 Well hello and welcome to this week's Kettleman's web update. I'm Dale Nasi, the NDSU Extension Agent from Mackenzie County. We're at a Lee Novak farm here in the Minot area, and I'd like to talk about something that comes around every time, about this time of year, and that's calving time. Some of you I know have already started calving, and a lot of you it's just around the corner. And we'd like to talk a little bit about some of the things that we might start to look for. This could be a time of great satisfaction for ranchers getting that calf crop on the ground, but it can also be a time of great stress. That's what we'd like to talk about today is some of the stressful times and what we could maybe run into in terms of calving difficulty commonly referred to as dissociation. When we look at calf losses, this no-sure calving difficulty still is the number one cause of calf losses in the cattle industry. There's the obvious thing about having dead calves that don't get more than alive, but if we have a high degree of calving difficulty, we can end up with more infectious disease problems to come to mind, or of course cowers or diarrhea and respiratory problems such as pneumonia. There's a correlation between calving difficulty and the calf's ability then to retain the calf's body, the higher difficulty and stress on the calf, the quicker to lose body, and that certainly has to do with this kind of weather that we're having here, survivability of the calf. The more calving difficulty we have, the weaker calf they can't get up, they can't suck up, they don't get colostrum in a timely basis. We can have other problems down the road. And then on the cow side, if we get into a real dire situation where we help the cow get stressed or hurt, you know, we're trying to recuperate and then get back in and heal up and breathe on a timely basis can be a factor. So, you know, maybe our goal should be not just a live calf on the ground, but also think in terms of lowering the stress and the survivability of the calf down the road and the reproductive performance of the cow. In other words, let's try to minimize the stress both the cow and the calf. Now, we should maybe talk a little bit about some of the stages of calving and what goes on. And essentially there are three stages. One is first stage is probably when calving process first starts. We see dilation of cervix and contraction start. The second stage would be then as the calf enters the birth canal and is actually born. And then the third stage would be the delivery of the placental membranes and for today I think we'll just concentrate on stage one and two. I think at this time I'd like to show you some slides and maybe offer you some hints on what to look for as we go through calving process and then offer you some hints on maybe how we can correct some abnormal presentations you might see. Before we go on though, I think I would like to give some acknowledgments to Dr. Robert Mortimer from Colorado State University and Dr. Brad White from Kansas State University whose materials I used quite a bit of as we put this program together. Now, I talked about the three stages of labor and stage one is actually when all the things start happening. The calf will rotate the upright position. We'll start to see some uterine contractions. Dilation of the cervix will begin and we might even see the first water sac expelled. Now, the cow or the heifer will maybe act nervous. She may be kicking at her side, lying down. You might see some slight straining. You know, in mature cows we may not even see this. It could last for two to three hours, but it is often reserved in heifers and it could go anywhere from four to six hours. Now, when we get to stage two of course the calf enters the birth canal and that's probably when we start to see the feet and the head protrude hopefully first if it's a normal delivery and then we have calf delivery that's complete and hopefully the cow will have strong frequent straining. She'll be lying down the water sac and the calf's feet and nose will be visible and we'll get discharge of fluids as well. Now, in heifers this can last three to six hours. Cow is mature cows. Maybe it can last two to four hours. Now, it might be a good time to talk about the three P's of calving. What I'm getting at is presentation. It could be either a frontward or backward or what we call transverse and I'll show you a slide of that in a minute. Position is it right side up or is it upside down? Then we get to posture. In other words, that's a relationship of the calf's leg and head to its body and what we'd want is a frontward right side up both legs and head extended into the birth canal and that would be the ideal. This just kind of gives the illustration of what we would like to see where the front feet and the legs and it's right side up and head and it's all there ready to come out as far as what we'd call a normal presentation. Now, there's probably four decisions we need to make before we decide to intervene and one thing is how frequent are we going to be observing these cows? Some animal scientists would suggest that maybe every three hours we should be checking cows but we know this is not the cality in terms of people that they have time and labor available so you'll have to do the best you can. When to intervene is sometimes a big question. We're going to give some hints here in a little bit of maybe some rules of thumb is when to intervene and help the cow out. We certainly got to think, can we deliver the calf by forced extraction or is it too big or is it presentation so weird that we can't get it and then of course when to call the veterinarian or some other professional help is going to be the final decision we make. Now, there's a couple of rules of thumb that I'd like to share with you in stage one. You know, if you suspect the cow or the heifer has been in labor for over eight hours, maybe we should start intervening. As we get to stage two, if the water sex has been visible for a couple of hours and the cows quit trying we may have run into what we call uterine and inertia and we're just going to have to physically extract that calf. Now, if the cow has been trying for over 30 minutes and you know it's a good effort with no progress we should maybe intervene. You know, if the cow quits trying for a period of 15 to 20 minutes, maybe it's time. You know, cows will take normally take breaks but they shouldn't exceed 5 to 10 minutes in a normal delivery so if they get too long maybe we should assist her. You know, and if the cow is showing sign of excess fatigue and stress or if we observe an abnormal delivery from either the presentation, position, or the posture standpoint. Now, when we talk about extraction with force, I think there's a couple things I'd like to point out. Let's use two point traction. Let's go in a natural arc of the cow in her body. Probably only play as much force as one man can exert and if we've got mechanical pullers, let's use them a little carefully and with some prudence. This is kind of what I mean by two point. On the one on the left, you know, it's maybe a one point. What we'd like to do is get that force on two points, one on each foot, and with even force on each foot if we can. The natural arc, I think, you know, you can see that there's a natural, just a physical make up of the cow and we'll see that natural kind of half moon arc as we'd like to pull. Now, we can use this with a little tongue in cheek. You know, we've all had really difficult deliveries. Anybody that's had some experience with pulling calves or assisting cows, you know, there is a tendency to want to just get in a hurry, we get excited and we exert too much force. Certainly in this situation where we can hurt the cow and damaged nerves, certainly we can hurt the calf too. So maybe this is just a little extreme. There are some common abnormal presentations that we'd like to talk to you and share a little bit with you today. This is just a list of them quickly, the elbow lock, deviation of the head, retention of limbs, either the hind limb or the forelimbs, breach, and then show you a picture of what they call a transverse presentation and, of course, twin. Now, if we get one with the elbow lock, we can see that it's just the elbows pulled back a little bit and we can probably correct this pretty easily if we repulse on the head, push the head back in a little bit, put some traction on that front hoof. Normally that'll come right out and then we have the normal delivery from then on. If we've got a head back, there's a couple of ways we can do that. We can go in and grasp the muzzle or the nose of the calf and then swinging the head into the correct position by pulling on the muzzle and hopefully rotating that head into the correct position. There's another way we can do that and that's by gripping the orbits of the eye, the eye socket in other words, and using that to try to pull the head into the correct position and hopefully we've had everything coming in in the normal delivery. If we've got a retained forelimb, we want to slip our hand down below the elbow and then we'll convert that leg up to a flex knee or a carpus position and then simultaneously then we'll grab the hoof and move the hoof toward the midline of the calf and knee laterally and then we'll pull the leg into the extended posture and hopefully a normal presentation from the hands forth. If we've got a retained hind limb, whether it's in a flex position or maybe it's pulled forward, again we reach in and we try to get a hold of where the hawk is and then you see on number one on the right you get a hold of the hawk and then pull that slide the hand down and then get it to a flex top position and we're probably going to need both hands then. We go in with one hand and put some repulsion on the hawk but we use the other hand to pull the hoof up into the birth canal and of course once we've got both limbs into the birth canal then we'll just pull them as we would normally backwards. Now this is what we call that transverse position where we've got all four limbs and the head and everything coming at once. Most veterinarians will say that if we try to get this calf out, let's push the head and the four limbs and maybe even the body cavity back into the cowl repulse and then what we've got then is an upside down backwards calf. We're probably going to have to rotate that calf to an upright position which is much easier to do with the hind legs than it is and if we can accomplish that then we pull it as a backwards right side up calf. Even in the best of situations this is a tough, tough presentation to overcome. And lastly twins with each one forward and one backward. This is not uncommon. I think what you'd like to do is if there's one closer to the birth canal try to get that one first. If not what we'd like to do is repulse the one that's coming backwards, push him in and get the forward one first and then pull the other one backwards but sometimes we just get into the situations where we have twins or transverse and we just can't overcome that kind of presentation. We have to call for professional help. Now for more information or if you want to get copies of Dr. Mortimer's or Dr. White's handouts you can call either myself, Dale Nozzi or John DuVette or at these phone numbers or emails and we can get these papers and power points out to you. With that then I want to wish all of you a our thank you for listening today and I want to wish all of you a safe and prosperous calving season.