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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;13;18 - 00;00;41;04
Brad
The spring is upon us and our cows have went to grass, so I'm kind of happy. Cows are loving it out on pasture. Production is going up. Actually, things are are going well. Except we had a little snafu today. I guess this is Sunday as I record it the day before Memorial Day. So. So come out Monday. It's Memorial Day here in the US.
00;00;41;04 - 00;01;01;03
Brad
So thanks for all the veterans, for all their service that they have done for this country. But we had a cow die of hemorrhagic bowel this morning in an organic cow, which was kind of crazy. I guess I've never necessarily seen it in an organic cow here. It's been a long time since we've had a cow die of hemorrhagic bowel, but it does happen.
00;01;01;03 - 00;01;22;22
Brad
We were treating or trying to throw everything at her. We had given her antibiotics as well to see if we could save her. And I guess with HBS, there's no way that it's not much you can do, not much you can do. So it's the unfortunate thing that does happen in our herd as well. And but overall, the cows are doing well out to grass.
00;01;22;22 - 00;01;48;21
Brad
Production is up, so things are going great. But I wanted to talk about a couple things today. One is we did our Holstein classification the other day. So if you're interested in Holstein scores, I have some classification stuff if you're interested. It's one thing that we do around here. It's kind of cool. We did a fairly well and the other one I want to talk about is some crossbreeding stuff.
00;01;48;21 - 00;02;14;27
Brad
And there was a new beef under article that came out that will talk about some of our crossbreeding research here at the University of Minnesota that I don't think we've ever done before. It's been a long, long time since I talked about crossbreeding. And a lot of, you know, I spent a lot of my career in crossbreeding, but I think we're going to go through the the study that we did and kind of find it interesting and some of the highlights that that we found and why we still crossbreed here.
00;02;14;27 - 00;02;38;16
Brad
But with our Holstein classification, we just did this earlier this week on Wednesday morning. So it's just fresh. And I just got all the summaries back and just go through some of the interesting things that we found. If I look at our organic herd, we only have a few Holsteins in our organic herd. Not very many. I just I don't know, I can't keep them going in that herd sometimes.
00;02;38;16 - 00;02;59;23
Brad
I think the Holsteins that we breed today are not necessarily cut out for 100% pasture or even consuming a lot of pasture, so trying to keep them going from a fertility standpoint is always a challenge. But alas, we have five and they did pretty good. Kind of the highlights. I have a young second lactation cow that went 83 point.
00;02;59;23 - 00;03;29;26
Brad
She's a Delta Lambda, and then we had an 85 point cow and second lactation recently fresh. She's a riveting which is an accelerated genetics bull that was meant for grazing. So I kind of happy there with with those some of the other highlights actually we had quite a few go very good in our conventional herd. We still have 90 point cow who went to she's a Val.
00;03;29;27 - 00;03;59;14
Brad
She's six lactation and doing quite well. We've had some frazzled. So I used frazzled, which is maybe not the kind of bull that you would think would be high type, but we've got a few frazzled that score high ones 85 points, another 87 point frazzled. So actually quite happy with those. I think the frazzled, the other good milk cows good utters, but not necessarily those high type animals that you see.
00;03;59;16 - 00;04;29;21
Brad
We also had another riveting go 85 points never been scored before. So again, another grazing type pro sire that went 85 points was a couple. Modesty. If you've never heard of modesty, he's a petty out of a super sire, out of a Bolton. So maybe a cow that you wouldn't necessarily think would be high type. I look at his PTA t now he's -0.7, but we haven't 86 point modesty and an 85 point modesty.
00;04;29;22 - 00;04;57;18
Brad
So yeah, not so bad. But of course we have some bulls. I've used King Doc and King Boy and some people might go, what in the world are you doing there? Well, I used them for inbreeding back in the day. We kind of bread our herd into an inbreeding nightmare. And King Boy and King Doc were out cross sires to our herd, so I used them.
00;04;57;18 - 00;05;24;25
Brad
They were good cows. They still are good cows. They have pretty good production on them. You know, we had 85.85 point King boy. 85 point King boy. Another two twin Holsteins, a twins 187. That's a king doc 87 point King doc. So we do pretty good on those. The other one the classifier really loved was luster P. So a pulled bull that I used because moving towards more pull genetics.
00;05;24;25 - 00;05;50;24
Brad
So the luster peas actually did quite good. We've got a number of 85 points 86 point luster peas, another 85 points. And when I was there classifying, I was looking at those cows when they were two year olds. They come in, maybe they're a little bit smaller type cow, but second lactation and they look good. They got good utters on them, just good working cows.
00;05;50;25 - 00;06;11;28
Brad
And I actually like the luster peas. So I'm I'm pretty happy with that. Even though we didn't get very many pulled animals out of him. But I did use quite a bit of luster P back in the day to get some more pulled genetics in our herd, and probably the highlight of the day. We had one two year old and first lactation score 85 points.
00;06;11;28 - 00;06;39;24
Brad
She's a renegade, and renegade was a lot of select sired by Jolt Oak out of a millington out of DaVinci. So something. And he's a good cow, you know, he's pretty good. Fat and protein bull still pretty good. Net Meredith types 1.19. Maybe not so great on sire conception rates, but overall good bull. So I was pretty happy with that to get that 85.2 year old renegade.
00;06;39;24 - 00;07;01;28
Brad
If you kind of look at the summary of our herd, if our average final score is 83 points, if you compare that to the herds in Minnesota, their average is 82 points. So we maybe score a little bit higher than the state average. In Minnesota, we don't have very many cows. We have 70 cows in our heard that are Holstein that that we score.
00;07;01;28 - 00;07;29;05
Brad
So a little bit less we have our one excellent. We have 22 very goods which is a little bit higher than the state average. So state average is 28%. Very good. And we're at 37%. So we're doing pretty good on that. So overall our our cows are scoring well. Our bar is 104.2 whatever that means I guess how good your type herd is in Minnesota.
00;07;29;05 - 00;07;52;02
Brad
It's 105.2. So we're a little bit less than bar. But that's not necessarily what we're striving for. It's it's it's interesting to see that I think you look at the bulls that are in our herd and how they score. We have Yoder. He's the highest scoring bowler's two daughters in the average 87. These modest as they're averaging 86.
00;07;52;03 - 00;08;15;27
Brad
Our King Ducks average 84. Renegades 84 riveting. They average 83. The frazzled are averaging 83. So they're pretty good comparable to the luster peas I think the King boys don't score as high. One that I thought would do a little bit better as the Delta lambdas, but they tend not to score as high. I think their average is 81 and the deltas are 78.
00;08;15;28 - 00;08;36;22
Brad
So pretty good. We we use some good bulls, and some bulls that we used are not necessarily high type that tend to score a little bit higher and are heard. But it's interesting and it's Holstein classification. So, you know, take it for what it's worth. It's nice to look at pretty cows as well. But I like to have production cows too.
00;08;36;22 - 00;09;02;28
Brad
And and those certainly pay the bills. Let's talk about something that I've always it's always on my mind. And we continue to do that. And that's cross-breeding in our our dairy herd here at Morris and still work with a number of farms that are doing some cross-breeding. And I just want to talk about some of the results. There was an interesting article that came out in Dairy Herd Management, and my colleague Amy Hazel, Amy Lusk sent it to me.
00;09;02;29 - 00;09;30;15
Brad
She worked on some crossbreeding stuff with us here at Minnesota a long time ago. And kind of the article showed that these beef on dairy calves may scour less than Holsteins. It was kind of a new research study that came out of Canada. And I actually discussed that study in episode 340. So if you go back eight episodes, you'll find that one where basically showed that these beef on dairy calves were much healthier.
00;09;30;17 - 00;10;01;28
Brad
They scoured less, had fewer digestion problems than Holsteins. And it was really scours was the big things. They just had fewer days with scours, fewer repeat treatments than Holsteins. And so it's really crossbreeding is the big thing. And the question was, well, okay, I think Amy maybe posed was, well, that's interesting. We've known that crossbreeding and our work showed cross-breeding helped with less disease issues as well, but the uptake is maybe not so much.
00;10;01;28 - 00;10;27;23
Brad
I think it is kind of interesting for me that a lot of dairy farmers tend not to crossbreed with dairy breeds. Holstein still the main breed and not very many use other breeds. But when it comes to beef on dairy, we there's no cross everything and those calves are healthier. And so it's kind of this disconnect between this beef on dairy crossbred which is healthier and has less problems.
00;10;27;23 - 00;10;56;16
Brad
But we won't crossbred our general cows in our herd. And for whatever reasons, I understand there's many different reasons for doing that or wanting to decide to cross breed in dairy herds. But I don't know if we've ever really reviewed a lot of our crossbreeding research that we've done in Minnesota. So I want to hit on some highlights on this.
00;10;56;16 - 00;11;23;05
Brad
And, you know, we did this ten year study where we compared Holsteins and Viking Red and Monty, the Yard in herds here in Minnesota for ten years. And we followed these seven herds and they recorded a lot of data for us. So I just want to hit on a few of the highlights that we found. You know, I've discussed some of the early Holstein results that we did.
00;11;23;07 - 00;11;48;01
Brad
From this study a few episodes ago as well, where we found that, you know, older Holstein cows have more health issues. But what happens when you cross these cows? So we had Holsteins and we compared them to two breed crosses with Viking Red and Montpelier. And we also had Holsteins compared to three breed crosses. So let's kind of go through some of the highlights and some of the traits that we found.
00;11;48;01 - 00;12;16;16
Brad
Well, if you look at gestation length and stillbirth, gestation length was longer for our crossbreeds, for our multi-layered sired calves and our Viking red sired calves by 3 to 4 days. So maybe in some crossbreeding situations you're going to have longer gestation links. And we found that even in the California study that we had, gestation links was a little bit longer.
00;12;16;16 - 00;12;36;07
Brad
And I think we're used to seeing that now, because if we're using some of these beef breeds, especially Simmental or others, or if you're crossbreeding with Brown Swiss, you're going to see gestation links a little bit longer. And I know software programs are trying to correct for that. So it gives you an adequate calving date. Well, what about stillbirth for these calves?
00;12;36;13 - 00;13;01;02
Brad
We didn't find a lot of difference in stillbirth. Maybe in first lactation, some biking red sired calves were a little bit less for stillbirth about 4%. We found 8% stillbirth rate in our Holstein calves, stillbirth rates in the older cows 2 to 3%. So stillbirth maybe a little bit more of an issue in the first lactation animals in Holstein than what we find in some of the other breeds.
00;13;01;04 - 00;13;18;04
Brad
You know, you kind of hear a lot of differences. If you talk to people, they're like, oh, we don't have a stillbirth, right? But when you actually start looking at their data, it's 7 to 8% and some herds are much higher than that. And I still think it's an issue. We don't talk about it enough, but I think stillbirth can be still an issue.
00;13;18;06 - 00;13;42;05
Brad
We have some even at our herd here. We are heard here in Morris where maybe about 3 to 4% stillbirth rate, so a little bit less. But alas, we still have some stillbirth issues going on. Now I look at production. So after we have the calf, what about production? Well we know that Holstein cows milk so they have a lot of milk volume.
00;13;42;08 - 00;14;12;17
Brad
I think for the most part compared to the Viking red crosses, the Holstein cows had higher fluid milk. So the milk volume, the B, the cows were right on the same for fluid milk compared to the whole scene. If you look at it from A to two breed crosses fat plus protein. Well, the month of the art crosses had higher fat and protein compared to a Holstein in these herds, and these herds had high fat and protein for their Holstein cows.
00;14;12;17 - 00;14;36;00
Brad
So we had a little bit higher for the the art Holstein crosses. And if you look at it across the lifetime, the month of the art, two breed crosses just had more production compared to a whole steam. Well, what about the three breed crosses? So you you make three breed crosses. So we have Viking Red out of the art at Holstein, and then we have the art Viking, Reddit Holstein.
00;14;36;00 - 00;14;58;08
Brad
Well, they had less fluid milk and less fat plus protein. So a little bit less production in first and second third lactation for the crossbred cows compared to the Holsteins. And we know this. We see this in a lot of different studies where production maybe a little bit less or right at what a Holstein cow does. So we know that these crossbred cows have high production.
00;14;58;08 - 00;15;22;03
Brad
We know that they can milk and they don't have many issues from a production standpoint if you look at these cows. So we scored these cows just to see, okay, well how good a are their utters when they come into lactation. What what do they look like. You know people are always like oh cows are fat or milking fat.
00;15;22;05 - 00;15;52;12
Brad
Beef cows. And I don't know if that's such the case anymore. So stature Holstein cows were much taller than these crossbred cows. The crossbred cows were significantly shorter than than the Holstein. So we know that will body condition score and angularity. And as we expect to crossbred calls all had less angularity and more body condition score compared to the whole Steen herd maids and some of these cows.
00;15;52;12 - 00;16;20;05
Brad
The three breed cross had high BCS 3.5 or higher. So, but the relationship of lower body condition score and reduced fertility, health and survival is kind of well documented. So cows with higher body condition scores tend to have better fertility. And we'll look at fertility in a second. If you look at utters obviously the crossbred cows all had lower utter clearance.
00;16;20;05 - 00;16;56;18
Brad
So that's from the ground to the bottom of the utter. So the utters were a little bit higher in a Holstein cow. And we've selected for utters and in Holstein cows for many, many years. So maybe a little bit nicer udders in a Holstein cow. The crossbred cows had longer teats than Holsteins. What about fatality? There's been some interesting talks about fatality and how they're going to change fertility evaluations in genetic evaluations here in the US, and how DPR may not be a good measure of fertility anymore.
00;16;56;18 - 00;17;23;21
Brad
And but we looked at a lot of different fertility traits that are kind of comparable to that. If you look at the two breed crosses, they had fewer times bred, they had less days open, so about 12 days to 23 days, so about two weeks to three weeks less days open. So that's one heat cycle, potentially less so one less unit of semen, less shots.
00;17;23;21 - 00;17;51;19
Brad
If you're on a sink program. Pregnancy rates were much higher 32% Prague rate and first lactation for billiard Holstein cows are Holstein pregnant and first lactation 27%. That's pretty good actually, for this herd. You know, this data, maybe ten years old, 27% Prague rate for a Holstein. So they were getting their Holsteins pregnant as well, 127 days open, which is less than national average in Holstein cows.
00;17;51;25 - 00;18;14;10
Brad
But the crossbreeds were just getting pregnant that much faster. And if you look at the three breed crosses, it kind of follows the same thing with the two breed crosses about 2 to 3 weeks quicker pregnancy than a Holstein cow. And we find this in many different crossbreeding studies that we've done here at the University of Minnesota and at other places.
00;18;14;10 - 00;18;42;11
Brad
The crossbred cows get pregnant 2 to 3 weeks quicker. So fatality is much, much better in the crossbred animals compared to Holsteins. If you look at death, loss, not much difference in death loss, the death loss in these herds, about 4% for Holstein during first lactation, 8% for the older cows. But there was more cows that survived to third calving and fourth calving that were crossbred compared to Holsteins.
00;18;42;11 - 00;19;12;18
Brad
And there were still 27% Holstein cows that survived to fourth calving. So pretty good. But just more crossbred cows survived. Multi-billion Holstein survived to fourth lactation 43%. So really high. If we look at cows that live to at least 45 months after first calving, so four years later, still 33% of the crossbred are in the herd, compared to only 18% of the Holsteins.
00;19;12;18 - 00;19;38;07
Brad
And it kind of follows the trend with the three breed crosses as well. Sired by Montpelier, you just have more cows surviving to third and fourth calving compared to the Holsteins. Death rates about the same, so we don't find as much for mortality in our herd here compared to some older studies that we had did in in California, we also recorded health treatments.
00;19;38;07 - 00;20;09;16
Brad
So mastitis, lameness, reproductive, metabolic and miscellaneous issues and then actually put a cost on those. And I've ranted about costs and cows before. But if you look at this data, on average our Holstein cows cost about $43 in health treatments and first lactation, 68 to 80 and second and 90 to $110 in third lactation. So all these crossbred cows were on average 20 to $40 less per lactation.
00;20;09;16 - 00;20;32;24
Brad
So you're just going to spend less money on health treatment costs in a crossbred compared to a Holstein animal. And then we put some economic values to them. So we accounted for milk price calves. When the cow got culled, we accounted for the cull value. And then we put some expenses on for feed overhead, replacement costs, breeding, you name it.
00;20;32;25 - 00;21;04;10
Brad
We put tried to account for all of these different costs. And if you look at income we just had more income from across spread cow on a daily basis $0.36 more for a month of the art Holstein, $0.10 more for a Viking red income. If you look at expenses about $0.30 more, $0.30 less 33 to $0.36 less per day from an expense compared to the crossbred cows.
00;21;04;10 - 00;21;40;29
Brad
And you see this with the three breed crosses as well, somewhere 33 to $0.50 less expenses per day. And we see this in all of the categories. Feed replacement cost is probably the big one, just less replacement costs for these crossbred cows. So if you kind of add it all up from a profitability standpoint, you have in the two breed crosses, we see daily profit 6% higher with a Viking Red Holstein and 20% higher with a billiard Holstein two breed cross.
00;21;40;29 - 00;22;06;26
Brad
So $0.72 more daily profit per day. If you look at the three read crosses, maybe not quite as high compared to the Holsteins, but $0.17 more from a Viking red three breed cross and $0.51 more. So you get about 4 to 13% higher daily profit. So we saw quite a bit of differences. Maybe some places we saw no difference in some of the traits.
00;22;06;26 - 00;22;32;18
Brad
We saw some differences in profitability in health, definitely. And so there is an impact on heteropsis or hybrid vigor. And we see this in all of our beef on dairy crossing that we see with healthier calves. We see healthier gabs in a crossbred system as well. So there is a lot of advantage to crossing. And I know some herds are not crossing anymore and some are still crossing.
00;22;32;18 - 00;23;02;29
Brad
And I think a lot of these different herd seed benefits in a crossing program. And I think our goal is to have three breed cross spreads in this rotation. And basically they should be based on breeds that have high effective genetic improvement programs that emphasize important traits that promote profitability. Obviously, you want to find breeds that complement each other for individual traits, whether it's production or fertility or health.
00;23;03;00 - 00;23;23;22
Brad
And obviously you want breeds that give a blended result across the generations. That's most appropriate for the environmental conditions in the herd. So there is some advantages to crossing, and I think it works. And I think many will continue to cross that are doing it. And I think there's a lot of advantage. And we certainly see that in the beef on dairy world.
00;23;23;22 - 00;23;41;01
Brad
So I think that'll be enough ranting about crossbreeding today. I know I haven't reviewed it in a long time on the podcast here. And I thought, well, why not just kind of resume some of our, our crossing results. So with that, if you have any comments, questions or scathing rebuttals, feel free to contact me at the Moose Room.
00;23;41;01 - 00;23;56;07
Brad
That's Moe's SR. Oh, at Edu or find us on the web at University of Minnesota Livestock Extension or UMC Rocky Dairy. And with that, I hope you have a good week by.