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Erik Jopp, from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, is with the OG3 today. We talk about drug residue avoidance and how MDA can help both beef and dairy farms to avoid drug residues.
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.
[music]
Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. Today, we have the OG3 here, and a guest. Our guest today is Erik Jopp. He is the veterinarian and supervisor of the Meat Inspection Program with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Today, we're talking about drug residues and how to avoid them, some of the outreach programs that MDA has going on. Erik's going to walk us through that. Before we get to that, though, Emily's going to get us through the two questions that we ask every guest.
Emily: Yes. Before I get to that, I just want to say welcome to Erik. People may not know this, but I've known Erik for several years. Back in my days in Stearns, Benton, and Morrison Counties, our paths crossed. I remember doing 4-H livestock ID checking with Erik at many Stearns County Fairs. Nothing unites people quite like that experience. Welcome, Erik. We're glad you're here.
Erik Jopp: Oh, thank you.
Emily: Two secret questions to get started. Based on the artwork in the background of your video, I'm going to start with the other thing first, what is your favorite breed of dairy cattle?
Erik Jopp: Favorite breed of dairy cattle? I would say probably the Holstein.
Emily: Yes, good choice. [chuckles]
Erik Jopp: What I've been exposed to the most, and that's the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of a dairy cow, it's black and white.
Emily: Hmm, classic. Timeless.
Bradley: Wrong answer. Wrong.
Joe: It is absolutely wrong, and that puts Holsteins out front. Holsteins at seven, Jerseys at six, Brown Swiss at four, Dutch Belted at two, Normandy at one, Montb�liarde at one.
Emily: Oh, yes. Tweedledee and Tweedledum here, they're Jersey guys, so I was so happy you said Holstein. That leads to the second question, which you probably have figured out what it is, what is your favorite beef breed?
Erik Jopp: Well, as you mentioned, the artwork behind me, I raise purebred Charolais, so that would be my favorite breed of beef.
Joe: Oh, that's a new one.
Emily: Also an excellent choice.
Joe: Yes, at least Herefords didn't get another vote. That's all I'm going to say.
Bradley: They're still in first, so it doesn't matter.
Joe: That's true.
Emily: Whatever.
Joe: Herefords at six, Black Angus at four, Black Baldy at two, Brahman at one, Stabilizer, one, Gelbvieh, one, Scottish Highlander, one, Chianina, one, and now Charolais, one.
Emily: I can't believe that's our first Charolais. That blows my mind.
Bradley: Well, there's not as many in Minnesota as what some of the other breeds are.
Emily: Yes.
Bradley: There are some--
Emily: I know. In Central Minnesota, a lot of people have them, so I was used to that. All right. Well, good. In Bradley's world, Erik, the two correct answers are Jersey and Hereford. You said neither of them, so good job. You actually were right.
Erik Jopp: [laughs] Great.
Joe: Apparently, the only correct answer is just whatever makes Bradley and Joe disappointed.
[laughter]
Joe: Okay, let's get into this for real. Erik, give us just a brief background about yourself. Who are you? Tell us, for sure, where you went to school, because that's very important, and we like that answer as well.
Erik Jopp: All right. I did my undergrad and vet school at the University of Minnesota. Graduated several years ago from vet school, we won't say exactly how long, but I went right into private practice from from vet school in Stearns County, Central Minnesota. I was in the Cold Spring Vet Clinic for just about 12 years doing primarily dairy practice, until the job became open at the at the state level looking for a veterinarian. Actually, Nikki Neeser, my overall boss, who's the director of the division, is a classmate of mine from vet school. When the position came open, she reached out saying, "Hey, I wonder if you know anybody who might be interested?" And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, "Oh, getting out on-call on weekends and holidays, and wear and tear on the body, maybe not a bad thing."
Like I said, after just about 12 years in practice, I moved over to Department of Ag, and I've been here now going on 10 years already. My primary job with the with the state is I supervise meat inspectors at the smaller facilities across the state, so I'm in charge of basically the inspectors for the northern half of the state. I oversee them on a day-to-day basis, I do their training. I'm also in charge of doing humane handling audits at these facilities that are under inspection. I have to be in all of those facilities every 12 to 18 months. Another part of my day-to-day job is, if an animal comes into an inspected facility that the inspector has questions about, or they feel needs to be condemned because it's not fit for human consumption, they get a hold of me, and I'm the one who makes that final call. Anything that's condemned at an animal level has to be done by a veterinarian, so I do that as well.
Now, since spring or since COVID has hit, I've been very, very busy going around the state, looking at prospective new facilities, licensing new custom facilities, as well as some of our inspected facilities, so I wear many hats at the state. I also participate on the Drug Residue team. There's three veterinarians, me being one of them on that team, so we do the outreach education with any dairy and meat residues throughout the state as well. That's another part of my job, and that's what we're here today talking about.
Joe: The biggest thing to point out is that I thought only people who worked for extension wore that many different hats. It's good to see that someone else has to do that as well.
Emily: Our brethren, Jack of all trades, master of none.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. Exactly. I'm glad that you-- You're involved in a lot, and that's a lot to deal with. I'm sure it hasn't gotten better with COVID, especially with trying to get the new facilities figured out. Just for the sake of time, we're going to have to focus just on one little small piece of your job, which is the Drug Residue Program, because I think we could talk for five, six episodes if we tried to jump into all of it. I think the big question for me is, when we're talking about the Drug Residue Prevention Program, the first thing that comes to mind is that you guys get a bad rep, in my opinion. There's a lot of producers that just don't want to see you on their farm because they think it's always a bad thing. Walk me through how you guys handle that, how you're trying to change maybe that rep that you've got.
Erik Jopp: To start off, I would say most of the residues that we go out on are milk residues, and I can understand us getting a bad rep because we're there because something bad happened on the farm, they had a residue for whatever reason. But our main goal out there as veterinarians on that farm is to just kind of take another bird's eye look at their facility, how they handle drugs, and record-keeping, and those types of things, and then maybe try to give them some ideas of things they can improve on. We're not out there in a regulatory fashion by any means. We're out there for education, outreach, answer questions. We also are out there with the dairy inspector on those visits, and we try to have the field rep along with us as well.
We bring along a lot of information as far as informational packets, record-keeping booklets, so if there's anything that we feel could be used or helpful for those producers, that's what we're there to do, is share that information with them and help educate them, because our main goal is to prevent any more of these residues from happening. We do get out on a few meat residue cases as well. Those are a little different because we don't necessarily have anybody else with us. Some of those, we do because of a residue that's occurred, or we also do offer just a site visit to go over ideas and things that farms are doing so they can get our perspective on how they can do things better or more preventative. Just kind of three different types of visits that we do.
Emily: I really like what you said about-- Kind of all of them, but it seems like really on the dairy side, how you seem to really focus on taking a team approach in bringing in other individuals, the field rep, et cetera. I think that that's a really great way to handle it, and I'm guessing would probably take some of that tension away as well by bringing in a group of people to help and and look at it from different perspectives.
Erik Jopp: We have to be a little careful there as well because we don't want to bring too many people onto a farm, because just sheer numbers can make people uncomfortable. We try to gauge that by the producer as well, what their comfort level maybe is as far as how many people and who is all there. We take direction from not only the field inspector, but also the field rep from the creameries as well of how many people could be there, what things that we need to touch on or don't need to touch on.
Bradley: It's probably already uncomfortable enough to know that some sort of residue challenge happened, and people have to come out to the farm. I'm sure it's already stressed enough before you even get there.
Erik Jopp: Absolutely, yes. Probably the most stressful day is when they get the call from the creamery that they had a residue, and then they're trying to figure out, "Okay, what happened? What do we do?" That's probably the most stressful. Then when we come out, we try to get there within a month of that residue occurring, and kind of bring some of those bad feelings back. We understand that, and we try to work through that and try to educate as much as we can and answer questions, but we don't want to take the place of their local veterinarian. The local veterinarian is still their go-to person, so we maybe try to stimulate conversation that could happen between that producer and the veterinarian as well to help things out.
Joe: When we're talking on the dairy side, is the biggest offender still penicillin, or what drug are we looking at most often when we're looking at these [unintelligible 00:10:49]?
Erik Jopp: I don't have those numbers in front of me, but I would say penicillin is one of the top two or three. Mastitis tubes, the variety of types, is probably the biggest thing. Milking either a dry cow into the tank or accidentally milking a treated cow for mastitis reasons. If that's a penicillin treatment or Today/Tomorrow tubes, take your pick, is probably the most common.
Joe: On the meat side, are we looking at kind of the same thing? Is it mostly penicillin again, or what's your biggest offender on that end?
Erik Jopp: On the meat side, usually it's penicillin, and then the Ceftiofur families. The way we check for those residues, we can't differentiate if it's Excenel, Naxcel, Spectramast, they all fall under the same group since we're finding a secondary metabolite in the meat, so we can't differentiate which product it was. So the Ceftiofurs and penicillins are at the top of the list.
Joe: When you do go out on a farm-- and I have my own thoughts on this, I think I know probably what the answer is. For most farms, what seems to be the reason that the residue happened in the first place? Where's the bottleneck on the farm most of the time that you see and think needs to be improved?
Erik Jopp: Most of the time, it's sheer human error. Not paying attention to the cows that are milked, or not recording the treatment, a cow gets put into the wrong pen. At a lot of those things just come down to basic human error of the day-to-day things going on on the farm, and so a lot of things going on. We do maybe see a little bit of a bump during harvest times or planting times when those producers have 1,000 things going through their head at the same time instead of 100 at that time. The busier the farm is, the more often that happens. There's not very many where it's the milking equipment or anything like that. There's not that many failures of equipment. It's usually some type of a human error.
Joe: Yes. I think when I've been involved in these kinds of things in the past, most of it comes down to communication and record-keeping, and I think record-keeping being a huge piece of it. It's like you said, when there's so many things going on, and you have to write something down and-- You're treating a cow and you're like, "I'm never going to get rid of this cow." Then seven days later, you don't remember that you gave her Excede or whatever else that had a 13, 14-day withdrawal on it. That's an issue. I like having built-in fail-safes, double-checking everything, having two ways to be recorded or communicated, I think that's great.
I really don't like single-leg bands. If you're using leg bands, just put one on each leg, it's so much easier. All that kind of stuff. I think that's the way to go. Communication being a big piece of it, record-keeping, no one wants to buy a whole tank, it's just not a good deal.
Emily: You know what that sounds like to me, Joe?
Joe: What's that?
Emily: Management.
Joe: Sure, it does. [chuckles] We got another piece in management records, record-keeping, and communication, which we talked about in our management episode. Yes, that's right. You said you're available for one-on-one visits preemptively, right?
Erik Jopp: Yes.
Joe: You're able to come out beforehand. When there's not a residue issue, how available are you? You sound busy, so how available are you really?
Erik Jopp: I don't do personally very many of those, but we do have, like I said, two other veterinarians on on our staff, Sandy Larson being the main one who does those site visits. Her availability is a lot more than mine, so that's her main job with this project, is doing those site visits. We have taken time, and she's spent time at some of the different auction facilities handing out information, talking with producers as they're dropping off animals. That's where she has gotten most of the interest of doing those preemptive visits, like we talked about, but finding those people that are interested in that is not an easy thing to do. To find those people that are willing to have somebody come out and look through their facilities and their records just to say, "Okay, how can I improve this?" So if you have any ideas of how to find those producers, we're all ears.
Joe: Well, I think it's a good idea, and I think that we don't take advantage of that enough as an industry. A lot of times, obviously, we're back to management, prevention better than treatment. Not running around putting out fires, but making sure we don't start them in the first place. If that's available, and there's someone that's willing to come out, I think producers really should take advantage of that. I mean, it's probably fairly simple things that aren't huge investments that could be done that would provide you that extra protection, and I think it is a really good deal to do. The next thing I want to talk about, Erik, is on-farm testing. How important is that? I see it becoming more and more available, more and more affordable, is it something you think that producers should be doing?
Erik Jopp: There's a couple of different ways to look at that. I always think of on-farm testing as a secondary way of finding things. Management being the first one, to prevent it from happening, but like you said, accidents always do happen. It's a lot easier to do that on the dairy farm since you have the milk right there to test. Those tests are quick, easy to read, reliable, and fairly inexpensive, so I think those are always a good idea. Those are some of the recommendations I almost always make, is if you have any kind of a doubt, test the tank before it goes any further.
The tests that are available for testing residues in meat are not as easy to come by, and they're not maybe as reliable, but it's always a good idea to have those in the back of your mind as a tool that you can use. Like you said, management is our first tool, and testing being the secondary tool to see if management was working, that's how I usually look at it.
Joe: Bradley, do you do any testing on your tank before it goes out the door?
Bradley: Yes, we do. We test every conventional load that goes out before the milk truck driver can pick it up. Why, might you ask? Because we had a violation. Way back when I started, 10 years ago, somebody was-- Oops, a treated cow got milked into the tank and didn't realize it, and it got shipped, so we had to immediately implement a testing regime to do that. We haven't had any problems since, and I'm not going to stop the testing. We haven't had a violation, but the minute I stop testing is the--
Joe: That's when it'll happen.
Bradley: That's right, so we do test every load that leaves.
Joe: I think it's a good idea. I think even if you're not testing every load, to have it available if you do have that question in the back of your mind, it's definitely something you should have in the toolbox. Having that violation-- One violation is bad, obviously, you should avoid it at all costs. Like Erik was talking about, usually that first visit is very educational, outreach, what could you do better, but now my question, Erik, is what if we continue to have violations? Walk me down that process of-- Okay, I've got one, had my educational visit, got everything straight, now what does it look like from there?
Erik Jopp: That's one of the discussions that we always have if there is a violation. Regulatory-- It's actually Minnesota law, and it's also in the PMO I believe, saying that if you do have a violation, you have to go through the meeting. If you have a second violation within a 12-month timeframe, it's basically the same thing, a meeting. You do also have to go through the dairy program with your local veterinarian, the preventative program, so that's a requirement for any violation as well.
If you happen to have a third violation within a 12-month timeframe, then the regulation states that we have to have a meeting with the producer and people in our St. Paul office. It's usually a trip to have a meeting in St. Paul with the producer, field reps, and then people from our department. At that point, actually, the law is-- The way it's written is that we have the authority to take you off the market for 30 days, but we've never done that because that would be hard for any producer to survive, not being able to ship their product for 30 days, but we do have some other regulatory things that we can do. It's usually some type of corrective actions, accelerated inspections. It could be, like you said, testing every tank, making sure that those protocols are in place. It could be going down to-- If you're a Grade A farm, going to Grade B for a set amount of time, so there could be a financial burden to you as well. It all depends on what that situation is and how progressive you were at trying to fix the problems from the first violation. If you didn't change anything and you're reluctant to do anything, then we may be a little bit more stiff on what our decision comes down as. The first and second violations are basically visits. The third violation is when more things can happen.
Emily: So don't get that far with it. [chuckles]
Joe: Yes. Please, don't get that far. I mean, getting to the point where you have the potential to not be in the market anymore, it's not good for anyone. That's part of why this is so important. Obviously, the other piece of it is the public health aspect and making sure-- There's reasons that we have these rules, and it's because of public health that we're worried about some of these things, but don't get that far. Please don't get that far.
Erik Jopp: It doesn't happen very often. I think in five years, I've been involved with three of them across the entire state, so it happens, but it's not very often.
Joe: That's good to hear. I think that's a good testament to how good a job people do with their milk and their meat, and knowing all these rules, and I definitely understand how it can happen. It's a struggle to keep track of all of it, especially when you're communicating with employees and how that all works, and then training new personnel. It could go wrong in a blink of an eye, so it is actually amazing to me how most farmers keep it straight 99% of the time. Other question that I've got is, where can people go if they need more information? Farmers are busy, not sure they have time to do an individual meeting or anything like that, but are the resources available for farmers to learn more about this and do some of this work on their own?
Erik Jopp: There is. We always say to work with your local veterinarian, so if they've got a particular veterinarian that they work with, always go to them first. We do also have a website on the Minnesota Department of Agriculture site, it's outreach and education of residue prevention. If you google Minnesota residue prevention, it will bring you to our site. We have lots of different resources and links on that site that we are continually updating, we keep adding more resources and more links. There will hopefully be some interactive trainings on there, or links to those interactive trainings in the near future as well, so there's a lot of information there.
Emily: On that same vein, I'm wondering, Erik, do you do any outreach? Is your group doing any outreach to the public, to consumers about drug residues? I think we know that that's a really controversial topic, hot button issue with a lot of consumers of residues in their milk and meat. Just curious, from that food safety perspective, anything you guys are doing, or is that somebody else at the department that does that work?
Erik Jopp: At this point, we have not reached out to the actual consumers. We've been trying to do more with the producers. We are trying to work with 4-H at the state level, and FFA as well, so we're trying to help with some curriculum with with FFA and some of the 4-H programs as well. We're starting at that level, and we have not gotten to consumers as such.
Emily: I think that's a great idea. 4-H and FFA members, they are good at spreading the word on things, and I know they interact with the public a lot, so it's probably good to get them educated.
Bradley: I have a question--
Joe: Go, Brad. Go.
Bradley: Talk about farmers-- We're talking about violations and helping with that, so do you see a movement out in the dairy or beef world for farmers to actually reduce antibiotic use and not have issues with violations? We all talk about, don't get violations, but are farmers thinking about other ways, alternatives to antibiotics, or just going away from them because of the issues happening?
Erik Jopp: I do see that on some farms, obviously, reducing what they have on their farms to use as far as antibiotics. There is organics, so there are other options for some treatments. It seems like if you have-- The larger the farms, it's usually the smaller amount of antibiotics and drugs they have on hand, and their protocols are a little bit better, so they're using things more on-label the way they were prescribed to be used at the dosages that they were intended for.
I would say a lot of the things that cause violations that I see are people using things off-label, so they're not working with their veterinarians, or using things off-label. As Joe asked about, the penicillins, I see that being used off-label almost all of the time, so that's very, very common. But yes, I do see the movement where people are using less and less and being more involved with veterinarians, with protocols, and using things more appropriately than what they were in the past.
Joe: I think this is a great spot for selective dry cow therapy and things like that, where we have data to show that using less is just as effective and can save you money at the same time, so I'm always up for that. You might not be saving a bunch of work because you do have some things you need to consider when you're doing the selective dry cow therapy, but you're saving money and you're avoiding some of these residue issues, and we're using antibiotics more judiciously. I think I'm all for that. I'm a big fan personally, just throwing it out there.
I think 95% of the things that you need antibiotics for on a dairy cow, you can solve with a Ceftiofur, and for me, that means that you don't have a milk withhold on that animal. I mean, that's just as safe as you can get. If there's no milk withhold, then you don't have to worry about it as often. I'm a big fan of that. Now, that comes with the condition that you need to use it on-label, and you need to work with your veterinarian to do that. This is just so everyone's noticing, Emily, Brad, I have not plugged veterinarians yet. Erik has done all of that for me. I just am telling you, you should have your local veterinarian involved--
Emily: I think you guys are in cahoots.
Joe: Maybe.
Bradley: How much are you charging? What's the going rate today?
Joe: Going rate, let's see-- I was going to bring that up. What you really don't want is to get to that second offense where you have to sit down with your local dairy vet, your local veterinarian, and go through that program with them. Because, first of all, they're busy too. They don't want to sit there and go through it with you because you had a second violation. They will, and they want to help you, but they don't want to do it, and I would guess a bunch of them aren't going to do it for free, so don't get to that point.
Emily: Well, you know, Joe, girls got to eat.
Joe: Girls got to eat.
Erik Jopp: That actually does start at the first violation, so don't have a violation at all.
Joe: Just don't it. Are you involved with organics at all, Erik, when you're talking about some of this stuff?
Erik Jopp: Not very often. No. When I was in practice, I had a couple of dairies that were organic, so I was exposed to it when I was in practice, but through this program, we have not had much exposure with the organic side of it.
Joe: The organic coops, are they testing for antibiotic residues?
Erik Jopp: Yes. Still every every load of milk, no matter what kind of a farm it's coming from, is tested for antibiotics.
Joe: Then Bradley, are you testing your organic load before it leaves?
Bradley: We do not. We have thought about that, but we don't. We don't use antibiotics in an organic herd, so should we test, or shouldn't we? We don't because we don't use antibiotics, so--
Joe: I just wanted to hear you say antibiotics a bunch of times. That's all I wanted. [chuckles]
Emily: Thanks, Joe.
Erik Jopp: There was one case at a dairy farm where they had silage that had some molds in it, and they tested positive, so that is always possible.
Joe: Yes, I saw that maybe two years ago. I feel like I saw that, and it was interesting trying to track that down and figure out where it came from. Having some penicillium molds in the silage can do that to you.
Erik Jopp: Yes. I think over the years, I've had two different cases where they believed it was from the silage. One of them where they were just at the bottom of a silo, getting it unloaded, and by the time they got the residue, they were done using that silo. So it basically went away as soon as they were done feeding, so we couldn't prove it one way or the other, but that was their thought. And another one where they had to actually quit using the silo because of all the mold.
Joe: The big thing is that if something like that is going to happen-- There's going to be fluke cases like that, but what you need to remember as a producer is that if you have documents or you have records, and you're keeping really good records, and you can demonstrate that you have immaculate records of when you treat animals, what you use, all these things, and you don't have a history of either using penicillin, or you don't have any animals that are on farm-- It's much more likely that someone like Erik is going to believe you when they come out to your farm if you have immaculate records to show that you write down everything, dose, route, why you're treating, all those things. If you write all of that down, first of all, it makes Erik's life easier, but also, when these weird fluke things happen, it makes it more believable that it is a weird fluke thing.
Erik Jopp: I was also going to mention that there are tests available on the milk side that, if you do have a positive antibiotic, you can actually find out what the antibiotic is. That technology is out there, and it's not as expensive as what it used to be. I think it's somewhere in the $50 range to find out exactly what the antibiotic was.
Joe: I just remembered my question from earlier that I completely forgot--
Emily: Yay.
Joe: Erik, have you been involved in any of these movements to try to get more and more technology involved in this process? When we're talking about RFID tags, and electronic records, and things like that, how do you see that helping this whole process?
Erik Jopp: I could see that definitely helping through the whole process of making sure animals are properly ID'd. That's one of the main questions that we ask is, how do you identify your animals? It's still amazing that some dairies don't have a good system for that, so the RFIDs and things I think could definitely help us move in those directions. We're seeing it in the robotic dairies where everything is electronic and done through the computers. Not to say that residues don't or can't happen in those situations, because they do, but it's usually not due to the electronics or anything like that. We talk about it at times when we're on the farms about IDs and record-keeping and that type of stuff, but we don't get into specific types or how to do it.
Joe: I think it's still one of my favorite things I've ever seen, is watching a load out where they literally have a stoplight, green or red. As every animal walks through the load out and they're getting on that truck, it shows green, green, green, and if there was someone who had been treated that still had a meat hold, then it would turn red, and then everything shuts down, you figure out what's going on. I think it's so simple, very good, fail-safe. I think we're headed towards electronic IDs anyway, in my opinion, so I think it's another way to help yourself and keep you from making that mistake. Especially if you're working in an environment where there's just a million pieces moving in all these different directions at some of these big operations.
Erik Jopp: Yes. That reminds me, one of the reasons that this program exists-- We're funded basically through an FDA grant. That FDA grant's sole purpose was based off of meat residues, and I want to say about 80% of the meat residues that happen around the country are due to dairy animals. So they're saying, "Okay, they're happening in dairy animals, let's try to be as proactive as we can and work with dairies in particular to try to mitigate these things from happening," but a high percentage of the meat residues are from dairy animals. That's something that a lot of producers, like you said, don't necessarily take the time to check their records and look back of who they treated two, three, four, five weeks ago, and are they safe to sell to the market?
Joe: That becomes even more important when you're talking about these extra-label drugs that we were talking about before. When you're using something extra-label, the tolerance becomes zero. There's no level that's allowed, so there's no cutoff, there's no nothing. If there's any there, it's a violation. That's again, where your local vet comes in. You have to be working with them to figure out what is the real withdrawal using the resources available, FARAD and every other thing that you can to figure out what the actual withdrawal should be on some of these extra-label drugs.
Big ones I think about all the time are penicillin-- We covered that already. Meloxicam, definitely something that you can't have in there at any level, and the metabolism gets a little weird in fresh cows as well. Those two alone will cause a bunch of residues when we're talking about these other things. Just work with your veterinarian on these extra-label drugs, because there is no tolerance allowed for any of those things as soon as you're off-label.
Erik Jopp: Another thing that we usually talk about with these producers is how sensitive these tests are. They're checking into the parts per billion. Billion with a B, not million with an M, so it's tenfold more sensitive than that. Trying to wrap your head around what five parts per billion is in milk is not easy to convince people or explain to people, that it's maybe one drop of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool is enough to cause a residue. That a fresh cow that you put the milk around for 30 seconds and you thought you got all the milk out, it doesn't take much to cause a residue.
Joe: All right, I think we've covered everything that we needed to today. Thank you, Erik, for being here. I really appreciate it. This is something that I think people are intimidated by, and they shouldn't be. It's really nice to have someone to talk to about it and to reassure us that it's not something that you should be scared of. With that, we're going to wrap. You guys know the drill, the questions, comments, scathing rebuttals, they go to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: For more information about what you heard today, please visit mda.state.mn.us/residue-prevention. You can also get there, like Erik said, by just googling Minnesota residue prevention. That'll pull up the site with the MDA, and you'll get all the information you need on their outreach, educational activities, some of the regulatory things we were talking about, and then also antibiotic stewardship all on the same page. Great resource. Catch us on Facebook @UMNBeef and @UMNDairy, and check out our website, extension.um.edu. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll catch you next week.
Emily: Okay, Bradley, say 'antibiotics.'
Bradley: Antibiotics.
Emily: Now say it like you normally do.
Bradley: Antibotics.
Emily: Antibotics. [chuckles]
Joe: Antibotics.
Emily: Antibotics.
Bradley: You just got to throw it all together.
Joe: Antibotics.
Emily: [chuckles] Antibotics.
[00:37:04] [END OF AUDIO]
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