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Dr. Joe recommends not treating your mature cows with de-wormers. Find out why!
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.
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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. OG3, no guest again. It feels good to do a little bit shorter episode, really focus in and get to hear more from Emily. That's really the point of these OG3 episodes when it's just the three of us. We just want to hear Emily's voice more often and we just don't get to hear it enough when there's a guest.
Emily: Absolutely. It's not like for the last four episodes where we had guests, I was the one leading the entire episode carrying you both on my back. People heard my voice plenty. Bradley, I don't even know why he showed up.
Joe: That is brutal.
Bradley: I'm out. It's always something to do. Grant money, grants to write, whatever.
Joe: You busy.
Emily: [unintelligible 00:00:55]
Bradley: Although we finally got rain out here, so I can go look at pastures without them being brown now maybe.
Emily: [chuckles] Without them making you sad.
Bradley: That's right. Maybe the grass will finally grow again.
Joe: Well, good. Well, today we're talking, I guess it's somewhat related to grass. What we want to talk about today's strategic deworming protocols and the potential to really benefit your operation, whether it's beef or grazing dairy, and how to do that in the spring instead of maybe not having to do it in the fall. This whole concept is really centered around trying to prevent resistance in our parasite populations. That's a huge problem on the small ruminant side. It's a big problem down south and it comes from potentially using products in a scheduled way and treating everyone. That's a lot of it. There's a lot of pressure. Now Bradley up in the organic herd especially, probably doesn't have that problem because you probably don't treat anyone on the organic side, right?
Bradley: No, typically not. Unless there's something that's a real problem.
Emily: Is there some holistic treatment for farming for cattle?
Bradley: Well, there could be some products that you can reduce worms or things like that.
Emily: Raw eggs, cayenne pepper.
Bradley: Yes, garlic, aloe, you name it. Whatever we want to put in there.
Emily: Mineral oil.
Bradley: I don't know if they work necessarily or not, but no research has been done to prove their efficacy. Rotational grazing with adequate time between grazings on the same spot is the best choice to prevent parasites in an organic herd.
Joe: I have used deworming products on the organic side. Moxidectin especially has been approved for organic use in specific situations. There's all sorts of caveats to that in terms of proving that there's an issue and milk cold afterwards and all these other things. That's something if you do have an issue, you need to talk with your veterinarian and your certifier to get that all straightened out. There is a possibility if you absolutely need to, there's something you can do.
The reason that we're talking about this is that it's about the time of year when we're talking about turnout, getting everyone on grass, maybe a little bit of hind by the time this comes out. One of the things that we want to talk about is refugia, this concept of parasite refugia is that we don't have to treat everyone and that's fine. Healthy adult cattle should be able to handle a relatively small load of parasites just fine. I think that's probably some of the things that Bradley's doing up in Morris just because he doesn't treat as often as many other people and your cattle do just fine, don't they, Brad?
Bradley: Yes, they do fine. I shouldn't say we don't have parasites. We know that we can test manure and find that there are some in there at very low levels that are not causing problems. I shouldn't say it's not in everybody, but if you manage them and if there's a problem, then we got to figure it out. Obviously, we're unique but we don't have too many issues. A while ago we did, this was, I don't know, approaching 10 years ago where we had some heifers in the winter that weren't growing. They looked scrubby and they had tapeworms. We had to take care of that. Otherwise, it wasn't going to be good. It does happen. It does happen.
Joe: Those are the populations that we really are worried about are those calves, the heifers, anyone who's still growing are the animals that are most susceptible to parasite loads. I'm not saying not to treat them. The whole point of strategically deworming is finding the population that you don't have to treat. I think that in those protocols, it's really advantageous to still treat your calves and still treat anybody who's growing really. That's your heifers, your replacement heifers, sometimes also your second calf heifers, dairy or beef, same thing applies. Really, those adult animals, mature cows, should be able to handle those loads of parasites and they should be able to handle it.
The other piece of this is that calves really are amplifiers on pasture of these parasites. Usually somewhere, depending on where you are, between May 1st and June 1st, all the parasites that were on pasture over winter and were able to live on pasture over winter, come back out and become infective again. That's what we're most concerned about in the spring when we turn out, is that all those cattle going out in the spring are coming out at the same time that all those parasites are coming back and becoming infective again on pasture. They can pick up and amplify all those parasites into huge numbers. The calves are the ones that do that the most because their immune system is still immature.
Emily: It's just like when you send your son to daycare, right, Joe?
Joe: Oh, absolutely.
Emily: Here's a little petri dish when he gets back.
Joe: He comes back and just gets everyone in the house sick. I think it's just like a time-honored tradition that out the first six months to a year after you send your kid to daycare, you're just sick all the time. Then, it's a similar situation where these calves are the ones that are really depositing all these parasite eggs back on the pasture. You can see that when you're looking at graphs of how parasite numbers and egg numbers go on pasture and in animals if you allow those calves to ingest those parasites and then uncontrolled all summer, they amplify the numbers through the roof and that just perpetuates the cycle of having high numbers on pasture when you come back the next spring.
The strategy is to figure out, okay, how are we going to cover our calves and all our other animals that are the amplifiers in the spring so that we don't perpetuate that cycle? That's where we get into strategic deworming and all the different options that are available. Bradley, up in Morris you have pasture and your cattle go out. How long is your rest between pastures? How many days is it?
Bradley: From a heifer standpoint, we're probably at 45 days. 30 to 45 days on a heifer pasture, that should be long enough to break parasite cycles. You would hope. Milking cows, 28 days somewhere around there, 25 to 28 days. Obviously, our hope is that we won't have any issues there either. Not perfect.
Joe: That's why we have the products that we have that are available. There's a bunch of different options on the way to do it. The point is we have to cover our calves for that basically 30 to 45 days when all our overwintering parasites are coming back out and there's a bunch of different ways to do it. You can get a product that lasts that whole time, which is an option and they're covered and then they're not perpetuating this cycle and putting eggs back on the pasture. Or you can send them out to pasture, let them vacuum up everything that's out there, collect everything for you, and then treat them. Then they're not putting eggs back on the pasture.
A situation like Bradley's where we have 30 to 45 days in between pasture, it'd be perfect. Send them out, send them through the rotation once, and before you get back to that first pasture you could treat, and bam you've broken the cycle. You don't have to treat everyone and you're still eliminating most of your problem. That's one of the options. There's all sorts of different products. You can go white warmer at that point because you're so targeted with your treatment one time, clean the gut out. You could be reinfected the next day. There's no residual value to those products. Or you can go pour on and cover yourself for 21 days.
Send them out, have them clean everything up, then pour them and then you get 21 days out of that. Or you can go long-range right out of the gate and you get about between 100 and 150 days depending on what parasite you're talking about where you're covering those calves for that whole time period. You could do that at turnout. A lot of different options for this. The important piece is that you're not treating everyone because the other piece of this where we started was resistance. Bradley, you probably know about refuge corn. There's certain amount of acres that you have to plant. That's the same concept we're working with here.
I want to reiterate before we keep moving on and maybe even wrap up this episode, I'm advocating for you not to treat your mature cows ever with a parasiticide. Just never treat them. Don't treat them in the spring and maybe treat them in the fall or treat them in the fall. I'm saying don't ever treat them. That gives us a population of parasites that's not exposed to our dewormers and they don't have the ability or they don't have that pressure to develop their resistance. Then that gives them that opportunity to repopulate the pasture with non-resistant eggs and non-resistant parasites to compete with the ones that might be resistant. That's the theory. That's the idea.
There's even the potential in a lot of our beef operations that if you do this correctly in the spring, and work through some of those different options we've talked about, you might not have to treat in the fall, which is when we traditionally do treat, and then you're saving money because you're not treating everybody. I think everyone's a fan of that.
Bradley: What should a producer do if they suspect they have some parasite problems? What's the take-home message here today? How do we change that?
Emily: Wait, no, Joe. Let me guess. Let me guess. They should call their vet.
Joe: That's part of it. Part of it.
Emily: [laughs]
Joe: Looking at your animals should tell you a lot. Like I said, low levels of parasites are fine. It's when you have certain populations get high levels of parasites, that it becomes an issue. When you're seeing growth that's not quite right. Like you said, you saw a group of heifers that was just scruffy looking, and haircoat wasn't quite right, and they're not gaining like they're supposed to, those are the things you look for on the cattle side. You can take fecal samples, and work through egg counts to see where we're at. Now, you got to take quite a few because really, the problem is that most data out there is going to tell you that 80% of the parasites come from 20% of the cattle. There's a small population of cattle that really are the ones that have most of the parasites.
Emily: Just like somatic cell count in [unintelligible 00:11:36]. When it's usually just some high cows that are ruining it for everyone else.
Joe: Yes, that's how it works. There's always a few, a small few that ruin it for everybody else. That's where you start. You look at your cattle, and you'd look at performance, and if everything's going smooth, then you shouldn't have to worry about it too much. If you really want to be ahead of the game, you can take some fecal egg counts and some fecal samples and get them to your veterinarian. Protocol-wise, I think this is something that's very integral to your whole system. You do need to talk to-- probably, I would advocate for getting your nutritionist and your veterinarian in the same room to talk about what this is going to do to your system and how it's going to affect your workflow.
Bradley: One question I have. Some people talk about multi-species grazing as in sheep and cattle grazing or following cattle with sheep or following sheep with cattle. Is that a good idea from a vet perspective?
Joe: From a vet perspective and we're talking strictly about parasites. Let's say, I am not a fan of co-pasturing or co-grazing in the same pasture. It's all dependent on the different populations. Sheep and goats tend to have more resistant parasites. The one that I worry about the most coming across to the cattle is [unintelligible 00:12:57]. If you get that in a population that can't overwinter on pasture, but it can overwinter in the herd, depending on where they stay over winter, and then you're dealing with a resistance issue. There's just not a whole lot you can do about it. I tend to not like them in the pasture together. I think there's plenty of benefits to the land and the grazing management side of things to have both species but I would prefer cattle go out first, and then sheep and goats follow them so there's not really an opportunity for that contamination.
Bradley: We've talked a lot about pasture animals or other parasites and if we think about confinement, whether you're confinement dairy producer or confinement beef feedlot. Are there parasites there as well?
Joe: It's something we're learning to watch more about. Traditionally, the thought is, once you go into a feedlot or confinement setting, if you treat on the way in, then you're clean and you're set to go. That may or may not be true. I think the levels of parasites are low enough that it usually isn't a problem. That doesn't mean that they can't get parasites in a confinement lot. Especially when we're talking about mud and where cattle are drinking from because it's not always the water. I think that's a whole another topic.
Traditionally, we think of if you can treat them on the way into confinement, then they're set to go. We're learning more about it now. There's not a ton of data to show us that that's not true, but there is some starting to come out that maybe that isn't the case. It's still a possibility in confinement. Fecal egg counts and screening methods for that are a good way to look. Okay, strategic deworming, treat in the spring.
Emily: This has been, here's what I think with Dr. Joe.
Joe: Yes, I mean, that's where we're at today.
Emily: [laughs]
Bradley: In my mind, you need to look at treatment options if you have a problem. Don't just brush it off and say, "Well, I don't know, or I can't treat anything, or I can't do anything about it." Because really it can affect growth of animals, milk production, feed efficiency, all kinds of stuff. [crosstalk]
Emily: Yes. It's a stressor. It's not just a nuisance.
Bradley: It will drive you crazy if you just keep letting it fester. Then all of a sudden, it goes from a couple animals, and now you got 30 or 40 of them, and now there's just a bigger problem. Don't just let it fly under the radar and dismiss it. It's something to think about.
Joe: Absolutely. I think the other piece of this that we didn't really talk about is that mature cows should be able to handle that low level of parasites. If you have a cow that repeatedly shows that she can't, maybe it's time for her to go. It's the same thing that we talked about on small ruminant side when we talk about FAMACHA scoring. FAMACHA scoring isn't just a method to show you who you need to treat. FAMACHA scoring is showing you who you need to treat, and if they keep showing up and they keep needing to be treated, it's a calling tool they need to go.
That's another piece of this and fostering the animals that work in your system and making sure the genetics, you're keeping the genetics that work in your workflow in your system, and that's what's key. With that, we'll wrap up. Questions, comments, scathing rebuttals? There might be some scathing rebuttals after I just basically unloaded my opinion on the show.
Emily: Dominated the entire conversation. Yes, yes.
Joe: Of course. Absolutely. Got to have an episode like that every once in a while.
Bradley: I can't dominate all the time.
Joe: Yes, I can't just be running the show all the time.
Emily: I'm just so busy dominating in other places that I don't have time to do that in the show.
Joe: All right, with that scathing rebuttals, questions, comments, they go to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: You can check us out on Facebook @UMNBeef and @UMNDairy. We're on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety, and we'll call the plugs there. That's enough for today. All right. Thank you everybody for listening. We'll catch you next week.
Emily: Goodbye.
Joe: Bye.
Emily: [laughs] Potpourri. Say it, Bradley.
Bradley: Potpourri.
Emily: Oh, come on. Say it the fun way.
Bradley: Antibiotics.
[laughter]
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[00:17:33] [END OF AUDIO]
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