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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;42;03
Brad
And welcome to The Moos Room. Beautiful day here in western Minnesota. Actually, the evening of Easter. So happy Easter to everyone. Just wanted to record something. Didn't really have a chance to do it this week. Was kind of crazy. Working with cows. Trying to put on more colors for my new knead up system. We'll talk about that one day once we start getting more data, and how all that's going and what it's working with in our cows.
00;00;42;05 - 00;01;21;05
Brad
Also trying to put more cows manager tags on calves. We're we're got 28 calves heifer calves on the ground. Now we've had maybe about 10 or 15 beef cross calves. So trying to run some studies with the calves and looking at precision technologies and new ways to help control scours and in those animals. But I wanted to talk about a study that that we did here at our dairy, really looking at first lactation heifers and how you can maybe prevent some mastitis in those animals by looking at teat dip application before they start to carve.
00;01;21;07 - 00;01;43;11
Brad
I think this has been it's been an issue. It has been a longstanding issue for us because, you know, our animals are outdoors. They're exposed more to the environment. We seem to have a little bit more fresh cow mastitis in our heifers. Right now, though, I, at least with the conventional heifers I dry treated them before they were calving.
00;01;43;11 - 00;02;13;04
Brad
I think a month before they calved we dry treated them. Maybe it seems it's working a little bit. We haven't. I haven't seen any of the first calf heifers get mastitis at least with our conventional one. So we'll see how that goes until the end of the calving season. But I heard about that at a dairy farm that I was at in South Dakota that was having some issues with fresh cow mastitis, and they were dry treating about a month before calving.
00;02;13;06 - 00;02;37;07
Brad
And to help prevent mastitis. So I wanted to give that a try just to see what was happening. I think, you know, the fresh cow mastitis was causes lots of issues reduce milk production, long term high somatic cell count. And I really wanted to try and stop that. But this was a study that we looked at in our first lactation animals.
00;02;37;09 - 00;03;01;02
Brad
I think the biggest thing is, you know, the first few days after calving can be quite stressful. They have to get acclimated to many different situations that they're unfamiliar with, whether it's milking parlor, they got new noises that they have to deal with, new sensations on their uttered with the milk, or going on, or somebody touching their teats.
00;03;01;02 - 00;03;34;01
Brad
That's never happened before. So there's this big human animal relationship that might jeopardize things. When cows first lactation heifers are coming in so they may display dangerous milking issues like kicking and stomping that may lead to mammary infections in cows. So I think there's many different things. There's with these first lactation heifers. There's you have a behavioral aspect to it.
00;03;34;01 - 00;03;55;27
Brad
So all these new milking procedures, new milking noises, sensations can cause stress that leads to kicking stomping. And sometimes it can lead to handler injuries. You know sometimes our milkers come to us and well, they got kicked. Well, what was going on or how did that how could we prevent that? But usually is happening in first lactation heifers.
00;03;55;27 - 00;04;32;22
Brad
But also these cows are at peak risk for mammary infections or mastitis in early lactation, which really threatens long term milk production and potentially survival. So these untrained heifers enter a compounding feedback loop where poor welfare drives disease and disease drives poor welfare. So they come into this unfamiliar parlor and it triggers fear right away. And this fear manifest into kicking, stomping and hostility towards people or their environment.
00;04;32;23 - 00;05;05;06
Brad
The kicking can, you know, dislodge the milking unit. Exposing the teat ends to environmental and contagious pathogens, especially if it falls on the the ground, sucks up some manure and we put the milking unit back on. Now we've just exposed this heifer to environmental pathogens and probably mastitis. And then mastitis develops, causing tissue swelling and pain. And then the pain amplifies more fear during the next milking.
00;05;05;09 - 00;05;33;20
Brad
So it's just this bad loop that animals get into. And we're trying to figure out how to really get out of that. So I think there's a few things that we wanted to look at. So sometimes people can put heifers in every day, daily massage them, get parlor visits for two weeks, are doing it every day. Well, it's has a high efficacy, but it's really unfeasible because of extreme labor costs.
00;05;33;23 - 00;06;07;23
Brad
And if you do nothing, obviously the labor cost is zero, but it might increase milker risk and severe mastitis rates go up. So we wanted to look at a once a week parlor visit and dip teats with iodine. And we felt that this probably balanced moderate labor with significant welfare and health outcomes. So what did we do for this study and kind of how did we carried out?
00;06;07;23 - 00;06;30;18
Brad
Well, we did this at our dairy here in Morris, and we had 37 cows that we trained and 30 that we did nothing with. So we just left them in the maternity pen for three weeks and did nothing to them. And then 37 heifers we brought up into the milking parlor. We did this after milking or once the last cows were done milking.
00;06;30;18 - 00;06;51;28
Brad
Then we brought this group into the parlor. We allowed them to acclimate to the holding area for about 15 minutes to kind of investigate the holding area, see what it's all about, kind of get all the noises. You know, we left the milk, the milk pump going. Everything was the same noise that all of the other cows have in the parlor.
00;06;51;28 - 00;07;17;03
Brad
So we allowed them to acclimate that. And then we did a parlor entry. So we did it quietly, gently guided them into our milking parlor. We have a swing nine parabon parlor. So we kind of sometimes we had to maybe push some of the heifers into the parlor, but we did it very quietly. You know, we didn't want to cause any undue stress with these animals.
00;07;17;03 - 00;07;38;24
Brad
And then we wiped their teats clean. We, you know, we just basically gently used a microfiber towel, kind of wipe their teats clean, you know, we didn't squeeze them or anything. We just kind of tried to get some of the dirt off, or if there was dirt or manure, but we gently wipe them and then we dipped them with, 1% iodine based dip.
00;07;38;24 - 00;08;09;16
Brad
And then we allowed the heifers to remain in the parlor for five minutes, which kind of simulated the milking duration that these animals might have when they come into the milking parlor. So that was sort of our, our protocol. So the 1% iodine barrier dip kind of act as a preventative because sometimes 15% of quarters can be affected by staph aureus 1 to 3 weeks prior to calving.
00;08;09;16 - 00;08;37;14
Brad
And we hope that this weekly teat dip eliminated bacteria when the heifers immune status dropped due to calving stress. So then these animals care of they were allowed to camp. So behavior was measured for each milking for three days. So only three days after they calved, the milkers were really blinded by which animals got dipped or not. They didn't know that the milkers didn't do that.
00;08;37;14 - 00;09;04;08
Brad
We did that mean and graduate students, did the teeth dipping and stuff. So the milkers had no clue which one, which treatment they really received. And so they scored cows or willingness to come into the milking parlor. They also scored them based on milking ease. You know, whether they were calm or hostile. They also recorded stomping. So raising and lowering their foot kicking.
00;09;04;11 - 00;09;34;05
Brad
So sometimes kicking without kicking the milker off. We measured defecation or maneuvering in the parlor. And we also measured kicking off the milker. So, you know, flat out kicking it off on the floor. We also measured clinical mastitis for those animals, whether they had, you know, Norm, no mastitis or severe mastitis. And we also took quarter samples for each of these cows and measured them for lots of different pathogens.
00;09;34;05 - 00;10;02;10
Brad
It was staff homogeneous staph aureus, streptococcus, E.coli, you name it. We measured all of the mastitis pathogens that we possibly could for these animals. So what did we find? Well, the heifers that were in our control group. So they were the ones that were not trained, had a 2.2 times greater odds of kicking during the milking procedure compared to the trained heifers.
00;10;02;12 - 00;10;27;19
Brad
So they they kicked more, not necessarily kicking the milker off, but they just kicked more milkers you name it, they were kicking more in the parlor and the trained heifers had 1.7 greater odds of being more calm. So they were more calm in the milking parlor compared to the heifers that were not trained. So heifers that were not trained had greater odds of being restless during milking.
00;10;27;19 - 00;11;01;22
Brad
And they were more hostile during milking compared to the trained heifers. And we also found that older heifers, so heifers that were a few months older were more likely to stomp, kick or kicking the milker unit off. So the younger heifers did much better with some of the behavioral aspects. So what about parlor entry? Well, we didn't find much statistical difference between the groups, but there is a tendency for the trained heifers to come into the parlor a lot easier.
00;11;01;22 - 00;11;30;17
Brad
We did find a big difference in milking ease. You know, those animals were just easier to milk, especially five times greater odds of having a much smoother time milking in the trained animals compared to the untrained animals. So what about mastitis? What did we find there? When we look at like Staphylococcus or Steph Cremonese, we didn't find any difference in animals whether they were trained or untrained.
00;11;30;17 - 00;11;57;15
Brad
We didn't find any difference in environmental mastitis, streptococcus or E.coli. It was really un impacted by training that was more driven by pasture and some mud in that we deal with here. But the interesting fact was we look at staph aureus, we found that the heifers that were not trained had a much higher rate of staph aureus mastitis compared to the trained ones.
00;11;57;15 - 00;12;29;03
Brad
And this barrier teat that we use kind of acts like a weapon that neutralizes staph aureus rather than acting as a blanket cure for all pathogens. So we were able to reduce staph aureus in the heifers that were trained and the heifers that were in the control group, not trained, had a five times greater odds to get staph aureus infection within three days or within an hour of calving compared to the trained heifers.
00;12;29;06 - 00;13;01;24
Brad
And that really could come down to, you know, those heifers were kicking the milkers off, being more exposed to different pathogens in the milking unit, you name it. But as far as clinical mastitis, we didn't find a difference. The incidence was about the same for both groups. In the first three days, udder edema was about the same. We really found that staph aureus was the big thing that we were preventing by weekly teat dipping of these heifers before they before they calved and bringing them into the milking parlor.
00;13;01;27 - 00;13;22;25
Brad
So what about, you know, the presence of clinical mastitis? Well, animals that had clinical mastitis had three times greater odds of parlor hesitation. So as I talked about that terrible loop in the beginning, you know, you get mastitis. And now they don't want to go into the parlor because they experienced a bad situation when they got in there.
00;13;22;25 - 00;13;56;26
Brad
Also, the heifers that had clinical mastitis had higher odds of kicking and kicking the milker off. So the animals that are doing more kicking of the milking off tend to have higher clinical mastitis. So really the heifers that suffered from clinical mastitis were more hostile and hesitant in the milking procedure. So really by implementing this pre calving training that we did really disrupted the cycle of pathogens and mastitis.
00;13;56;28 - 00;14;31;28
Brad
It reduced initial anxiety of the milkers as well. So the milkers were more calm with these animals. And we reduced the contagious bacteria mostly staph aureus in these animals. So what about a difference in pasture or dry lot? Well, the animals that were housed on pasture that we did, the quarters of those pasture animals had a higher probability of pathogen growth compared to animals that were in the dry lot of heifers that were in a dry lot.
00;14;32;01 - 00;15;02;12
Brad
Just because they're exposed more to environmental things, mud flies can really heavily influence infection rates. Well, what about Holsteins versus crossbred? Because we had we had both animals. So interestingly enough, the Holstein quarters had greater odds of higher growth pathogen growth compared to the grass crossbred. So really breed resilience plays a supporting role in early lactation mastitis susceptibility.
00;15;02;14 - 00;15;34;24
Brad
And we know this we we done lots of studies with Holsteins and cross breeds. And they just have they're just better at less health problems. So kind of this 20 minute once a week parlor routine where we dipped the parlors really helped us. It required minimal labor, but it really found some big differences in reducing milker issues. So handler injury, it reduced mastitis, namely staph aureus mastitis.
00;15;34;26 - 00;16;08;26
Brad
During probably the most critical window of this first lactation, heifers life. So dipping these heifers in the milking parlor three weeks before calving really reduced some adverse behaviors and the risk of staph aureus. So really the results from this experiment kind of suggest that maybe we should be dipping heifers three weeks before their expected calving date, and it may modulate some adverse behaviors and reduce some inter mammary infections in early lactation heifers.
00;16;08;26 - 00;16;28;19
Brad
I know there's labor behind this. You and you have to find a time to do it. Namely, we did it after milking in the morning kind of mid morning and that's when we did it. So you have to find the time to do it. But I really think that doing some training, you know what we've I think we've we all know that training some of these heifers before they calve can really help them.
00;16;28;21 - 00;16;48;04
Brad
But I know I get it. It takes labor. It takes time. When do we do it? There's so many other things going on on the farm that we just don't have time to do it. But I think in the end it really pays off with reducing mastitis, reducing other issues. I think those heifers just do better when they start milking.
00;16;48;04 - 00;17;11;16
Brad
They, they just they milk more and have less problems. So I think we should really think about that. We've we don't do that anymore either. But maybe I should think about doing some of this again to see if we can help modulate some of those issues. I notice that the Milkers will write some notes on the milking desk, that there's a few heifers that are kicking and things like that.
00;17;11;16 - 00;17;36;10
Brad
So maybe we could have helped those heifers by bringing them into the parlor much easier before they started calving. So with that, I hope you learned a little bit about our study today. And you might think about ways to help create a better environment for your first lactation heifers. That will help kind of decrease some of the bad behaviors, maybe decrease some mastitis in those animals.
00;17;36;12 - 00;17;57;03
Brad
And with that, if you have any comments, questions, or scathing rebuttals, feel free to contact me at the Moos room. That's t h e m o s r o m at u Amanda edu or find me on the web at University of Minnesota Livestock Extension or, n Rock dairy. And with that, I hope you have a good week.
00;17;57;06 - 00;17;59;03
Brad
Sun is shining by.