MSU Extension Beef

[Jerad Jaborek] Hello everyone, thank you for attending the MSU feedlot educational series. Today we're going to start our second session of the series. And today we have Marianne Buza, who is the Michigan State University Extension diary educator in Huron County. And she's going to be talking today with us on, tips for raising dairy beef calves. With that, I will let Marianne begin. [Marianne Buza] Thanks Jerad. So thanks for having me today. So I am just going to talk about some things from kind of a dairy perspective. As a lot of you raise Holstein steers for beef. I think that there are some things that the dairy producers do really well that can translate over. So our roadmap for today is, is going to, I'm going to talk about passive transfer and how you can assess that. Also kind of going to go over monitoring performance, biosecurity, winter calf management tips. And then I wanted to talk a little bit about necropsy and euthanasia. So to start off, in 2016, the dairy team did a project to assess the passive transfer on 50 Michigan dairy farms. And as a reminder, what passive transfer is, passive transfer is how IgG or antibodies from colostrum get through the gut of the calf. So this is something that has to be done within the first 12 hours to 24 hours of birth, ideally within the first 12. So we wanted to basically look at how dairy farms were doing as far as getting colostrum into their calves. So the project's objectives were to look at the management of newborn calves. And can we stop reminding people that they need to feed one gallon a clean, high-quality colostrum within four hours of birth? What practices are Michigan dairy farmers using to manage their colostrum? What are the best dairies doing? And how are they treating bull calves? And were bull calves being treated differently than heifer calves. So we tested serum total proteins using a handheld brix refractometer, a digital one. So we would draw blood out of the calf and then we would either spin it down in the centrifuge or let it sit in the fridge overnight until the blood kind of clotted at the bottom and the blood serum was at the top. And then we would take that blood serum out and put it on the reader of the refractometer or you can also, this digital one is really fancy. They cost about $300, but you can also use one of the ones that you look up at the light that cost about $40. In either way that I'll tell you whether or not that calf has had colostrum or what level was absorbed. So the goals for serum total protein, as an indicator of passive transfer is we consider anything at a 5.2 or below as failure. So whether the colostrum wasn't good quality, it was dirty, it wasn't given soon enough. Whatever it was a failure of IgG antibodies to go through the gut to get into the immune system of the calf. 5.2 to 5.4 is considered moderate. Anything above a 5.5 is considered excellent. It's important to remember or remind you or tell you when we're doing this test, it's really important to make sure that the calves are hydrated. Dehydrated calves can give false positives or it'll show that they received or had passive transfer. But that is not always the case because without the hydration, levels are going to be, with dehydration, the levels will be higher than they actually are. So the goals for Michigan is to have 90% of our calves considering at least moderate, and that 80% of our calves are at an excellent passive transfer level. So our preliminary results were that 18% overall failure rate of heifer calves. So I'm out of 523 calves that we that we took blood from, 97 of them failed. And of the 511 bull calves, a 132 or 26% of them failed to have passive transfer. So the rate for failure passive transfer in the US is around 20%. So really our results are pretty much right on par with what is going on, like what's going on as far as the nation, or national results. So it's not that Michigan isn't doing bad or good. It's just, we feel that there's still a lot of room to improve colostrum management on dairy farms. So in of this, in this study of the 50 farms that we went to do, five of them had no failures of passive transfer. Six of those farms had one failure of passive transfer, again. So and then we had six farms that had 50% or greater. So 50% or greater of their calves had failure of passive transfer. And only 18 out of the 50 farms met the goal of 90% passing of failure transfer. So to the dairy team this, this says that we still need to preach colostrum management. But kind of what it has to do with people that raise beef as dairy bulls is that colostrum is basically the immunity that that calf gets for weeks, right? So it's good for you to know what the dairy industry is doing as far as colostrum in Michigan. So we also wanted to look at, do bulls had the same status as heifers? And so the numbers of farms with 50% failures in bulls was there were eight farms that had 50% failure in bulls, but they also failed in heifers as well. So it's not that they were treating the bulls and heifers particularly different on those farms. They just had 50% of their animals failing. So the farms with 0 failures, there were a lot more farms what have had 0 passive transfer failures if it wasn't for the bulls. So again, the 26% of the farms had failure of passive transfer in bulls and 18% in heifers. So dairy farms do treat heifers a little bit different, obviously. From a dairy perspective. Those are their replacement animals. So they tend to keep, take better care of them or be more meticulous when it comes to feeding them colostrum. But so what does this, what does this all mean for raising steers, right? So serum total protein can be tested for within the first seven days the life. I know a lot of the dairy producers out by me. They don't keep calves longer than seven days. Most of them are out of there in three to five at the most. Getting calves picked up and taken off there, or bull calves get picked up almost twice a week. So one of the things that you can do is when you get a new load of calves in is you can do a serum total protein test on your calves, it's accurate for the first seven days of life. Again, you can use the Brix refractometer like we did. The again, the digital ones are about $300, but there's the ones that look up to the light for about 40. So this is also something your veterinarian can do for you. They can draw blood for you and tell you what the levels of IgG are in the calf's blood. So this can help you decide whether or not the source of calves that you have is giving them good colostrum. And it also, if you're having a lot of calves that fail, then, you know, you might want to talk to the dairy about what kind of standard operating procedures they have for bull calf colostrum. Some dairy farms do test their colostrum for quality and give the higher quality colostrum to heifer calves in the lower quality colostrum to the bull calves. So the pass fail for the serum total proteins can influence like your treatment decisions as you keep that calf long-term. You know, as we know already that colostrum impacts the immune system of that calf for basically their entire life. So calves that don't receive enough good quality colostrum have lower average daily gain, they have lower growth rate, or they have a higher likelyhood of getting sick. So it's just, if you have records on serum total proteins of the calves that you're bringing in. You're going to know whether or not they're likely to be able to overcome an infection. Or scours or something simple like pneumonia. Like by themselves because they have a good immune system, because they passed the serum total protein or they may not have a good immune system. So it can kind of help you determine whether or not to treat, when to treat, when to step in and so forth. I also wanted to talk a little bit about monitoring and improving performance. So I wanted to talk about keeping good records. It's really hard to evaluate how you're doing if you don't have anywhere to start from. So mortality and morbidity are really good things to keep track of. Especially morbidity. And how many times has that calf gotten sick and how many times are you going to treat that calf and whether or not it's a calf that you should continue to keep treating, especially because it is so expensive to continuously put electrolytes and antibiotics and other types of drugs into a calf to help keep them going. You should also keep records on growth rates using a scale or a measuring tape. So as a reminder, so for mortality it should be really under 5%. For any calf that's older than 24 hours. And for respiratory by 60 days, they should really be under 15%, and 25% for scours. So these are kind of some of the goals that you can make for yourself or work with your veterinarian to make these goals. But first, you have to have records in order to make any type of goals. So records. It's really important to make sure that you're keeping track of your vaccines, vaccinations, weaning, dehorning, any type of treatment, illness, types of illness, death, reason for death, and body condition score and stuff. So again, you know, kind of going back to that passive transfer, it's how often are you going to have to treat the same calves and how long are you going to keep them going and continue to sink more treatment into them? The other thing I wanted to talk about is biosecurity and sanitation. So biosecurity, as far as the, you always want to start with the youngest animals and work your way to the oldest. Because again, the youngest have the weakest immune system. It's really important to have clean gloves and clean clothes when you're handling them. Because they have such a weak immune system. And that's another great thing that passive transfer can tell you is how good their immune system is at the time when you, when you bring them onto your farm. You know, I know cleaning gloves or having to change your gloves all the time can be a pain in the butt, I've just had like a bucket of bleach before and dip my gloves in. And you could also use other disinfectants to try and help keep your gloves clean and keep from passing or spreading disease and microbials from one calf to the other. You need to make sure that you're actually disinfecting feeders and buckets and not leaving them dirty. That's a really great way to obviously spread illness. Stopped nose to nose contact. Unlike in these pens, you can see in the corner, they just have a wire between them. Nose to nose contact is a really great way to just have disease kind of run through your farm. Calf hutches had been the golden standard in the dairy industry for so long because they keep the calf, into like, separated from all the other calves. There's no nose to nose contact. And you can really focus in on one animal and stop and help stop the spread of disease. I also have seen plastic panels between calves that I like. Those are a lot easier to clean then these wire stalls that are pictured down in the corner. And again, if you can if you have special equipment just for the calf area, obviously that's not always financially possible, but is ideal to make sure that you're not bringing microbials from your mature cows into your calf area. So I'm just kind of as a reminder, cleaning and disinfecting and how to make sure that you're doing that right. You want to obviously rinse it and you need to get all of the organic material off. You cannot disinfect something if you don't get the organic material off, you have to remove that first. So you want to rinse it and you want to soak it in hot water. The water should be over a 140 degrees. We, the dairy team has, you know, from Dr. Don Sockett, he actually, that's where the, that was my source for this information. But with chlorinated alkaline detergent. You also want to manually wash. The problem with high pressure washers is especially if you're using them inside and then a barn. And I know that they make things a lot easier, but the problem with them is that they aerosolize, they aerosolize debris, and microbials. And they can just, you're inhaling a lot of things with the pressure washers. And so if you do you want to use one, I would suggest wearing a mask. That way you're not, you're reducing the risk of inhaling any of that stuff. Then you want to rinse it, dry it, and then use your disinfectant. And the disinfectant is only going to work again if all of that organic material is off. You can't disinfect something that's still got filth and dirt on it. One of the cleaning chemicals that I like is cleaning dioxide or I'm sorry, Chlorine Dioxide. The one of the biggest reasons why I like this one so much is because of a kills crypto. There aren't very many disinfectants, like sanitation chemicals that can actually kill the protozoa. That is crypto, which causes a lot of scours in calves, especially. It's also a zoonotic disease. So I don't know if any of you have gotten crypto. I had the displeasure of accidentally getting crypto when I was in college. It's not fun. I like was sick for like three weeks. So that's one great thing about chlorine dioxide is that it does kill crypto . It has a really low contact kill time. It's pretty inexpensive. And its works on a lot of different things. However, it does create chlorine gas. When you mix it, so you need to be careful. It needs to be mixed up. And once you mix it, it only lasts a certain amount of time. I can't remember how long. And the pH of your water also can impact how how well it cleans. And it does have an odor. So, there are some pros and cons of chlorine dioxide. But if crypto is in particular is really prevalent on your farm, this is a really great tool to use. There are lots of other cleaners out there. Rescue, I think is another brand that I know that some of my MSU Extension colleagues use because it's got a very short contact time. I think it's like ten seconds. So with Rescue, it's a hydrogen peroxide solution. So that's another one. But the thing about that one is, is that it does not kill protozoa, so it does not take care of crypto for you. So again, that's why I always recommend chlorine dioxide because it does actually take care of crypto. So kind of as a reminder, it is winter, the critical temperature for calves is 48 degrees, so that's when they can start getting like hypothermia. So for winter, they really should be in deep bedded straw. Wood shavings and other budding types really aren't good enough for winter, for calves, especially if they're in hutches, especially if they're outside. Another thing is, is calf coats are really popular, at least from what I've seen on dairy farms. But they only work if they're dry, once they're wet, it's a wet blanket on your calf. So if you're going to use calf coats, make sure that you're managing them. So I also wanted to talk a little bit about necropsy. So the reason, this topic is it's kind of an abrupt shift. Sorry, I did work on that transition more, but a lot of the, or a few of the beef calf producers that I have worked with or talked to, they do seem to have a pretty high mortality rate. And so I think necropsy is a really good way to try and figure out like what's going on with your calves. And so obviously, great times to consider necropsy are if you have an unknown cause of death, if you have a possible outbreak. It's really important to work with your veterinarian on this again, they can be super helpful. I've, you know, I've done a couple of necropsies when I was still working on farms. But specifically in calves, you can look for clotted milk in the abomasum. You can look for milk in the lungs. Especially if you've had a tube-fed calf. You can look for fluid or dead tissue in the lungs, like in this horribly graphic picture. There was just really obviously dead tissue in the lungs. Another one is infected umbilical cords. If you have calves that you are bringing onto your farm and you think they might have an umbilical cord infection it's important to dip them or you might want to dip them anyway, especially if you're getting them within the first couple, first couple of days of life because the umbilical cord does lead directly to the liver. So it's basically an infection wick right up to their liver. So you're also want to check their nose, mouth, rectum and vulva for blood to see if they, you know, there's like, that's another thing that you can tell your vet, talk to your vet too, obviously trauma, infected joints. Look through the GI tract for inflammation, look for discoloration. You can look for anything that's like black colored from blood. Obviously the liver as well, body fat to, can also tell you whether, how that calf was doing before they died. So this is all just the stuff that like you can find by doing a necropsy. But you can work with your veterinarian as well. Because if you find an impacted area, you can take multiple samples for your veterinarian. So example, if you think it was scours, you can take both fecal and intestinal samples from multiple locations on the GI track. Another thing is, is obviously with technology right now, you can snap a couple of photos and send them over to your vet. Maybe warn them first. But just let your vet, that way the vet can kind of take look that way as far as what's going on. But yes, so that way the vet can then take those samples and run some more tests. They can, some of the things that vets offer are, They can culture samples, find the possible cause. They can do a histology on impacted cells and take a look at those specific cells. You can also send an animal to MSU, for a full farm animal necropsy. It's a $180. You can actually send the animal while it's alive. Like if you have an animal that you just know isn't going to make it, you can take them down there. They will also accept tissue samples. It's important to have your vet involved with sending the samples. If the, if they want to be able to see the results because of privacy. They can also identify any antibodies in the blood. To identify a specific organism or tumor. They can identify bacterial or fungal causes and determine which antimicrobial agents would be best to kind of fight that. So if you, that would be a great tool if you had something that was running through your herd and you wanted to find out what's the best way to treat that. That's something that the MSU Diagnostic Center can help you out with. Another problem, unfortunately, with calves, is that calves are, we have a tendency to limp them along, keep them going as long as possible. So when it comes to euthanasia, I think sometimes we let this go on too long. And so I think it's important to make sure that you have written guidelines on euthanasia, especially as to at what point in time are you going to consider that whether or not you're going to have the euthanasia. You can even write down who is responsible on your farm for euthanasia and include what kind of method you're going to use. So when you're thinking about that, obviously pain and distress, likelihood of recovery is a really important one with calves. Because again, we tend to limp them along, as long as we can. Ability to get to food and water, especially if they have a leg injury or are unable to get up and you're having to tube feed them. Any diagnostic information, economic factors, drug withdrawal time and contamination of carcass potential. Again, are all decision factors for euthanasia. So methods of approved euthanasia for calves are gunshot captive bolt and barbiturate overdose, which needs to be given by a vet. Not approved. Blunt trauma is not approved. Drowning, air injection, electric shock, bleeding out while conscious. None of these are considered to be approved methods of euthanasia. After euthanasia, it's important to, again, make sure you have confirmation of deaths. So check for heartbeat, breath, eye reflex, toe pinch. And all of those to make sure that the animal that you euthanize is actually dead. Ok. So I went way too fast. I guess I didn't. I'd planned on talking longer. But so, my kind of points I wanted for today are considering passive transfer, testing for your calves, and have a plan for euthanasia. So I guess I because I meant to talk for 15 minutes longer. I'm really sorry Jerad and everyone on the call, but that means we've got lots of time for questions. And I would love to answer some. [Jerad Jaborek] Thank you, Marianne for that presentation. Like she said. In a moment we can take up some questions. You will be able to enter those in the chat down below and type them out if you'd like and we can get them that way or if you'd like to unmute yourself when we have a pause, you can ask your question in person if you'd like. Before we get to questions, I would just like to say a few things. Just a reminder that we plan on posting these presentations after each session. So hopefully, shortly, we will have the first sessions recording posted on the MSU beef team website for those who were unable to attend that zoom meeting. So with that, if you have any questions, you can start typing them in or you can ask them right to Marianne right now. I guess I'll break the ice for some conversation. Marianne, so when you were talking earlier about testing serum protein, if someone tests a calf that recently arrived on their operation for the serum proteins and they happened to fail. What different approaches should they take with their vaccination protocols compared to one that would of had proper serum protein levels? [Marianne Buza] So actually that's a good question. And so, I would definitely recommend some of the intranasal vaccines. I know that there are some for clostridia. There also some, oh, it's made by Zoetis, I can't remember, that one's for viruses. But I would definitely talk to your vet about using, well, First off, I guess I'd have a plan for that, right? Because these as these calves are coming to your farm and they do have, they may or may not be getting the colostrum that they need from the person that had them before. And you kind of want to make sure that you're getting good quality calves that have a good immune system setup already. I would, you know, I would definitely consider intranasal vaccines, maybe even some Bo-Se, just some stuff to make sure that you can do everything you can to give them a good start. Unfortunately without the colostrum and without getting them within the first 24 hours, there's not a lot that really can be done for them. They've done studies where they tried to feed those types of calves more milk. And the thing is that it just, it doesn't really matter. Those calves are kind of just, they tend to be like poor doers. They're going to have a higher morbidity rate. They have slower growth rates, like they just aren't going to reach their genetic potential in general. So really, looking at serum total proteins would help you figure out what the best source for bull calves is. Because it's just it's kinda like that, that one meal for calves, that first feeding of colostrum is so important. And so crucial that like without it, they just, they're, they're never going to reach their genetic potential. So again, I would just, I would say some of those intranasal vaccines and work with your vet on what other vaccines you already have. But I would also write, like make sure that I'm keeping records on that calf, because the research shows that that calf is going to get sick more often and have a harder time recovering. So I would consider stepping in sooner with treatments for that calf or considering how many times you're going to treat that calf or for how long and consider their likelihood of recovery. [Jerad Jaborek] Thank you. Yeah. We had two questions come in here. And I may have stole the thunder from this one question which was: Currently, how should producers handle calves with known inadequate passive transfer post 24 hours? So I know you kind of just touched base on that. So sorry about stealing that question. Unless you have some else you'd like to add to that, Marianne? [Marianne Buza] Yeah. Yeah, there's really, unfortunately James there's not a lot that you can really do post 24 hours. Again, those intranasal vaccines work with, you're about to see if they'd recommend a particular one that can kind of give them a jump start in protection for a little while. But that's really it. I see Ann's question, how economical is it to check total proteins on bull calves? Do you know cost on average for time and labor involved, as well as the analysis of the data? Okay. So as far as how economical it is to check. So it's a blood draw. So you can do that out of the jugular vein. You can have your vet show you how to do that. You can work with me, I can show you how to do that. And then the other cost would be two. You wanted your own at home Brix refractometer. As far as what vet clinics charge to have the vet come out and do it. That I don't know. I guess I would just like try to have it on a day when your vet is already going to be there. As far as labor, it's a pretty quick process. The Brix refractometer, the digital one, like the results are like instantaneous. So it would really just be drawing blood and if you're good at it, I would say maybe five minutes tops per calf. I think the big thing would be learning how to do it. The analysis of the data. So the serum total proteins is basically just one number that can be generated by the digital Brix refractometer. And so it would basically just be entering that into your records and keeping track of that, maybe keeping track of where that calf originated. So the data analysis would be whatever you wanted to put into it. Charlie Rawlings asked about Colostrum replacer versus natural colostrum. So the colostrum replacer is getting better and better. It's probably still not as good as natural colostrum. But then there's like, it's tricky because there's the colostrum replacer and there's like colostrum enhancer that you add to natural colostrum. Then there's just natural colostrum. You know, the research on colostrum has been really interesting in the last few years. They're finding that even like freezing the colostrum can damage hormones but kills certain viruses. So honestly, I feel, I still feel that heat treated natural colostrum that has been measured. So if you are measuring, able to measure the colostrum that you're calves are getting, you can use again, a Brix refractometer or a colostrometer to measure approximately how many antibodies are in that colostrum. And I can't remember the numbers for the colostrometer and the Brix refractometer. Right off the top of my head, I want to say it's like 25 for the Brix refractometer reading on natural colostrum and above is good quality. It might be 22. I know that anything like 18 or under is kind of questionable. So I guess I'd always go natural colostrum but because colostrum replacer is expensive. But you know, you don't have any colostrum the colostrum replacer is definitely better than nothing. Hopefully that answered your question, Charlie. Sara asks, does it matter how old the calves are when serum samples are taken? Yes, it does. If they are they cannot be older than seven days. So once they're older than seven days, the information is inaccurate. The other thing that's important when the samples are taken again, is that if the calf is dehydrated, you get a lot of false passes because the serum is more, is like, is what's the word I'm looking for? I can't find it. It's like more concentrated because they're dehydrated. So it'll give you a false positive. So, they have to be under seven days of life and they have to be hydrated to get a proper result from the serum reading, total protein readings. What systems do you find that are efficient and effective to keep track of records that you're recommending? So I guess I'm not very familiar with the beef systems out there. Most dairy producers use either PC dart or dairy comp. So that's pretty standard right now. Honestly, I think Excel can do a lot of things, so can Google Sheets, but I don't, that would be a better question actually for Jerad? As to what systems what record keeping systems do you recommend for beef producers? [Jerad Jaborek] Yeah Marianne, and I think Excel can probably handle some of those records like you were saying. I don't know of any programs that are specifically designed for beef for that, but Excel should be able to handle that. [Jeannine Schweihofer] I would agree with the Google sheets comment though, because if you do it in Google sheets, it's very easy to do it, like on a device and it links back to that sheet very easily. So realtime recordkeeping, maybe easier with Google sheets or something of that nature. [Marianne Buza] Yeah, you can have it on your phone, on an app. That would be a good way to keep records, especially as you're treating something. But see the only issue could be with that, is that how many people have access to that Google sheets? But yeah, actually that could work really well. I was thinking more about the capabilities of the program. But yeah. [Jeannine Schweihofer] Yeah, you could still ultimately convert it to Excel if you're more comfortable with Excel, but it might be a good way to easily capture it. And it can be shared by multiple users. Like you said. I have a question. So you talked about the calves needs to be less than seven days of age and the well-hydrated. But has any data been taken with calves at sale barns and correlated to the price range of the day, so to speak? Like, [Marianne Buza]No. {Jeannine Schweihofer] Do they do they look out there? I mean, we all think we know what a healthy calf looks like, right? We all think we know which one's the best or worth more money. Can you really tell? [Marianne Buza] No, you can't tell by looking at them or anything like that. I don't know. I've never asked a sale barn if they would let you take, if they'd, if you could take blood samples. All of the studies and all the samples I've ever taken have been on a farm, crawling into somebody's calf pen or maternity area to catch this calf and draw blood. But yeah, I mean, I guess if, I think at a sale barn it's trickier, but if you know where that calf is coming from, like a direct supplier, then it's a lot easier to get steady information on that calf. And a lot of dairies will be keeping track of what kind of colostrum and how much each calf received. So I think, like if you're working with a direct supplier, there are some really good conversations that can happen around serum total protein, and colostrum management for those calves. A lot, or most, I think most dairies now are checking their colostrum levels to see how many antibodies or IgG there are in it to make sure that there's enough and it's adequate for their calves. But I would think that as as a buyer of bull calves from a supplier, that would be information that I would be interested in and should be at least shared what their standard operating procedures for colostrum is and whether or not they're checking to make sure that the quality of colostrum is appropriate. Did I answer everyone's question okay? Does anyone have follow up questions? [Audience question] I can't speak to the little calves, but here at Lewis farms, those 350 pounders, you can even tell which ones get treated better or worse when they were, when they were young. It shows up in the health data and that sort of thing. But it follows through for the rest of their rest of their lifetime. It's very important. [Marianne Buza] Yeah. Yeah. [Jerad Jaborek] While you guys are thinking some additional questions to ask Marianne, I'd like to draw your attention to the chat. Jeannine has posted a post presentation survey. If you would be so kind to give this look and fill this out for us, we would greatly appreciate it. I will also try to send out a follow-up email with this if you are unable to get this survey completed at this time. But we would greatly appreciate if you could take the time to fill that out for us. So thank you in advance. Any other questions? Going once, going twice? If not, we can wrap this up. And again, I'd like to thank everyone for attending this evening session. Just a reminder, we will have another session in the upcoming months. So stay tuned for that. You can find information on the MSU university extension webpage looking at the events calendar. There's also information on the beef team website or MSU Extension beef team website. Otherwise, you can also reach out to me. My email or contact information is there and I'd be happy to let you know what the information is. So it's been the second Wednesday of each month, so we still have February, March, and April yet. So stay tuned. We hope to see you in the upcoming sessions as well. So thank you.