heart and then all of a sudden it was there. There was. We started looking at the heart. I believe it was the the left side. The left ventricle was paper thin.
00;06;00;25 - 00;06;32;18
Brad
There wasn't much left. It was a really small muscle on the heart. The right side looked pretty good from the heart. Really good from a tissue. But the left, when we cut the heart open and it was like paper thin on this heart of this calf, basically, we determined or determined that this calf had a genetic defect, that it had a heart defect and the left aorta was thin and so there was nothing that we could really do about this genetic defect.
00;06;32;22 - 00;06;56;28
Brad
We can't tell that the heart is going, but, you know, kind of happens with a heart defect. These curves do really well. They're growing well, but then they get to a certain point where the heart just takes up a lot of energy to pump blood and get everything going. And the heart muscle kind of gives out. And we saw this as this calf got older three weeks before we did the necropsy.
00;06;57;01 - 00;07;24;08
Brad
It was going downhill really fast. So a genetic defect on a heart. It's kind of interesting. I never really saw kind of a paper thin aorta before. It was just mind blowing to see what they were going through in this, this calf. You know, obviously that heart was trying to work, but it just wasn't going to work. So there was nothing, you know, this calf would have succumbed weeks later anyways and it would have went downhill even more.
00;07;24;12 - 00;07;49;06
Brad
So we're glad that we did that. Obviously, the vet maybe considered, you know, if we had other problems that we we should do some selenium testing and look at what was going on in our heifers, you know, was there a mineral problem with our calf grains or things about that? You know, we were in the middle of revamping our calf feeding program as well, looking at milk and grain intake.
00;07;49;06 - 00;08;10;01
Brad
So maybe there's something there. And I got a lot of recommendations, looking at our calf program as well. And maybe we'll discuss those certainly in the future. But one thing to look for. Could it be a mineral deficiency that caused this heart defect, or was it actually genetic? This is the second calf kind of early February here.
00;08;10;02 - 00;08;34;00
Brad
Maybe in in early January, maybe late late December. I noticed this was a calf was born March 21st. It's a registered Holstein an eye candy out of, this would be a king boy. So, a pretty good calf. That was really doing well. If I look at what we did, you know, we did the the all the vaccinations.
00;08;34;03 - 00;09;01;12
Brad
De Horning even got some vaccinations in them in the summertime. And in October noticed some respiratory problems. So at seven months of age, they gave this calf some new floor because they thought it was having a tough time, with some respiratory issues. Otherwise, did some vaccinations, no problem. Kind of went on and kind of noticed this calf was maybe a little bit smaller than the rest, but not anything out of the ordinary.
00;09;01;12 - 00;09;17;18
Brad
And then again, around kind of Christmas time, I was looking at all the heifers. You know, it's hard for me sometimes. I like to look at all the animals and see what's going on, and, you know, making sure everything's okay. But, you know, I looked at this one in December and it was like, man, what is going on with this heifer?
00;09;17;18 - 00;09;42;27
Brad
It just looks it's skinny. His hair looks kind of, you know, not very nice, a little bit smaller than the rest, but I didn't really notice any respiration problems in this heifer at all. But I kind of looked at the animal and did some investigation. Its hooves were kind of curling up, you know, it was weird. I didn't never seen a an animal start curving on, on its hooves.
00;09;42;27 - 00;10;00;09
Brad
You know, this calf was nine months of age by the time we we put it down and we did. This calf weighed maybe 300 pounds. Nine month old calf is is pretty small. I thought it had parasites. You know, I've kind of seen that before. I'm like, oh man, maybe we got some worms or, or something going on in our animal.
00;10;00;09 - 00;10;20;23
Brad
So we gave it some ivermectin and then vendors all to see if we could take care of the parasite issue. But did it get better? Looked a little bit better after that. I'm like, oh, maybe, maybe that's what was happening. But then it just went downhill and we made the decision to put this heifer down as well. This heifer was at the feed bunk all the time.
00;10;20;23 - 00;10;48;06
Brad
Every time we fed, always it, the feed bunk eating all the time. It was ruminating. No, no major problems. Unfortunately, I was not there for this necropsy. I was, away at another conference, but basically cut this calf open. Everything looked good again. No issues with digestion, no lung issues. Everything looked good. And then we moved to the heart.
00;10;48;06 - 00;11;23;05
Brad
Same thing. And this was in the right side. So basically right side heart failure. It was the the right ventricle was sort of flaccid as they say, distended pulmonary artery. So again the ventricle was kind of thin. Not much there for a heart muscle at all. So basically they deemed this calf a nine month old heifer had heart failure and was had some either issue related to genetics or environment that caused a heart problem.
00;11;23;07 - 00;11;49;23
Brad
You know, there can be many causes of heart issues genetics, summer genetics. Some are environmental, but we really don't know where could this be coming? Could it be related to the selenium testing that I'd talked about in the previous calf? Possibly, but we're not sure. So there we have it with two calves, one 60 day old calf and one nine months of age had congestive heart failure.
00;11;49;25 - 00;12;07;25
Brad
So it's kind of kind of some of those freak things and, and a lot of these things, maybe farmers don't really know that they have or have problems. Heifers die or calves die. And we really don't know. We'd like to do necropsies on all of our animals to figure out what's going on and see if there are problems, how we can fix those.
00;12;07;27 - 00;12;32;21
Brad
So I'd recommend doing some necropsies if you don't. So again, let's talk about some aborts. Here we go again with some buffer wonderful abortions. So this, cow was just a first lactation heifer milked about 300 days, maybe not quite 300 days. Didn't really have many problems. She's known as negative because this negative maybe had 1 or 2 bouts with mastitis.
00;12;32;21 - 00;13;03;28
Brad
Nothing terrible. And then we dried her off January 22nd. So about a month ago. And at dry us we give dry cow treatments. This is a conventional cow spectrum. Last dry we gave Novak vaccine which is for mastitis. And then we also give scour guard to help with a calf immunity. So this cow boarded on February 13th. So about three weeks after she went dry, crossbred cow won't be there.
00;13;04;01 - 00;13;29;19
Brad
And earlier we had another cow abort, a Holstein cow that was dry six months. I know it was an organic cow and she just stopped milking. So we we let her go dry and she aborted as well. So our our dry cows are raised out on a pasture, wintering pasture, a little bit of ways from our milking parlor, but they're all together kind of fed on the ground, I guess.
00;13;29;19 - 00;13;50;11
Brad
I don't necessarily like that, but, no feed bunks. They're there. Shelter in windbreaks, but they're not in a barn or anything. They're they're kind of raised, wintered. And so the workers and notice this cow, it aborted, and it's like, okay, well, we noticed a couple other abortions. We better take care of this and send in what was going on with this calf.
00;13;50;11 - 00;14;10;21
Brad
So I sent it in to the University of Minnesota diagnostic lab. And I just actually got the diagnostic report back yesterday or or today. So we kind of know what's going on. So it was a kind of my explanation to the veterinarian in charge. I brought a fetus in. So this was all testing in in the aborted fetus that we got.
00;14;10;21 - 00;14;29;05
Brad
It's kind of the third abortion in the last ten days. All of the other abortions were about three weeks, from expected calving date. You know, I kind of thought, well, maybe it was a a vaccine abort, but maybe not. I think all of our aborts would be a first lactation cow. Second lactation cow. And the other one was a fifth or six lactation cow.
00;14;29;07 - 00;14;53;15
Brad
You know, like I said, no glucose, no Joni's in this animal. All doing standard fect vaccinations. You know, we had our Knaresborough cast that that happened last summer. And, you know, we can still debate whether Neosporin was causing any abortions or not. But it was picked up. So I brought the whole fetus in, did some diagnostic testing. Let's look at the summary.
00;14;53;15 - 00;15;24;25
Brad
They did some other testing. BVD so bovine viral diarrhea, IBR, you know, which could cause, abortions as well. Those were both negative. So negative BVD negative IBR the Lepto PCR test is still incomplete yet. So that one hasn't been reported. But basically it came back circle bacteria circle bacteria species. So what what is circle bacteria?
00;15;24;28 - 00;15;59;21
Brad
Well, it's a bacteria that can be found in bedding manure or soil. So it's kind of like it's a gram negative bacteria. It can cause acute mastitis in animals. If it gets in through the the teat, you know, if you get circle these animals can have sudden onset fever decreased milk production. But this was a dry cow. So we didn't really know loss of appetite dehydration and what are what's another thing that can happen to these animals that get circle.
00;15;59;23 - 00;16;31;27
Brad
Well it can abort their fetus. So it's one of the causes of kind of spontaneous abortions in dairy cattle. Now, we didn't really identify the species of circle bacteria. There's many different species of circle bacteria. So circle bacteria accessory is probably one that can be related to abortions in dairy cattle. So it could be that they didn't necessarily get to specific on what was what the circle was that was causing this.
00;16;31;27 - 00;17;04;16
Brad
They did some susceptibility testing to see if it was resistant or not resistant to some drug classes. So it was resistant to clindamycin, it was resistant to some sulfa drugs and looks like a few others. Tillerson So it was kind of resistant to some different species. If I look at her activity monitoring system manager, see what happened. Well, the day she aborted, she was down and eating down in rumination.
00;17;04;16 - 00;17;29;09
Brad
But the day before, definitely not everything looks good on this cow. No indication that we would have any issue or abortions in this animal. So circle bacteria, how can we prevent it? I don't know, it's maybe one of those weird things that's found in the environment. Yes. Could it be caused of manure or, you know, feeding on the ground that we had that certainly could be the cause of it.
00;17;29;09 - 00;17;53;21
Brad
Getting some, circle bacteria in from manure and cows are ingesting that and they get a big load and, and now all of a sudden we have a few spontaneous abortions in animals. So that could that's my my guess. I don't really know for sure where this animal could have got that from, but I'm kind of guessing it came from the environment or the conditions that we have our animals in, in the out.
00;17;53;21 - 00;18;22;10
Brad
When a wintering area. So hopefully we don't get any more. I think, we've had our fair share and we're ready for spring to come. We're actually going to be start calving soon. So our first calves are due in three weeks, and we'll be looking forward to a wonderful calving season and getting some good calves on the ground, some a lot more beef and dairy crosses coming that are $1,500 a piece.
00;18;22;10 - 00;18;43;03
Brad
So I'm kind of excited to see how spring carving is going to go. So hopefully you maybe learned a few things. I know we didn't maybe not learned anything, but kind of an interesting case study. Some of our calves that had heart defects and some other abortions and what, what those might be caused from. So hopefully you may have learned some or took a few tidbits.
00;18;43;06 - 00;19;03;04
Brad
And with that, I think I'll close for this evening. And if you have any comments, questions, or scathing rebuttals, feel free to contact me at the Moose Room. That's t m o s r o o m at human edu. Find us on the web at University of Minnesota Livestock Extension, and we have a new dairy extension page coming.
00;19;03;07 - 00;19;11;22
Brad
Or find us on the web, but, and crock dairy and with that. Hope you have a good week. But eat.