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A
Foreign.
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B
Cattle chat. I'm Brad White. Happy to have you with us today and happy to have our crew here in the studio. Morning, Dustin.
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C
Good morning, Phillip.
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D
Hello guys.
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B
Bob.
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A
Good morning everybody.
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B
And our guest today is Dr. Billy Brown from Animal science. He's an assistant professor of dairy nutrition. Morning, Billy. So we're happy to have you with us. Always like to get that different perspective and we be able to talk a little bit about some of your research that you've done on starting calves. We're also going to discuss the best time to calve, get a little debate among the crew and we'll talk about overeating. Before we get into those topics, I want to remind you if you have a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, you can send us an email@bcisu.edu. and the overeating topic got me excited guys. And I wanted to know this time of year. I know it's one of my favorite things to do, but at this time of year, if we're going to overeat, then we have to have a nice frozen treat afterwards. And I want to know what is your favorite prepackaged. You go to the freezer and you grab one out frozen treat. Frozen Snickers, frozen icy frozen ice cream bar. What's your favorite? If you're going to go grab one and you can only have one for the rest of the summer.
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D
For the rest of the summer?
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B
Yeah.
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D
You gotta pick one.
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B
But I mean you can have it over and over again.
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D
You don't just have cat. I can eat more than one of them. Like. Yeah, okay. I don't know. Mine's ice cream. So it could be an ice cream sandwich. It could be an ice cream. I wear the ones with the like frozen chocolate around the ice cream. Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that.
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A
Oh yeah. Go to, go to Dairy Queen, get a Buster bar. And that's pretty classic. Okay. I could do those all summer long.
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B
Joey.
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E
Name brand names on here. Is that pusher? Okay. Bluebell ice cream cream. Grew up in the South. Love Blue Bell.
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C
Yeah, I like those, those ice cream cones, you know they got like the sprinkled notes on top but at the bottom you got like that much. Is just the cone. Is the chocolate.
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B
Just the chocolate. The drumstick with the. Yeah, yeah. Chocolate.
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C
Yep, yep.
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B
Chocolate filled in the middle. Yeah.
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D
It's amazing how you know the names.
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B
Of all of these things. Oh, they're all in my freezer. I think we actually have all of those things in your, in our freezer right now. But that is replenished quickly with four, four boys in and out of the house. They disappear very rapidly. So. Excellent. We'll have to have an ice cream break after this.
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C
Hopefully.
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B
Hopefully you get an ice cream break today sometime. So I wanted to have a little bit of discussion, guys, relative to. And there's no singular answer to this, but the way we're going to start it, I want to talk about the best time to calve. And before we get into any discussion, I'm going to ask you all for a date. If you could pick your one day of the year that is the ideal time to calve. I want you to pick a date and then we're going to back up and kind of defend those. So, Philip, I'm going to start with you first. Pick a day of the year.
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D
I figured you were going to start with me and I'm going to tell you it depends.
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B
Pick a date.
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D
My day of the year depends on, on your forage resource. So if you're in a, if you're in like a, a fescue belt where you get a good forage regrowth and stuff in the fall. I like fall calving.
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E
Okay.
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D
I like, I think that's a good. But if you're in a warm season type of situation, then I like a, a late spring calving. I, I'm, I'm not a proponent of this kind of late winter calving type type of stuff. I want to be later in the, in the year than that. Bob. Yeah.
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A
If I was a calf, I think the perfect day to be born would be like May 5th. I mean, just, just beautiful weather and, and the forage is about coming on. So mom's gonna hit peak milk when there's plenty of good forage out there. And again, it is geographically, you know, and forage based, but, you know, kind of in this short grass prairie or tall grass prairie area, that pretty good.
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B
Really.
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E
Yeah. From a dairy perspective, all year, right. Every day. But realistically, if we think about the day that we have and the importance of heat stress in dairy cattle, a cow that calves around November 1, December 1, is going to avoid all that heat stress when she's in peak milk production. And we know that she's going to avoid that when she's late gestation too, which also has a big effect. And so anything that we can do to cool those cows and help make them have a better opportunity while they're lactating and hitting peak milk is better. Best for us.
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A
And it's a different perspective.
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C
That's if I'm a calf. I want to be born in the fall. That way my owner can market me at the highest price.
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B
See the carry trade offs there. So we've kind of covered spring, fall, nobody said January, February, middle, middle of winter, which is many times when we'll see cow calf herds calving. And especially when we talk about calving heifers before the cows. That may be March, February, sometime in that time of year. But give me some, some rationale for what are the things that go into this decision, Bob.
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A
Well, and I think it's really important to also say whether we're talking about purebred producers producing bulls or what we're talking about commercial. And I think one of the reasons that purebred producers oftentimes calvin in January, February is so that those bulls, when they're ready, so they're selling yearling bulls for their first breeding season, they would be long yearlings. So if a bull calf is born, say in February, and I expect him to go out and start breeding in May, that makes him, you know, a long yearling. And that's, that's an appropriate decision for the maturity that I need that bull to be for his first breeding season. For a commercial producer, it's harder to find any reason to calve in January or February. We're a long way from really good forage production in most parts of the country. Again, you know, you go to California and January is pretty good peak forage production. But in our part of the world, we're, we're months away from peak forage. And that's not a good alignment with the dams nutritional needs. And it's also not ideal weather. Now the problem is calves aren't born just on one day. They're born over a breeding season. And probably the, the minimum length of a breeding season would be a couple of months, or in calving season would be a couple of months. So you also have to look at that entire breeding season and calving season. And so I kind of want the, the beginning of the calving season and the end of the calving season to bracket pretty good weather for that calf to be born. And I want the corresponding breeding season to bracket some pretty good weather for breeding. So we're avoiding heat, stress and those types of things. And actually when you start looking at it that way, that gets a little hard to get the calendar to line up exactly. So it's always optimum for both calving and breeding.
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D
Bob, you mentioned calving there in like February. And so when I was going through undergrad I was taught that we wanted to cows to calve there in like February because then that calf is 3, 4 months old when that good spring forage is coming on and he's, he's needing more forage in his diet because milk production is declining. And so that was the logic, you know, 30 years ago. And so, but, but we've learned I think for some from recent, some recent research that from an economic standpoint and from a cow reproductive standpoint, we're actually better off to calve later in the spring so that the cow is getting that peak forage quality during early lactation and helps her rebreed better, maintain body condition score better. And I'm not feeding a lactating cow on hay and supplement through late winter.
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A
Yeah, I, I totally agree with that. I think it's kind of my, my goal for commercial cows is to avoid that late gestation, early lactation to base that on a hay based diet. I would much rather have that be based on a grazing forage. And so again, but that depends on are we talking cool season grasses, warm season grasses that's going to shift and how far, where we are latitude wise of when, when does forage production start. So I mean it depends on how far north or south we are and also what forage type.
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D
Yeah. So you, you started the conversation, Brad, with what's your favorite date? Well, I, I guess better way to say it and kind of what I said is it's not a specific date, it's when is your forage green up, when's your forage turnout time? That needs to be. I think a big part of your decision of when you calve the tra.
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B
The trade off is back to what Billy mentioned is you, you talked about heat stress. So sometimes my forage is good, but then it gets very hot. And what is your concern with heat stress, Billy, as you talk to.
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E
So the heat stress just really hammers milk production in dairy cows. They start experiencing heat stress at 68 degrees Fahrenheit. And so that's really detrimental to them for milk production yield their reproduction. There's a whole cascade of events that really starts to set those cows back and, and we want to try to avoid that as much as possible. And we see through winter and on into spring that those cows, that's when our herd is going to peak throughout the year on our production cycle, which.
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B
Which we'll see the same thing on beef herds. We just don't milk them every day. And, and Dustin, you talked about going in the fall and why, why did you want to go in the fall?
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C
Well, I was just gonna say the thinking about the prices of the calves when you go to market them. So that was one thing. We've also talked about coffee costs. You know, the thing we haven't brought up is labor availability. So if you're maybe a crop producer, is there anything you need to think about that? The other thing I was going to ask you guys, are there any other animal health considerations when thinking about the timing?
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A
Yeah, the couple that we think about are, you know, really low temperatures, cold and wet are hard on newborn calves. And extremely hot temperatures with a high fly load can be hard on newborn calves in the middle of the summer. And so I, a long time ago, many years ago, I sat down and, and we looked at optimum weather for calving, optimum weather for breeding, optimum price value for 500 pound weaned calves, optimum value for yearling calves if I kept them post weaning. And so what would be the best breeding season? Calving season to hit the optimum. All those. And what? There wasn't any. Everything was a trade off. And so, and then labor, you know, we have a lot of people that have, you know, corn, soybean, wheat and cattle. And so I might really prefer cadding, you know, in April and May. Well, that's a lot of labor can on the, on the crop side of the operation. And so all of those go into consideration. And there's probably no one perfect time. But I think you have to look at productivity. So I don't, I don't want dead calves. I want my feed cost to be low, but I want to at least consider the marketing window of when those calves will hit the market that I want to hit. So there's a lot to consider when you ask this relatively simple question of when's the best time to calve it. It is complicated and needs to be thought through.
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E
I hear that from different beef producers too. Some don't want to deal with mud season, some want. Don't mind dealing with the cold. So there's some personal preference in there that goes with it?
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A
Yeah, absolutely. Well.
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B
And I don't think anybody's going to drastically change your calving season just to, to fit one parameter. But you can always tweak it. It's not set in stone. Sometimes we get into momentum and we calve at this time of year and get into that cycle of I don't really like calving and March or February and you can tweak that a little bit. But there are Trade offs, the more I slide towards spring, if I'm in a place where it gets really hot during that time of year, breeding can be more challenging. So look at all of the trade offs all the way through. The other thing that can be modified and Dustin, you mentioned it, calf prices change at different times of year. So I can modify actually when I wean and market calves without changing my calving season. And you may see some differences there. All that we're asking is give it some consideration. Next thing I'd like to talk about, we had a great listener question and this one was from a listener that had been trying to really manage the calves on the cow. And he's providing a supplement to the cows. He's providing a supplement to the calves. Creep feeding supplement. A calf that's about three months of age died and was diagnosed sudden death, was diagnosed with Clostridium perfringens C and D or overeating. Bob, tell us a little bit about that disease.
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A
Okay, so this is another one of the clostridial diseases. So a way that a lot of producers may be aware of this disease. It's one of the diseases that's protected against in a seven way blackleg vaccine. Now a lot of times we're thinking of black leg, which is also a disease of these, you know, two, three, four months old calves. But overeating disease is another one of those. So Clostridium are bacteria that live in the soil. They're very hardy. Basically we consider them to be everywhere. So every pasture is probably contaminated with some clostridial spores and so the cattle can pick them up. So most cattle have them in their digestive tract all the time. The problem comes in is the perfringens, the C and D that we see. It's called overeating disease because it appears that when calves have large meals. So it's often associated with herds that do a lot of things well, such as high milking females. So a calf whose dam milks at a pretty heavy level, he's probably a little bit more risk to consuming enough rapidly fermentable feed carb that that he could have that overgrowth and then that that toxin is produced by that bacteria. So it's a frustrating disease.
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D
So couple thoughts. They're looking at the question now, this happens in the intestine, right? This doesn't happen in the rumen, right?
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B
Right, that's correct.
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D
So milk may be a little bit more, especially with a two and a half or three month old calf. We're kind of still A pretty good milk production and he's probably not eating a ton of creep feed. So one of the things I'm thinking from this question is we've had really good rains this spring. We, he's probably got some really good grass. He's been supplementing his cows as well. I bet he's got some really good milking cows this year. I mean cow milk production is somewhat dynamic and so if you got, if you got good nutrition, they'll, they'll push up higher than the AV than their average year, you know. And so he may, it may not be the creep feed that was, that they're suggesting is the culprit in the question. It may be that the cows are producing a lot more milk than normal and that just one of the things that tipped him over.
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A
I think that's possible. And it's. And that's one of the things that makes this disease so frustrating is that a lot of times the kind of the textbook story is it's one of my better doing cats. You know, he's from a cow that milks really well. He's a little bit older, he's really consuming, he's doing what we want him to do, which is grow fast, consume a lot of feed. And that feed is mostly milk with a little bit of grass and that's the calf that gets sick. So it's just so frustrating because our typical things of well, this isn't a sanitation problem. Calves don't catch it from other calves. They don't catch it from a dirty environment. It is a unintended consequence of selecting for high milk, high growth, you know, high intake of calves and a certain number of them can have this problem. The one intervention we do have is the, the seven way blackleg vaccine which a lot of times veterinarians recommend giving that at past your turnout time or branding time. So the, the calves are around 2 months of age or so does provide some benefit. Although you can still see this problem.
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B
In a well vaccinated herd, but relative relatively rare, sporadic. And Billy, I know you've got some experience with this as well.
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E
Sure, yeah. University of Wisconsin. When I was doing my postdoc there, we were running a research project on Holstein calves, their university research herd. And out of the 50 something calves, I think we had seven or 12 calves that would present with us. So quite a number of calves. And why was more prevalent there, I'm not totally sure. But again we were looking at the milk and you know, the, these calves are fed milk twice per day. So they're getting a big load. Is there some over overflow into the rumen? What does that look like? But we were able to give some antitoxin I think to. To help resolve that. The big advantage being there that we see those calves twice per day. We're monitoring their feed intake and so it's not something where we go back out the next day and we have a calf that's been through the whole disease process with that. And so a little bit different in that regard.
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B
Yeah, very, very different than on the cow calf scenario where we're not closely monitoring their intake and we may not see it until later in the process. So a challenging disease. I would commend for the producer that sent in this question. Nice job going ahead and get the necropsy. Go ahead and figure out what's causing it so that you have some idea to prepare for next time. As we said, there's no solid prevention that's going to prevent all cases. But I think worth taking a look at. The next topic I want to shift to is some of your research that you've done Billy, on, on talking about starting calves. Because I think this is applicable and you've looked at it in calves post weaning and what is the different type of supplements that we can provide, which I think applies both on the dairy side and the beef side. So tell us a little bit about what you've learned.
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E
Absolutely, yeah. And I think we. What excites me is to see the dairy and beef industry starting to intersect more with beef on dairy calves. And we have to be cognizant of that and the different production styles that we have that. And of course Philip's doing great research on that right now. But one of the things I got to looking at was if we think about ethanol production in Kansas or beyond these ethanol refiners, they produce a byproduct distillers grains that we utilize and they're getting more creative in how they make more ethanol and do that more efficiently and that changes the byproducts that they produce and they also want to add value to those. So we're seeing more byproducts from these ethanol refiners that are are being promoted as high protein distillers. Grains up to 50%. That's a really high protein corn product. Corn is not a high protein product.
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B
Right.
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E
And so there's ICM in Kansas is producing a high, high protein product for this. And so we wanted to test it out in calf starter grains to see how that would do for dairy calves. And how it would help them grow. And so we put it together in those calf starter grains and monitored from them from about two weeks to about a month after weaning. So about three months of age.
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B
And what'd you find out?
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E
So one of the things we were really surprised by this. The, the calves that consume this product actually had greater body weight and greater average daily gain. And we were surprised by this because we typically think of zine protein and corn as not being really digestible stuff compared to soybean meal. And that's what we tried to compare soybean meal versus this high protein corn product. And I think what was going on there is that they were concentrating the solubles that had the yeast bodies in them. And we know yeast has beneficial effects on ruminal environment as well. And so I think we're, we're having a more digestible product than we were thinking. We were just on a crude protein basis with those yeast bodies. But there may have been some added health benefits from the yeast bodies at the same time.
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B
Yeah, it's interesting because we don't spend as much time, or at least I don't. You guys, nutritionists maybe do thinking about types of protein. You talk to the swine nutrition folks. They're into amino acids. And which amino acids do we provide? Because the monogastric versus the rumen. And I just kind of figure, yeah, the rumen will fix that. Whatever, whatever it is that we need, the rumen will fix it. But what you're saying is there may be some differences in protein types. Am I interpreting that correctly?
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E
Yeah. So it all depends on the amino acids. Again, it is important for the dairy industry.
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B
Oh no, I'm going to have to learn those again.
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E
You're going to have to learn them again for sure. But one of the things we did with this project was that we actually balanced for methionine and lysine, which are two of the most common limiting amino acids in cattle production. And at this stage, are those really limiting in calves? I don't know. But we went based upon what the models were. And so we're probably the only study that's published out there with calves at this age that have kind of done that to help give us a fair comparison between two different types of feed products that are going to have different amino acid profiles. And so I think that kind of gave some credence and credibility to what, what we did.
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B
So what would be my take home if I'm. And let me change the scenario a little bit, let's say I'm a cow calf guy and I'm going to wean calves this fall and I want to get them started on a good supplement to get them going. Is there anything that I could take from this study and use on my oper?
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E
Sure, I, I think, you know, I think you could probably use this as a one to one replacement for soybean meal, recognizing that those calves at that point in time probably are not going to be limited in a lot of nutrients or a lot of amino acids necessarily. So I think you can do a one to one if the price is right and it's a comparable protein source and, and it's showing up at your doorstep without indications of being overheated. You know, with a lot of brown or black in that product, there's a, an indication of heating, excessive heating that would degrade that protein and not make it available to those animals animals at the same time.
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B
And if I can't get that specific product, what does, does the source of protein matter a lot in those freshly weaned calves and what source of protein should I lean towards?
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E
Well, I would say if we need to be leaning towards highly digestible protein sources and so we know soy meal is doing good, going to do a good job, but we think this high protein corn product coming from this plant in Kansas would be doing a good job. And I think, you know, regular distillers grains would be doing a good job as well. So I think any of those would be applicable and that's where you can gau nutritionist and I encourage people to do that because they can help really get you a more precise diet so you can be sure that you're, you're feeding something that's going to perform well and you're not overspending or under spending, spending and shorting your animals at the same time.
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D
Um, so a couple questions about the study, Billy. Did, did the calves on the corn product eat more starter grain than the others? And, and did you measure digestibility to look at in any differences?
- [22:23]
E
Yeah, great point. So these calves did eat a little bit more, but I think what's going on there is that it was a more digestible product. So we did total tract digestibility. We collected fecal samples from the calves at the end of the study and they were digesting more of it. And so I think they were able to consume more of it at the same time when they would have been limited by gut fill potentially during that time period. And so that helped to drive that intake which drives growth at the same time. So all those things kind of went into him.
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D
So they. So it was more digest. Digestible?
- [22:53]
E
I think so, yeah.
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A
Yeah, for sure.
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B
Excellent. Well, I think that's a interesting topic because as we think about those calves, whether it's beef, dairy cross calves or dairy calves, that's a stage of development that's really important. One of the things that I would wonder is, and, and I don't know if you measured that in this study, was there any catch up? Like you said, there's an improvement in average daily gain over this short period of time. But once we got further down the road, did the other calves catch up or do you have any feel for that? I don't think you assessed it in this study.
- [23:23]
E
Yeah, we didn't assess that. So we stopped the study at 3 months of age and so we didn't follow them beyond that. But you could certainly look to compensatory gain. We always know compensatory gain is a thing that's possible for animals. But I don't, in this, I don't think that any of these calves were necessarily shorted because when we looked at their blood metabolites, they had greater glucose concentrations, greater insulin concentrations that are indicative of when you're eating a lot. Same thing that happens in us right when we're eating that ice cream we were talking about at the beginning of this segment. And so I don't think they were necessarily shorted, just they were able to consume more as a result and put that towards gain.
- [23:58]
B
Well, and I think that's great to measure because we can see body weight but we can't see rate of gain visually. So as you measure that and you look and if they stay on a higher plane of nutrition, that higher rate of gain should get there. What's next for your research?
- [24:12]
E
We're going to pivot away from that a little bit and we're going to hopefully try to do a little bit more on, on the side of developmental programming for dairy calves and understanding how some feed supplements, particularly rumen protected choline or methionine amino acids, things like that, can influence how the calf performs when it's fed to the dam. So there's actually some emerging research that is showing what we feed the dam has a big impact on the calf postpartum and for potentially a long period of time. And, and that's not only for the females, but also the beef on dairy calves. So that's again where our industries start to intersect. Excellent.
- [24:46]
B
Well, we appreciate you joining us and sharing that research today. And as always, if you have questions, comments or topics you'd like us to discuss, send us an email@bcisu.edu.