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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.
Welcome to The Moo's Room. Just back from Florida. Yes, I know it was sunny. It was 95 degrees there in mid-October, which is kind of crazy. Even the people in Florida were saying that it was a little maybe hot for mid-October. But I was there for some research meetings. We have a group of dairy management researchers here in the United States, where we all get together once a year at different places around the US and kind of share what we're doing, work on, on projects together, where we can collaborate and do lots of things.
So it was a good day of a couple days of meetings. We saw some dairies. We went to the University of Florida Dairy and checked out all of their research, what they're doing on heat stress. Obviously, Florida is pretty hot. They have some slick Holsteins and lots of good research happening there. We also went to their Brahman herd.
So they have a 200-cow Brahman herd that was quite fascinating, so I learned a lot about Brahman cattle in the US and how that goes. But most of, of us researchers at this meeting, we've been doing a lot of calf research. We kind of do various feeding experience, uh, behavioral experiments. Uh, there was a lot of us talking about beef-on-dairy crosses and how we're all gonna work together on doing a lot more research with beef-on-dairy crosses.
But there was one study that I wanted to kind of share about. I thought it was quite fascinating, and it's actually just published in the Journal of Dairy Science in late September by Melissa Kantor. She's at Penn State University and did a research survey to people in North America, so the US and Canada, that all about calf management practices.
And so we're gonna go through that. I thought it was really fascinating to listen to Melissa talk about this research and maybe how we can help farmers and farmers themselves can maybe check some of these things out, uh, to help improve all of their calves. So obviously, this study was about challenges in the calf raising industry, uh, because a lot of producers face issues with BRD or bovine respiratory disease, uh, neonatal scours or diarrhea, and umbilical infections, which was kinda crazy to hear that umbilical infections are quite high.
And if you look at BRD scours and umbilical infections, they kind of collectively account for about a third of issues in pre-weaned dairy calves. So obviously, you know, when a disease happens, the producers are actually scrambling for a lot of different fixes, looking for antibiotics to use or other treatments.
So obviously, effective disease management requires kind of stepping back and evaluating kind of the broader environmental operation or what's happening on the dairy So this study kind of provided a real fresh perspective on challenges and how industry professionals are kind of troubleshooting these disease outbreaks.
So like I said, it was gathered from North America. So this is a survey. So they surveyed different consultants, veterinarians, extension academic nutritionists, milk processors, students. Basically, we'll call them calf health experts about what they see on dairies and, and what's happening. So there's a lot of veterinarians.
Thirty-one percent of the results here are from licensed veterinarians, twenty-two percent from extension, and about twenty percent dairy consultants. So about seventy percent are vets, academics, or consultants.
And they all wanted to be sure that all of these experts had no financial stake in these commercial dairies that they were working with. So that was probably one of the big things. Now obviously, most of this was in the United States, kind of concentrated around the Northeast, so Pennsylvania and New York, and the Midwest, uh, Wisconsin.
About twelve percent of these experts worked in Canada as well, so some Canadian influence here. And the herds that they targeted ranged actually pretty good distribution. So they had less than a hundred and twenty cows, a hundred and twenty to seven hundred cows, and then obviously some large operations over seven hundred cows.
So they had about a third, a third, and a third across herd size distribution
So if you think about these experts that were looking at this survey, basically 51% consulted farms on a BRD outbreak, respiratory disease. 47% consulted on calf scours or diarrhea, and 13% consulted on high umbilical infections. So those were the three main areas where these dairy experts were consulting with farms on.
So BRD, diarrhea, and umbilical infections
So really it found some impactful insights and it kind of demonstrated how nutritional limits, pen grouping, and missing protocols can drive disease dynamics on farms. So let's dive in and see what they actually found by consulting with these experts
So the first one was that nutritional restriction is probably fueling respiratory disease. So kind of underfeeding milk is kind of the unseen thing that is found in a lot of BRD outbreaks
So when herd managers face kind of sudden spikes in pre-weaned respiratory problems, their response is often adjusting vaccination schedules. They're checking calves, making sure they have jackets on. They're blaming the weather. I know we blame the weather a lot here at our research center for respiratory issues.
But really when these calf experts went onto farms that were struggling with pneumonia, the first place that they looked was often the liquid feeding area. So among these experts that were kind of troubleshooting BRD herds or BRD issues on farms, the primary consensus was that low milk allowance, so that's less than four liters of milk a day, was a foundational management failure And I found that quite interesting in talking at the meeting that there are a lot of herds out there that are still feeding four liters of milk per day.
That's pretty low. And we're at eight liters
We're at eight liters of milk on our calves, so that's double what you would find probably on some of these herds in this study. But I think sometimes that's too low myself, and we'll talk about our calves that we found maybe next week on some insights on our calf rearing But historically, the standard producer practice involved restricted milk feeding.
That's usually about 10% of the body weight, so four liters a day. And they do that out of fear of causing nutritional scours and to really minimize liquid feeding costs. Calves are expensive, so they try to minimize costs. So the experts really recognize that this restriction of milk intake starves the calf's developing immune system.
And really, without sufficient energy and nutrient intake, the young calves can't maintain effective immune function, which really leaves them vulnerable to respiratory problems. So really, this finding highlighted that the experts surveyed found that this nutritional restriction, feeding less than four liters of milk a day, is probably driving severe disease, especially from a BRD standpoint Another one was grouping over 10 calves kind of causes a disease vulnerability.
And I know I'm not gonna get into group housing today and, you know, we debate group sizes and how that all works. You know, our calves right now, the heifer calves are in groups of 10. The auto feeder calves is groups of 30. So all of this-- There's a lot of dynamics that play into this, but the biggest thing that they found is that grouping over 10 may be creating some issues.
So while kind of pair housing, and we talked a lot about pair housing at this meeting, kind of supports social development, scaling group sizes above 10 kind of created a tipping point where this contamination and feeding competition kind of overrided the welfare benefits. So this study kind of found that experts agreed that group sizes larger than 10 served as a big driver for both respiratory disease and scours.
So it really provided kind of this double disease vulnerability on high pen sizes in calves. So it's kind of this debate whether social housing remains a valuable tool, but going above and beyond specific calf sizes can maybe negate some of those welfare benefits So number three, the other issue, missing standard operating procedure probably caused more health breakdowns than the actual feeding equipment did.
Obviously, you know, resolving some of these health problems can re- sometimes require heavy capital investment, because sometimes farmers are upgrading their automated feeding systems, they're installing negative pressure ventilation systems, or they decide to just build a new barn to help alleviate some of their problems.
But across all of these health categories, the complete lack of formal written standard operating procedures was consistently ranked as a primary driver of disease on farms
So the absence of written navel dipping SOPs found more umbilical infections, lack of sanitation protocols was an issue for scours outbreaks, and the absence of written colostrum feeding SOPs caused scour challenges as well So obviously, th- these findings kind of spotlight there is a human element still to calf feeding, and we're supposed to help find the best possible way to treat all of these animals so we don't get disease.
And obviously, written protocols are probably the biggest thing. So
Sometimes there's no knowledge on these facilities, there's inadequate infrastructure, and it really results in day-to-day problems that are really causing issues without unwritten procedures, which in the end really can have high employee turnover. So the other one they found postnatal care kind of defeated umbilical infections, and we've unfortunately seen this in our dairy.
This year we've had one umbilical infection. We don't have many, but calf specialist was out the other day and asked if we dip navels, and, well, we don't, and we really haven't in the past. And it's-- there is a debate about that all the time, and whether we should do it or not, but I think it's a good practice, especially at birth, to have great hygiene.
And obviously, when these umbilical infections increase on a dairy, producers often look for medical treatments or antibiotics to manage these swollen navels instead of actually looking back at the issue that caused this issue in the first place, and that was really calving hygiene So the experts found that farms that had elevated umbilical infections, so greater than 5%, they identified maternity pen management as the single critical point to alleviating this issue.
Obviously We found that
So the experts found two breakdowns that are responsible for umbilical disease, and one was the absence of an umbilical cord dipping protocol and wet or dirty maternity and calving pens. So really basic hygiene applied immediately at birth really helped solving some of these navel infections.
Basically dipping the navel at birth with an effective sanitizer and providing a clean, dry calving environment
And lastly, air exchanges. We might not think about that. So air exchanges and early colostrum quantity are some of the benchmarks that should be applied on farms. So basically, this study found that there's a colostrum volume deficiency, so delivering inadequate colostrum volume within the first hours of life basically meant that farms were having more diarrhea.
And poor winter air exchange, so insufficient winter ventilation also caused BRDs. So basically, when a newborn calf received less than two liters of colostrum, it really failed to acquire sufficient IgG levels, which meant that it was compromised in passive immunity
And then from a winter housing environment, obviously poor ventilation, elevated humidity, and airborne pathogens sort of created issues with respiratory disease in these farms So what do we do? So this study kind of highlighted some of the shifts that we see in pre-weaned calf management. So obviously controlling calf death requires us to move away from treating diseases as a series of just random events that might be happening with antibiotics.
Instead, we must think about helping challenge these disease issues with protocol gaps, nutritional effects, and environmental issues. So what do we need to do? Well, we need to provide milk allowance. So calves need to drink more than four liters, and I would suggest six to eight, if not eight as a minimum.
And I, I think there should be no compromise to that. The idea that calves need four liters a day is just bonkers nowadays. I just-- And that's what it was when I started at Morris 15 years ago, and we've increased much more, and I think the calves do much better on higher milk allowances Obviously capping group sizes at 10.
Yeah, we can debate that, but depends on each farm's management style. We group our calves outside in groups of 10 because that's the size of the super hutches, and it works really well. Obviously, farms need to have written S- SOPs for sanitation, colostrum handling, navel care. We all need to have SOPs, and we need to make sure that they're being followed.
I think that's-- we can have all the SOPs in the world, but if we're not following them, that can be an issue as well. We need to maintain clean, dry maternity pens at birth, and we need to ensure for those of us that live in the north with winter, we need to have continuous winter air exchange to help prevent a lot of these disease challenges on farms So with that, I hopefully you learned a little bit today about what's happening on dairies in the North America as far as some disease challenges, and we'll talk about more of those into the future.
So with that, I think we'll leave it there for today, and if you have any comments, questions, scaling rebuttals, feel free to contact me at The Moos Room. That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M @umn.edu, or find us on the web, University of Minnesota Livestock Extension, or UMN WCROC Dairy. And with that, I hope you have a great week.
Bye.