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- [00:07]
A
Hi, welcome to BCI Cattle Chat. I'm Brad White. Happy to have you with us today and happy to have our crew here in the studio. Morning, Philip.
- [00:13]
B
Good morning, guys.
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A
Dustin.
- [00:14]
C
Good morning.
- [00:15]
A
Brian.
- [00:16]
D
Good morning, everybody.
- [00:17]
A
And Bob.
- [00:17]
E
Hello, everybody.
- [00:18]
A
And we're glad to be able to discuss with you today. We actually have a really good listener question. We're gonna talk to Dr. Conrad Shelkoff, who's finishing his PhD, doing some interesting research, and we're going to visit about continuous versus rotational grazing. One of the things that we appreciate is when you send us in listener questions. We'd also like you to send us in. We've had a lot of discussions here recently about artificial intelligence in agriculture, and we'd be interested on your thoughts. If you're using it in any way on your operation, send us an email because we're going to talk about AI in ag more on an upcoming episode. Or if you have a different question you'd like us to talk about, feel free to send that in as well. One of the things that. Before we get into our topics today, guys, it's grilling season. It's barbecue season now. When you cook a good steak, you don't need a lot of sauce, you don't need a little salt, little pepper, and you're good. Some other meats, you may decide that you would like to have a sauce. So my question for you guys today is, why is A one called A one? What's the origin for that? And then I'm going to ask you about Heinz57, too.
- [01:31]
E
I have no idea. It's got to be like the first one that was tried.
- [01:36]
A
The first one that was tried. Philip, maybe.
- [01:39]
F
I don't know.
- [01:39]
B
My brain went. If you name it A one, it automatically shows up at the top of the alphabetical and numerical list.
- [01:45]
D
Yeah, I'm with Philip. I think A1 marketing. Probably A marketing. Yeah. It's not only A, but it's A one.
- [01:54]
A
Our. Our international man over here has yet to weigh in. He's going to have the.
- [01:57]
C
I was going to say something to do with grading.
- [01:59]
D
Don't they grade different in.
- [02:01]
A
It was from the 18th century in England and their top grade was A1. And somebody tried it and said, this is A1. So I knew he, I knew he would get that. What about Heinz 57? That's.
- [02:16]
D
I, I will guess that that's the 57th iteration.
- [02:19]
B
Yeah, that's what I think.
- [02:20]
E
Yeah. Yeah, it's almost.
- [02:21]
A
That would be.
- [02:22]
E
My guess IS they tried 56 before that. They didn't like.
- [02:25]
A
I Had to look this up. So Henry Heinz, as in Heinz ketchup. As in Heinz. Yeah. The Heinz of Heinz 57. Heinz ketchup. He thought it would sound good if it seemed like we had tried a lot of varieties. His favorite number was five. His wife's favorite number was seven. So it was Heinz 57. It wasn't the 57th one that they had tried. They fooled us. Okay. Along the same veins. I've got one more, and this one is easy. WD40. Not a steak, so don't put that on your steak. But WD40.
- [02:57]
E
I have heard that this was like the 40th version that they tried.
- [03:02]
A
Water displacement to the 40.
- [03:05]
D
Is it the 40th recipe or to the 40th degree?
- [03:08]
A
The 40th attempt. It was the 40th attempt at water displacement. So, no, now we've got steak sauce and WD40 covered. I don't know what else we could really cover this morning now that we've got that deep. But let's talk about continuous versus rotational grazing. And here's the. Here's the question, guys, and I'll define both. So continuous being through my grazing season, I basically have them out in one large or sometimes a couple large areas. And the cattle are there for extended periods. Rotational grazing, I'm going to define as I move them relatively frequently, a week or less period in a. In a grazing pasture. And I have lots of grazing pastures that they will revisit during the grazing season, whereas in continuous, sometimes they leave and they're not coming back. Give me some pros and cons, and Philip, I'm going to start with you.
- [04:00]
B
Well, so part of the pro or the benefit of rotational grazing is due to helping the plant be more persistent and more productive through the growing season. So when we think about continuous grazing, what happens in lots of situations is the animal is regraising the same plant over and over again in a very short amount of time because the animal is going to eat whatever is most palatable. And so when they eat off some grass and the new growth comes, that new growth is now more palatable than the old growth on a different plant. And so they keep coming back to that same plant and eating it off again and again and again, which stresses the plant. The benefit to rotational grazing is I force that animal to leave that plant alone for a period of time to let it recover from the previous grazing event. And that helps then the plant be more persistent and productive over the growing.
- [04:59]
A
Season and the variety in the pasture. Because if I don't have A monoculture. They're going to go back to the things that they want specifically and could kill them out of the pasture, which could be detrimental.
- [05:10]
B
Yes, that can happen, especially in our native range type of systems where we've got multiple plant species in the pasture. That some plant species can be way overgrazed and others are undergrazed.
- [05:22]
E
My understanding is. So I spent a little time, 10 years or so in Missouri and there was an emphasis on using some rotational grazing, grazing much like you described, where pretty, pretty frequent, you know, so management intensive grazing where you're pretty frequently moving cattle from one to the next. And my understanding, or what I was taught was one of the benefits is you actually get more beef production per acre because you get basically more forage production per acre. And it's not just night and day better, but it is better. Some of the negatives are the requirement to have some cross fencing, oftentimes electric fence to keep the cost down and water development so that you've got to have water resources. And people were pretty creative about how they did that. But again, and we're going to contrast this maybe with other geographic areas. In some of the areas where I saw it being used, it wasn't very many acres per cow, you know, three, four acres per cow type of a grazing situation. And, and those guys really, you know, they managed it pretty intensively and tried to get as much production as they could.
- [06:29]
A
And a different grass type. Philip. Philip kind of described a scenario of warm season type grasses. Whereas with the cool season grasses you've got a pretty defined growing season and you'll have some of that rapid growth and that's sometimes where you see some of the management intensive grazing.
- [06:44]
C
I guess my pros cons would be pros for one con for the other would just be infrastructure costs like Bob mentioned. So fencing, but then labor costs. So those obviously be a pro for if you're thinking cheaper cost for the continuous grazing, whereas it might be a con for the rotational grazing.
- [07:02]
D
Yeah, and, and Bob kind of started to go there. But you know, the other thing is comparing now where you have extensive grazing, just very large pastures, it kind of accentuates the water issue, the infrastructure costs of cross fencing. And I do think, you know, we had a. On a recent episode we talked about virtual fencing and that that probably might be an option. And my understanding is, is that's where it's being currently kind of used is in those more extensive settings where it's now 10 to 12 to 15 acres per cow. You can change the fence, you know, Virtually so it doesn't have kind of the, it's got the upfront cost, but not, you're not moving fences and water. You can, you can set the virtual fence so they have access to water too.
- [07:46]
A
And I think that becomes the real labor issue is with whether it's management intensive grazing or rotational grazing. I still have to assess. I can't come up with a set schedule and say every four days I'm going to move them from pasture to pasture because depending on rainfall, how much growth I have on that forage, I still have to go out and look at them. And actually moving them is not too bad once you get the cow's condition to it. But, but making sure the fences cause cross fences, single strand electric wire are susceptible to other species like deer running through them and other animals. Which means you gotta still kinda gotta check those. You're spending more time. Is it worth it to go through that time and effort? How much you said Bob? A little bit better production, but is it worth it to go through that time and effort?
- [08:36]
E
I think that's one of the things that people really need to understand. And then also just the geographic differences. And by geographic differences, a lot of times it's grass species and rate of growth. For instance, you know, I know some ranches in kind of drier, again areas where the acres per cow is much bigger. But what they will do is instead not the management intensive where you're moving them frequently, but they will kind of overstock. I mean, so they put more cattle on a pasture than would be for continuous grazing. But then they'll move those cattle off of that pasture, you know, mid summer onto another pasture and then maybe even a third pasture. So they are moving several times and then the following year they will go in a different order. So they're putting grazing pressure on those pastures at different times to kind of allow again different periods of rest, allow different grasses to really come back after some grazing pressure. And again, I think it, it's hard for us to give advice for every geographic area. I think you really need to know the forage in your area and what you could do to optimize forage production and cattle production per acre is really our goal.
- [09:48]
A
I would also say the other thing I'm going to say you have to know is you have to know you. Right. So can I keep up with this system or is it going to be like me and the garden? And the garden and I are great in April. Yeah, beautiful, right? I'll get that baby tilled, cleaned up, ready to Go by August, we're no longer best buds. So it is. We may take a mower to the whole thing. So you have to know, am I gonna keep up with this system? Can I keep it going? How does that work? Philip, what are your thoughts? Well, I think other than on my gardening.
- [10:23]
B
Yeah, we'll leave that topic alone. I think there's. To be creative, I guess, is one thing I would say. I mean, your goal with the grazing management is to try to improve grazing distribution across the whole pasture or your whole up ranch, I guess you would say. And they don't just use their favorite spots all the time. Then that causes the plant persistence problems and productivity problems. And so there are lots of ways to do that, putting water in different places. If I can build a stock pond or whatever, different parts of the pasture so that cattle go different places. I know some ranchers will use what's called patch burning. And so they'll burn a different section of the ranch or the pasture every three to four years. And so then the cows will spend more time in that part of the pasture on that particular year. They still. They don't have a fence, cross fence. The cows can still go everywhere, but because that grass is more green and lush, they'll spend more time there.
- [11:28]
A
Just.
- [11:29]
B
And then that. You just move that around. So again, kind of like Bob's example, you're just trying to get them to put different grazing pressure on different parts of the ranch in different years and try to distribute that some.
- [11:40]
F
There's.
- [11:41]
B
There's lots of ways to make that happen to different levels of success, I guess, to improve the productivity of the ranch overall.
- [11:52]
A
I like that thought a lot. And whether it's patch burning or. Or where I have water placement or mineral placement, I can drive a distributed grazing pattern even without fences. And I need to. That's a pro and a con, right? So if I have everything all in one location, they're going to have more intensively grazed by that area versus if I have multiple water sources or multiple places. They can go to great points on continuous versus rotational grazing. But I'd like to address a listener question question and the listener question. I can boil it down pretty quickly. Is this a rash or is it herpes? Now, do you want more information or is that good enough to go from.
- [12:37]
D
That a little more?
- [12:38]
A
Okay, so producer that had a cow that showed signs of a urinary tract infection, was treated later, had some bumps on her vulva. And the veterinarian was thinking that this might be infectious. Bovine rhino tracheitis IBR wanted to get you guys thoughts and a couple questions. Specific questions that she had is, is this going to affect the rest of the cows in my herd and is it okay to sell this cow? So maybe Bob and Brian, you want to give us a little background on herpes And IBR is a herpes virus.
- [13:15]
E
Yeah, it is a herpes virus and in cattle it is really common. It, as far as we know, it's pretty contagious. It spreads through herds really rapidly. I think our vaccines for IBR herpes virus are pretty effective. And so a lot of cattle have decent immunity to herpes virus either from natural exposure or vaccines or probably a.
- [13:36]
A
Little bit of both.
- [13:37]
E
And so we honestly don't see what this owner described, which is the actual kind of little vesicles. So if you think on the human side, the human herpes virus, we see cold sores and if you remember what a cold sores like that old vesicle on your lips in cattle. Yes, this herpes virus causes vesicles. It's one of the reasons the other term for it in cattle is red nose, where we'll see it as a respiratory disease syndrome. And again, we honestly don't see that classic red nose very often. Every once in a while you do, and that's usually due to those vesicles really being pretty severe on the nose area and you'll get some real red inflamed areas. The other place you'll see it is on the reproductive tract, either on the, if it's a bull along the penis and prepuce, and if it's a female along the vulva. You get these little vesicles now. So it's pretty common. Honestly, because it's so common, we don't see the manifestations of the true vesicles very often, but when we do, I'm a little bit concerned about it's also an abortion causing disease. So in this herd we have a history of herpes virus causing clinical disease during pregnancy. And we can see some abortions in that group of cows a few weeks after this outbreak of the vesicles or the little bumps on the vulvas. So we'll see. I mean, at this point there's probably nothing you can do. I mean, coming in and vaccinating at this point isn't going to change the outcome at all. But I am concerned and I'd watch those cattle real closely because we could have a few of them aboard. Other things to do is, you know, recheck your, your vaccine protocol, make sure that you're you know, using the vaccines appropriately and, and it is a, A antigen that I think works pretty well. And so it's one we want to focus on.
- [15:34]
A
So Brian, I was going to ask you as kind of a follow up to what Bob said. So he talks about the vaccine may not work well in the herd at this point, but is that going to go, is the herpes going to kind of pass through and then we won't see any further problems or is it going to stay within this herd? As she talked about moving to the next. Moving to the next area.
- [15:55]
D
Yeah. So one thing that I'd kind of add to what Bob said is so herpes can actually. So we think that once you have a herpes infection or your cattle have a herpes infection, that virus actually goes dormant and it lives in the, basically lives in the nerve roots. And so that's why people, Bob mentioned cold sores. People, once you get a cold sore, you get stressed out, you're gonna get another cold sore because it, that it's called recrudescence. So the virus becomes active again. So, and my guess is, and this listener mentioned that they have a, have a closed herd. There was a bull that was purchased so it would be pretty easy to bring a non symptomatic herpes carrier into the herd. So I suspect that that probably has happened somewhere along the way. Sorry. And Bob mentioned too that vaccinating at this point probably not going to be.
- [16:51]
A
Too helpful for you. So what about selling, let's say this cow, Is it okay to sell this cow while she's clinical?
- [16:59]
D
We've talked about herpes a lot, but there are some other things that I would want to make sure. I suspect that's probably what this is. But the listener also mentioned trich and without seeing the animal. So trich will cause kind of a discharge, a thick white discharge from the reproductive tract, which hasn't been described here, but it could complicate it. So I'd want to make sure that that's what we have. Although I'm pretty confident from the history they mentioned bumps in the reproductive tract. So I don't know if that's on the external reproductive tract or the internal reproductive tract, which is a whole nother set of potential issues. So I want a little clarity. But as far as the herpes go, most animals are going to have either been exposed or be carriers. So I, you know, selling this animal. Yeah, I mean lots of, there are lots of herpes carriers that are getting sold.
- [17:55]
A
Yeah. Probably want to make sure that she's not clinical. And a couple, a couple clarifications here. One, in this particular case, they mentioned their veterinarian had come out and had thought it was herpes. So that's a lot what we're going off of. I didn't mention that at the, at the top. Also, as Brian brought up, several things can cause similar syndrome. So making sure that if you're in question, have your veterinarian come out and do a good exam, do some potential testing and then relative to specific diseases, there are specific restrictions on which diseases are we can sell cattle with and we don't want to knowingly be selling cattle that have a clinical disease that can easily be transmitted. Herpes is one of the ones that's relatively common. So good question, we appreciate that. And let's get Conrad in and talk about some research. Wanted to welcome in Dr. Konrad Chelkoff, who's with us today. And he's done his PhD and his DVM is finishing the last stages of his PhD. Welcome, Konrad.
- [18:55]
F
Thanks for having me.
- [18:56]
A
Wanted to tell you also congratulations. He just recently received an award for a presentation that he did here in Topeka at the capital of Kansas for governor. It was a governor's statewide competition for research and you got an award for your presentation. Nice job, Conrad.
- [19:12]
F
Thank you again.
- [19:13]
A
So we're going to discuss some of your research that you've done a lot with Dr. Lubbers and you've used what's called an E nose or an electronic nose. Tell us what that device is.
- [19:24]
F
Yeah. So the electronic nose we are using is called the Cyranose 320. It's a handheld device about the size of a brick, but much lighter. It is composed of 32 sensors within and each sensor is sensitive to volatile organic compounds. So to give you a background of what a volat organic compound is, is let's say we take a sample of blood or of breath or of urine, the air or the particles coming off of that sample, not the sample itself, but the, the particles above it are called volatile organic compounds. And those go across this device, the enos. And then it can do classification algorithms based on those based on that media. So it's kind of a unique test media that it's sampling much different than our traditional diagnostic tests. The big thing with this device is it samples. So let's say we have a breast sample and then we have two animals. One is sick with respiratory disease and one is healthy. It can take those samples and it does some pattern matching algorithms. But in theory it could be Able to tell you which one is healthy and which one is sick.
- [20:32]
A
Excellent. And I think it's working on that expired air. So there might be different volatile compounds in the diseased animal versus the healthy animal. And, Brian, when you first heard about this, I know this sparked an interest in you, and you had some thoughts of different diseases beyond just respiratory disease. So what. What were you thinking when you first heard about this technology?
- [20:53]
D
Yeah. The electronic nose has been used in human medicine for a variety of different applications. Anything from not just saying, does a human have pneumonia or not, but they've actually worked it down to can it identify specific bacteria causing that infection. We initially used the ENOS on a project looking at could we use it to diagnose ketosis in dairy cattle off of a milk sample. So that was kind of our first foray into using the electronic nose and learned quite a bit about it. And one thing I think that's important is you have to train the instrument, so you have to tell it initially. This is a. We'll say healthy animal versus a disease state animal. And one of the challenges with milk is there it's a pretty complex mixture. And so we think that probably we were trying to use it to say ketosis, yes or no, but there were probably a lot of other things that kind of convoluted those samples.
- [21:56]
A
So, Conrad, you've actually done a challenge study looking at this, and you looked at calves that were challenged with some respiratory disease pathogens both before the challenge and after the challenge. What did you learn from that work?
- [22:08]
F
Yeah, so that was kind of our first success with the enos. We did a challenge study where we took calves. So we took the same animals, and they were healthy at the beginning. We collected samples on them. We then challenged them with BRD respiratory pathogens, and then we collected samples on them after. We then trained the ENOS on those pre. Prior to the challenge, then after the challenge, samples to separate our two classes of sick and healthy. And the ENOS did a very good job, up to 90% correct, at differentiating samples that were unknown to those challenged ones.
- [22:44]
D
And one thing, too, with that model. So we. Our challenge was we started with infectious bovine rhinotracheitis, which is a viral pathogen that causes BRD. And then 48 hours later, we challenged with Manhyme hemolyticus. So it was two distinct pathogens within the bovine respiratory disease complex.
- [23:03]
E
Well, I've got a question for you guys. How quickly or how long does it take to run these samples? Would it be something that could conceivably be done shoot side?
- [23:13]
F
Yes, it definitely could be something that could be done shoot side. It probably takes, well, by the time you collect the sample, it takes somewhere about a minute or so to collect the sample, and it takes a minute or so to analyze a sample. So you're probably looking at like three to five minutes from sample collection to result when the device is fully trained and ready to go.
- [23:33]
D
And one of the things. So before we get to this, Conrad, why don't you probably tell us what did we find in the challenge study? So you talked about, we trained it on pre challenge samples and then we had post challenge samples that were our diseased samples, basically. So how did the ENOS do in that study?
- [23:50]
F
Yeah, so it was really good, above 90% at diagnosing animals as healthy. But then the post challenge was a little bit more interesting. Within the first two days after our challenge, we didn't have amazing results somewhere in like the 30 to 70% correct range. But then after about 48 hours after the challenge, our device really performed well up in the 90% to 100% correct range. So we kind of learned that from the way we train this device that once the challenge settles in, I guess in the animal, we had much better ability at predicting disease.
- [24:30]
D
And we did find some different. We actually tested two different sample types. So we tested a nasal swab, put in a tube, and then testing the air sample above that. And then we also tested expired air. So Conrad had a, basically a rebreathing device that collected expired air into a Mylar bag. And actually the swab did a little bit better in our challenge study. So we think moving forward, that's probably a for ease of collection, but also it performs a little better on the enos. That's what we're going to use moving forward.
- [25:02]
A
And I think that makes sense, making the collection easier. And that leads right into my next question for you, Conrad, is what's, what's next? What do you see as the next stages for this? Because you've got some promising preliminary data. What do you see as next steps?
- [25:16]
F
Yeah, so we actually ran a study this fall to look at it in a feed yard setting. We kind of just took the raw training set that we established from the initial challenge study and use that in the feedlot. We're still kind of working on the results, but initial results were maybe. Well, they were not as promising as our induced study, but that's kind of expected. We would expect there's a different pathogen demographic, maybe in those feedlot cattle, a lot of other things going on, but we were happy to see that using this device, or at least the training set we created on some challenge calves, actually was able to detect BRD in some degree on feedlot cattle. So the usability of this device on diverse groups of animals is actually kind of promising right now.
- [26:05]
A
Excellent. Well, we appreciate you sharing with us and spending some time with us, Conrad. Thanks for doing that research and we look forward to seeing the outputs from that. And we appreciate everybody joining us today. If you have questions, comments, or things you'd like us to talk about, you can send us an email. Bciasu you, Eduardo.