Peer Group Meetings We are having our next peer group meeting at noon at Speedway Lanes

455 N Herman St. New Bremen, OH Thursday, January 30, Ors. Lowell Midla and Doris Ledwith of Merck (SCR) will present on the capabilities of Activity Monitoring Systems. If you have a system, you may find that it can do even more than simple heat detection. If you don't have a system, this may be enough for you to move into the technology that is changing the way we run our dairies. Lunch will be available at 12 noon sponsored by Merck.

Dairy Banquet We appreciate your attendance and would like to use this as a focus on the future. If you would like copies of the notes, please, let us know.

VoR, Ceftiofur, and Flunixin Forms

Thank you, for signing and· returning these forms. It helps keep everything in order for our inspectors and we can make a copy when you need one for yours. Many signed and returned the Vet of Record form at the banquet. The others were not available, but they should be with this mailing.

Winter - Time to review Vaccination and Treatment Protocols Some of you have been asking for this, which is great. We like to review protocols annually to make sure what we are doing makes sense. We will be printing these out soon for herd health doctors to review with you. Vaccines change. Disease patterns change. Treatments advance. Work routines change. We need to be sure we bring these all together. After we get through vaccination protocols, we should focus on treatment protocols. As we review product sales, it becomes apparent that some are going off protocol.

 

 Future Vet Dr Wavrin offered us an opportunity to think about what our objectives are as dairymen utilizing Veterinary services and as Veterinarians offering those services. He acknowledged that we have value with a sleeve or a scalpel in our hand. However, vets have greater value as an advisor that has familiarity with the operation and the people involved. He makes the point that vets are highly selected (3500 applying for 165 seats at OSU), then highly trained with 8 to 10 years of post secondary education. You get to hire this kind of person for a few hours at a time. Historically much of what we have done has been physical and there is value in continuing that. There is more value in disease prevention than there is in disease treatment. Are we doing as much as we should to make disease decrease on your farm?
 

Where do we start? We start with where we are now and continue doing that. One of our dairymen astutely observed that it would be difficult for a vet to carry the mental burden of challenges on a large number of dairies. Without planning, commitment, and scheduling we revert to addressing the current crisis rather than preventing the future issue. That is the difference a planned management (subscription if you want) plan can have. Both parties allot the time to commit to this level of prevention.

What would we do? Review vaccination programs. Review Treatment Protocols. Observe treatments and treatment records. Review production records. Evaluate production records as they relate to financial returns. Review feed inventories and projections. Review feed delivery and management. Walk and observe calves. Ultrasound calf lungs. Check total proteins on calves. Graph pulsators. Walk through and discuss current issues with staff. Any value here?

 

 With the constant swinging of temperatures throughout this winter it has become difficult to grow healthy calves. Sometimes the Ohio weather makes pneumonia seem unavoidable but it is important to still think of the fundamentals when trying to wean healthy calves. Since we know pneumonia in a calf can influence her lifetime milk production and profitability, it is more and more important to try and minimize the amount of pneumonia cases you have to treat.

The first step is to always create a good calf environment. There are many different kinds of housing situations that can work for calves. Whether it is in hutches, or a well designed calf barn, you can raise healthy calves in either situation. Some of the key things that need to be remembered are ventilation, bedding, and drainage. In terms of ventilation, proper air flow and speeds are a necessity. Positive pressure air tubes can definitely help, but they will not always solve all the problems. Every barn is different and it is important to look at the air quality and wind speeds in your barn to determine if improvements need to be made. We have tools to measure wind speeds, as well as a fogger to help visualize where fresh air is going.

When looking at bedding we use a nesting score system. A nesting score of 3 is what we like to see when the weather is less than 50 degrees. A score of 3 is when the calves are deeply bedded to the point that their legs are not visible. Many barns are usually a nesting score of 2, which is when the bedding is generally clean and dry, but their legs are partially visible when they are laying down. It has been proven that going from a nesting score of 2 to 3 can result in up to a 20% decrease in the prevalence of pneumonia. Calf jackets can also be utilized, and they count as one nesting score.

 

Once you have the bedding taken care of we need to make sure that it stays clean and dry, which is where drainage comes in. Utilizing slopes,tiles, and gutters can help remove urine from calf barns, and this keeps the calf dry and will help decrease ammonia levels. Long straw is great for insulation in the winter, but keep in mind that it is not very absorbent. A good base layer can be placed below straw to help keep the bed dry, but drainage is still necessary. Once good drainage is achieved it will also cut down on the amount of bedding you will need!

Unfortunately though in times like these we can do all the above correct and still be fighting too much pneumonia. That's when it is important to make sure vaccine and treatment protocols are in place and being followed. We are all very familiar with the intranasal vaccines and over the last few years many farms have utilized nasalgen 3-PMH to get both viral and bacterial protection in one vaccine. Though injectable vaccines are not ideal in the first 60 days of life, they can be very useful in some situations. Contact us if you would like to discuss your vaccine protocol and we can decide if injectable vaccines may be useful.

Lastly, we need to make sure we are treating these calves appropriately. A good respiratory scoring system came out of Wisconsin that can help with identifying calves that need to be treated, and we can help create on farm protocols for treating individual sick animals. In the case of an outbreak, sending in necropsy samples can be helpful to help make sure we are making the correct treatment choices. Top dress and water meds can have their place as well if a large percentage of the calves are being affected. When treating an entire group it is critical to still be treating individual sick animals if she is falling behind and not responding to top dress/water meds.
 

Dr. Emily Stayduhar