 Hi, welcome viewers. I'm Erin Schneider. I am a farmer and I also work with the North Central Sustainable Ag Research and Education or SAIR program. Hi, everyone. I'm Marie Flanagan. I'm the communications specialist for North Central Region SAIR. And I am excited to be here with you all today with Tabby Stechler-Hurst, who is a third generation dairy farmer in Southwest Indiana. She is here to share with all of our curious farmers out there about her project, which was understanding the willingness of farms to utilize lung scanning in their cattle operations. So Tabby, I will just let you take it from here and share a little more about where you're from and then just delve into the grid of your project. Thank you, Erin, for the introduction. Like she said, my name is Tabby Stechler-Hurst, and I am a third generation farmer who farms with her dad and her husband in Southern Indiana. And I recently graduated from Purdue University. I got my bachelor's and my master's there. So that really stemmed the research behind the SAIR grant that I had performed. And so with that, we can start getting into my presentation. And to get us started, I wanted to talk a little bit about bovine respiratory disease, or BRD, as it's more commonly known. This disease is a disease of the upper or lower respiratory tract. And it is the second leading cause of illness in all dairy calves, as well as in beef calves. There are significant producer economic things that go along with this disease. And some of those include high treatment costs using antibiotics. There's been shown to be a reduction in average daily gain. There's also increased raising costs that are occurred. And there's increased morbidity and mortality from these animals that are diagnosed with this disease, as well as some studies have shown that there to be decreased milk production of those heifers with the early in life and when they became milking herds. So one study found that when they combined all of these economic issues that it can cost up to $245 per heifer to treat them for BRD. In the industry, we are usually using ultrasound machines when we're pregnancy testing cattle, or other things related to pregnancy. So I had never considered using it as a tool for respiratory disease. But I was introduced to the technology there. And I performed a study during my program where I learned how to long scan and I scanned 420 commercial dairy heifers in an automated feeding system. And I was able to record a decreased milk intake as well as a reduced average daily gain from these calves who had respiratory disease from that I identified using the lung scanning technology. So we're going to go over the procedure first. And here I have popped up a few pictures. And so here are the is the technology that I use. So we use an ultrasound machine. Like I said before, it's the same thing that they use when they're pregnancy testing cattle. They have just found another use for in the industry. And when I'm lung scanning these calves. I will clip the hair around the thorax of the heifer in between the rib pieces. And that's where I'm going to be lung scanning and I will do this on both sides because the lungs of that animal spanned on both sides. So when you look in the bottom left hand picture here, you can see the anatomy of where the rib is placed and where the ribs are placed versus where the lungs are placed and I'm going to take that ultrasound machine. And the probe like you can see in the picture in the corner and place it in between those rib spaces. And that's how I'm going to look at that lung tissue to identify if there's respiratory disease or not. I wanted to go over what a healthy lung tissue looks like versus a disease lung tissue. So the blue circle I've highlighted here is a healthy lung tissue, you can see it's pinkish in color pink to whitish in color, and the texture is when you if you felt it would be bouncy to the touch, and meaning that it's full of air. And so that's healthy lung tissue and unhealthy lung tissue is that in red, and it can be reddish to purple in color. And this unhealthy lung tissue and that's what I'm looking for when I'm using the ultrasound machine is made this color and texture because of what we call lung consolidation. And when animals get respiratory disease, they acquire this lung consolidation and this is when the airways of that long are filled with substances that aren't air which air is supposed to be in the lungs and that's what helps the animal breathe. At the top here, we have the picture of a healthy lung tissue on the ultrasound machine. And what I'm looking at in the animated picture below is what we call the plural surface which is the outermost tissue of that long. And whenever I'm using the ultrasound machine, it's a cross section of the lung that I'm looking at it's not the entire long. So you can see this white horizontal line across the screen, and that's that plural surface that I'm looking at. And when that is white and clear across the entire screen that shows me that that is healthy lung tissue. I think that we understand a little bit more about what bovine respiratory disease is what lung damage is, and how I can use it on, I can see it on an ultrasound machine. That brings me to the scoring system that I've that I created and everybody that is in the industry long scanning now kind of has their own scoring system that they use, and I've adapted it a little bit to make something that works for me when I'm scanning animals. So their, their animals are have different severities of lung damage. And you can see here I have a scoring system of one to six. So here the one being the healthy lung tissue with that white line or the plural surface being healthy. And then down here, there's a six where there is a whole bunch of lung damage and cross the entirety of the screen. And that is a large amount of lung damage. Continuing on I, I still found that there was an average overall reduction and average daily gain in calves at weaning, as well as when I scan the calves later in life. I also found that there was a large reduction in average daily gain post weaning as well. And then I found, like I showed earlier there's varying degrees of lung damage show I found that the larger the lung damage was that lead to a larger reduction in average daily gain, and I was able to quantify that. And then, so I found that lung damage can be healed through antibiotic treatments and such. But it has to be found quickly and efficiently and then it can be treated and I was able to, to find the, the, the lung damage using the scanning technology and tell the producers to treat and then this was healed over time. So my first objective. I wanted to see what is the best age to long scan, and I found from my perspective that there is no one set age because each farm has different management that they do and keep their and do things with their animals differently. So I ended up with two time points in which I think would be valuable for farmers to use. And the first one is lung scanning to treat those animals, and then we do know that not all animals can heal effectively from respiratory disease. So I would suggest long scanning at a single time point to decide to call those animals or change their career to not becoming a dairy cow. And for my second objective, using the lung scanning on B farms. I so I did find that it was a farm. If a farm has an adequate suit system, the long scanning work. It does get us for their dairy animals. However, it does increase the time it takes to compare compared to small groups in a dairy system or if calves are an individual hutch. So you have to account for the increased time it takes. Because it does increase time I wouldn't suggest long scanning those calves when they arrive at the farm. And I also found my research that the majority of the lung damage that is occurring in beef calves on the backgrounding system is after they show up on the background at the farm. And that's because there's a lot of stress that goes on between this time period, and for a lot of those calves they're being weaned, they're being transported, they're being co mingled, and they're having to change different feed rations so all those stressors can have an increased rate of respiratory disease. And then I would scan these calves. At the same time, you're doing other things so that that increased time is made of use so example when you're weighing those calves, or when you're you can implement the scanning and by implementing the scanning I am hopeful that we can catch the subclinical cases where farmers aren't able to identify the sick calves and then we can have a more targeted treatment therapy for those animals with lung damage. I'm going to share a little bit of the results from my survey responses. So, background 76% of the people who answered the survey owned or served farms with over 1000 cows on each farm. So, I knew that I was talking with a lot of farmers with dairy backgrounds and had high stakes in the dairy industry so they really paid attention to what I was talking about. And to my surprise 79% of those people had already heard of lung scanning before the presentation. So, that was surprising to me and I really didn't ask follow up questions about if anyone was actually using lung scanning on the farm. I don't think they were because I found I saw that greater than 50% of farms, sometimes or did not track antibiotic treatments on their farm at all, as well as 60% of farms, sometimes or don't track individual record. So, if these farms aren't tracking individual animal records, I can assume that they weren't implementing individual animal lung scans as well. So, it really isn't highly you this technology isn't used on dairy farms. And then I asked in a final question, what are their hesitations for implementing lung scanning, and some of those included skill level skill level, or so finding someone to have labor needed to to long scan the efficiency of long scanning, and the cost it would take to implement on this farm so there are several things or barriers to entry for these farmers to use this technology. As a whole, I found that long scanning technology can effectively and efficiently be used on dairy farms, as well as be farms, and their management systems, and I really found that it turned a primarily subjective way of bringing those respiratory disease into a quantitative diagnosis. And then introducing another technology on farm takes time. And even though most farms have heard about lung scanning, they haven't adapted it on their farms yet and there are quite a few barriers to entry for these farms to adapt another technology. And then I just have a few next steps. And for farmers to really I think we need to take more accurate individual animal records. So a lot of times on dairy farms. They take individual records as soon as the cow gets into the milking parlor. But I think it's really valuable to understand how the heifer is going to perform individually before she makes it to the milking parlor. And then we can really make some great decisions on who's going to perform best for us. In the future. And then finally, I think we need to openly discuss respiratory disease on farm and because it is a leading disease. And it's something bad that happens on farms. And so I think just open conversations about the problems we're having on farms with respiratory disease would go a long way with starting to implement technology. And again, I would like to thank everybody for listening to my presentation today. And if they have any more questions or comments they could just reach out to me I have my email and my name here. So with that, I can take any questions that anybody has. I can like hear here and feel your passion and curiosity and all just coming coming through there. It's not like a lot of farmers you interact with or shared this with a really interested in wanting to adopt. And you mentioned some of the barriers. What do you think it would take to get another farmer to go from that knowledge and interest to adoption. I think there are probably several things. And I think, because farms dairy farms specifically are adopting a lot of different technologies. However, these technologies are mostly being adopted on the cow side. So once the cow enters the milking system, that's when they really pay attention to those individual records like I was talking about. So typically, the ones that are going to be lung scanning or wouldn't know how to use an ultrasound machine are veterinarians. And there are already, there's a lot of things that they already have to do every day to so they're not always going to be going out and being the ones to the ones to lung scan. So that is a really big thing is actually finding somebody that knows how to do this and there's not very many people that know how to do it right now to find somebody that can efficiently do it. However, there are several people that are teaching the technology so I think as the the years go on there will be a lot more people so that barrier to entry won't be as severe. I wanted to ask like what's, there's a lot of lessons learned out in there, but what really kind of bubbled up to the top for you. So one of the biggest things that I learned from doing my little project at Purdue to taking it on farm is when and reading through all the research, because I have to do that. So, what I found when I what I thought when I started this was that there's only one thing I can use lung scanning for animals can get respiratory disease and they get lung damage and the lung damage stays there forever. And that animal cannot enter the milking herd she just has to be cold. But what I found is because a lot of the research being done now is only being done at one time point on animals who are still drinking milk, and they're not scanning calves at older ages, or at multiple time points. I found that lung damage can be healed, and over time, and then I can I can identify it with the with the lung scanning technology. I can tell the producer to treat that animal with an antibiotic, and I come back maybe a week or two and it's gone. And I, I didn't think that was possible. When I first started the grant research for Sarah, and now I'm like there's this whole new open door, a long scanning knowledge that I didn't even think was possible. Is there anything that you want to share with our viewers and other farmers listening in today. That would feel incomplete that you know if you didn't have a chance to say that. Yeah, I think I would say I originally didn't think I wanted to apply for the Sarah grant, because like, oh, I've always had this thing in the back I grew up on a farm. And I was like, oh yeah, farming is always going to be a part of my life, but because I'm female. I was like, oh no, you won't be a farmer but now that I've been able to, you know, get the education and really find a passion in what what I'm good at. I'm like, yes, I can be a farmer so any females out there who don't think they can. You can so that's really what I would say to them. Well, thank you Tabby for just sharing your project and what you learned and where it's taking you next.