 Let's move on to our next speaker and that will be Dr. Carl Dahlin. He's our extension beef specialist, nutritionist and reproductive physiologist here in Campison or Animal Science Department. And we've asked him to talk a little bit about pregnancy detection in cows. So with that, Carl, if you'd like to share with us so we can be done in a timely fashion. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Good luck with the keeping on time thing. But it's nice because now everybody that was in the room has cleared out of the room. So I'm going to talk a little bit today about methods of pregnancy detection. That was kind of the charge and I'll give you the very abbreviated version. If you guys have got any questions, just feel free to ask. But when I talk about methods of pregnancy detection, the first thing that comes to mind was, well, what's going on out there in our industry currently? And I don't know how many times I've shown slides like this where I come in and talk about a NOM survey that shows that less than 20% of our producers out there are using palpation for pregnancy detection. And reasons for and against that, you know, this is an individual operation decision. But this is the basis that we are starting with. So four methods that I'm going to talk about. The first is going to be an old standby. I'm going to go out and bump that calf. Then the most common will be a palpation perectum and getting into, you know, some modernized transrectal ultrasonography. And one that's come about more recently is evaluation of blood samples for some pregnancy specific proteins. And the question ultimately is, which one is right for you? So my goal at the end of the day is to have a discussion about what is it that you need to consider when looking at these different methods. So this is the old bumping the calf routine. And I don't know how many of you have done this. Normally if I have an audience that I'm not talking to a wall, I would have a show of hands for something like this. But here we got our old baldy beef cow. You make a fist, put it up against your flank there, give it a good push. What you feel is that calf as it's kind of coming back from that push hitting up against your hand. Now this is kind of a remnant throwback from a lot of dairy work that's been done. If you've got a nice calm beef cow, you might be able to try it with her. But the third step to this whole technique is hope that her kick doesn't connect with you, because most likely our beef cows, this isn't a real practical method. Works great if you've got nice calm cows. Cabs have got to be pretty big. There's got to be something there for her to, you know, to come back and hit your hand on. So this is a late gestation thing. Is that cow out there pregnant? She hasn't calved yet. She hasn't started to bag up yet. Everybody else has dropped a calf. This one might be an option for you. If you do, good luck. Alright, palpation perectum. The concept of most of the palpation perectum is what we call a fetal membrane slip. And we talk about fetal membrane. Most of you guys, what you see out there is Doc's got his arm up cow's butt, and not quite sure what he's doing, but he's really green if it's a good summer day. When we've got calves that are in utero, we've got a calf here, and there's three layers of placenta. Alright, we've got the first layer, goes right around the calf here. This is amnion. And then we've got two layers out here. Corion and allantois. When we talk about a fetal membrane slip, what we're doing is we're in there and we're actually squeezing the uterus around the edges of this placenta. And as we squeeze them together, this membrane slips away from them, these membranes. That's what we mean fetal membrane slip. So that's what Doc's doing when he's in there messing around. Other things that we look for during palpation perectum. A fetal membrane slip is the first thing that we can feel in there. As we progress into pregnancy, around 90 days we can feel what we call placentomes. Now, placentomes are basically placental attachments. It's the whole big structure in there. On the damn side, on the mother's side, we have car ankles. The way I remember this is mom drives a car. On the calf side of the placenta, we have cotyledons. Okay, so baby sleeps in a cot. Together these form the placentomes, we can feel them ball-like structures on there. This is a placenta just got dropped out into a pasture right here. We've got one of these balls here. One of these balls think, okay, we're dealing with a calf placenta. So these are cotyledons. If you're so unfortunate to have a uterine prolapse out there, that's the time when we really get to see this other side. And it's never pretty. All right, another thing that we can feel, again, as we progress through pregnancy calves get big and we may not be able to physically reach them. But this one right here from Midas, this is basically a whole bunch of blood pulsing through a uterine artery. Early on when we don't have a pregnancy, we've got about 3.5 millimeters. So if you think about it, that's maybe about the size of a thin, thin pencil. That's how big that uterine artery is inside that animal. Now, that increases to about 1.5 centimeters. So if I think in centimeters, now we've got well over three quarters of an inch, about the size of a thumb. So that's a tremendous increase in size. And what we can do is just reach in and feel the blood vibrating through there. And that's all we'll say about that. The other thing that we can feel is just the calf. We can physically feel the calf. And so as we progress through pregnancy, we say, okay, a two month old pregnancy, about the size of a mouse. And then as we go up, we've got rat, small cat, large cat, and about six months he's like a beagle. I'd say kind of a full grown beagle. I'm not sure if that's a 10 inch beagle or a 12 inch beagle, but it's a beagle. This is by far the most common method, the palpation perectum as a whole. If you're really, really good. And again, I've got much, much, much experience out here. Heifers, you might be able to get around 30 days, cows around 35 days. Now this is right on the border. Most people, most veterinarians are comfortable with this 45 to 60 days of gestation of calling pregnancies at that point in time. This is a veterinarian specific measure of what they are comfortable doing. So have that conversation with your veterinarian about where, what stage of pregnancy they can physically palpate. The nice thing about palpation perectum is I get an answer right now. Cows there, in the chute, if she's open, I can put her right on a truck. No questions asked. So immediate answer. Okay. This next one I'm going to talk about is ultrasound and I've given classroom lectures on ultrasound and talked for about three hours at a crack on this. So I'm going to try to keep it short. Here I've got one of my graduate students, Sharni Klein, from out in the Bula area. She is learning how to ultrasound and there's a pretty good learning curve associated with this. But the principle of ultrasound, you've got a box here and that box produces electricity. You've got all kinds of little wires in this probe or this transducer and at the end of that transducer we've got a whole bunch of little crystals. This goes back to some physics classes and things like that that you may have heard. Energy is neither gained nor lost. So what happens when that electricity hits the crystals? They make a small change in shape. That change in shape of the crystals causes two things. One it causes a small amount of heat and two it causes a sound or a noise. This noise is at a level, a frequency that we can't hear. That's why we call it ultrasound. It's a sound, it's there but we can't hear it. It may drive your dogs crazy but we're not going to be impacted by it at all. So what we see on the ultrasound screen is actually those sound waves as they're bouncing back up into the probe and being interpreted by the machine. So a black color means fluid or that the waves did not get bounced back up into that probe. A white color means that, yeah, the sound waves bounced right back up. So this is what we see with a 25-day pregnancy. Here is a fetus very, very small and we've got a little bit of fluid surrounding the fetus. Fluid around a fetus is kind of the hallmark that I start a lot of people looking for because it's the easiest thing to pick up. As we progress, this is a 35-day pregnancy and on your far right we've got a 50-day pregnancy. Again, we've got a nose, a muzzle here, a head. We can see the spine of the animal, umbilical cord, some back legs. So I get a question all the time about, you know, can you age a fetus? And yeah, we can age a fetus. We can do this with palpation. We talked about the cat, rat, dog, that whole concept of different sizes of fetus. With ultrasound what we can do is we can do pretty soon after conception we can start to get a real accurate age on these fetuses. And this picture shows a concept of fetal growth and what happens. So along the bottom here we've got the size of the fetus. And along the side here we've got a stage of gestation. So this middle line is, we're going to call it a normal calf. Then on this line on the right we're going to call it a fast growing calf. And a line on the left is a slow growing calf. Now if you look at the differences here, early on in gestation we've got pretty similar growth among fetuses. The further we get out into gestation the more variation in fetal size there happens to be. So where I'm going with that is if you want to get a real good age on a fetus do it as soon as possible after conception that's going to be your most accurate age. As we proceed later if you're just trying to get a good fetal age and these calves maybe six months old already very very difficult to do with ultrasound. Alright we've also got all kinds of different parts of an animal and we know kind of at what stage these different things start to happen. So around 20 to 21 days we can first see an embryo with ultrasound and a lot of this is basically from a heartbeat because we've got some type of movement some little flicker going on in there. And then we've got all the other things that develop. So if we want to get really picky we can say okay well this calf is, he's there, I can see an eye orbit but I can't see any split hooves. So that right there tells me he's between 30 and 45 days old. That's one way to do it. Trying to figure out what I've got here. Alright a 30 day pregnancy uterine width that just kind of looks at the measurement of the uterus here. This is a 100 day pregnancy in the middle. Again what we're looking at here is a hind foot. So this is bone in the leg. We've got due claws right here and we've got each of the hooves at this point. So that's a hind limb on a 100 day pregnancy. Over here we've got a 43 day pregnancy and what I'm looking at there is called the crown rump length. So it's top of the head to the bottom of the butt. Okay that's what I'm looking at here. Now you'll see on the right hand bottom right hand corner it's that ultrasound can be used effectively until 120 days of gestation. There really shouldn't be a number here. It's more of a concept that ultrasound works until you can't reach the calf anymore. As a calf grows up at certain point in time it may just tip right over the pelvic rim and God was very kind to me. He gave me very long skinny arms so I can stick them way inside a cow. But there's an awful lot of cows that I can't physically reach the calf on. So age determination these kind of things with ultrasound are pretty limited once you can't reach that calf. Now in other cases you can reach these calves all the way through gestation. So there shouldn't be a number of days here. This was just kind of a ballpark at which point in time majority these are going to drop over the pelvic rim. Okay another thing with ultrasound is we can pick up twin pregnancies. In both of these cases here we've got one pregnancy here and another one here. Again another case of twin pregnancies down here. Now just because you use ultrasound are you going to see all of the twins in the herd? The answer is well it depends. In order to see twins you've got to be about the right stage of gestation. The easiest time to see twins is between about 40 and 60 days of gestation. Before that they're kind of small. After that it gets to be a little bit big. So do you know when the cow was bred? A lot of times we don't. The bull got out there and we're just kind of there. That's one question. The other question is are you making a concerted effort to look for twins? And there's some cases where you may want to do that. But finding twins inside a cow takes time with ultrasound. Yes you can see them but you almost have to be looking for them. One of the things that I do when I go in and preg check cows is I will physically look at the ovaries of each cow and I will count the number of cl or corpus luteum on those cows. Corpus luteum develops after a follicle is ovulated follicle held the little oocyte. So if I find multiple cl on an ovary of a cow that's when I go in and I look for two babies. And I do this because about 97% of all twins born come from two separate ovulations as opposed to being identical twins which result from a single ovulation. Alright the next thing I'm going to talk about is fetal sexing and I've got a couple of fetuses here. Just to point out here this is an umbilical cord. Right here I've got a penis of this calf and here's testicles. If I look at the calf on the right here's my umbilicus there's nothing there but right underneath the tail this is the vulva of that calf so this is a little heifer this is a little boy a little bull sorry and this is what I'm looking for. This structure is called a genital tubercle when a calf is young like this and interesting point is that this thing starts at the exact same location regardless of whether something is a bull or a heifer. So if you do a fetal sexing too early you won't be able to tell whether it's a bull or a heifer. Now the point in time where this happens is right around 45 days is when you can physically tell by looking at a calf that yeah this thing is moving up here so it's a heifer or no it's down here so it's a bull. On ultrasound this is what this looks like and I've got kind of a key down in the bottom here of what in the heck you're looking at but basically this is a male fetus we've got four legs that stick out umbilical cord comes in looking as a slightly gray structure right behind that this bright white spot that is our penis. Back up a little bit more we've got one white flag here one white flag here these are testicles we come to the right what we've got here is these are the hind legs of a calf and so we're basically looking at the rear end of this calf this body is away from us so here's our hind leg this bright white spot right here that is our genital tubercle which in this case is the vulva of a female fetus disadvantage of ultrasound right off the bat it is by far the most expensive method you can get some payback on it again depending on what your goals are and we'll get into that later because you can check earlier now for practicality standpoint you know 25 to 30 days is pretty possible and you can go you know 26 days and a heifer I'm confident that we can move right along in a cow that number is about 28 days other things you can get from ultrasound if you need it or want it you can determine whether there's a viable fetus in there okay this is one thing that the other methods don't necessarily do unless it's palpation perectum and you're grabbing your calf and you feel it kick you that happens too you know that calf is alive then but with ultrasound it's a pretty non-invasive way to determine whether you've got a beating heart okay it's very very accurate early ingestation you can get a very accurate age you can also figure out the sex if you're at the right stage of pregnancy other limiting factors you've got cost by far and away and then maybe a bigger component depending on where you're at is the availability of expertise technicians veterinarians to actually go out and do this ultrasound for you the other thing that I just kind of put in here you know with these early preg checks the thing that people need to remember is you're always going to have a certain amount of normal loss okay normally between around a 30 and a 65 of pregnancy in beef cattle you're going to have between a 2 to 4% loss of pregnancy now that's not because you worked with palpation perectum or that you worked with ultrasound it's just that was going to happen anyway so we've got to point that out normal biology and sometimes people misinterpret that and say well your ultrasound caused my pregnancy loss and we've looked at these numbers a lot and regardless of whether you check them or not the pregnancy rates after a certain point are about the same all right the last one I'm going to talk about here is pregnancy specific protein so these are proteins that are released from the placenta of a calf we don't have a placenta of a calf unless we've got a calf so that's why the pregnancy specific commercial tests say these can be detected in the blood around 28 days of gestation but the other caution you've got to have here is that when you're checking a cow if she's not more than 90 days postpartum then you could be getting proteins in her blood from her previous calf okay that's a danger so what that means is that that cow had to be about 60 days after calving when she was bred in order for this test to mean anything if she was only 45 days and then she got bred and you're trying to catch her really early around 28 days you'll get a false positive reading on that test or you could get a false positive reading on that test I got this picture up here to show you that you know what it's really not that difficult to go out and collect blood on the right this is my graduate student Phil Steichen I've had him bleeding cows all over the place but on the left this is Ben Klinkner he's another student at NDSU and he's a pig guy so I took a pig guy out there and we were able to get him within a few minutes to be pretty handy at collecting blood from the juggler vein and cattle whether you collect it from the juggler vein which is going to give you a nice big target to hit or from the tail vein working back behind the cow both of them are accurate the issue is going to be it's going to be easier to collect blood from the head and but then you need a halter you need to catch them the technique of collecting blood from the tail takes a little bit longer to figure out but it's still very very possible okay the thing about pregnancy specific proteins is you absolutely got to have good records and I say this because you need to go and you need to take a blood sample you need to record the ID tag of that cow on the blood tube and then you need to send that information into a lab the lab's going to analyze the results and send back something that says whether this cow is pregnant or open so if you don't have good ID systems at your house this is not a good option for you if there's questions if you've got duplicate IDs anything like this in the danger of not having this stuff in line is that you come back and you sell the wrong cow because you said well the test came back and said she's open you're not exactly sure if you don't have good records so samples again you send these blood tubes in samples are returned within a few days the doubt fall if you're going to go out and you're going to then sort off the open cows is now you've got to gather your cows up again once you get the results and you've got to work them again so you've got to work cattle twice in order to call out your animals on the bright side or the downside depending on which seat you're in no veterinarian is required for this test some veterinarians are actually promoting and using this test with their clients but nothing is required you can take the blood samples on your own send them into a lab so when I think when I step back and look at all these different options what do you want to consider the first one is how are you going to use the data okay I'm a big proponent of doing things for a reason so if you're not going to call out your cows that are not pregnant or you're not going to do anything with it don't even bother with any of the methods okay the next question I say is well how accurate do you need to be is there a reason why you want to age a fetus is there a reason why you want to want that kind of information what time of the year will you check okay and this is in reference to having cows that are bred say you know May through June if you're not going to preg check those cows until into November some of the methods of preg checking namely ultrasound and maybe a more limited information to you at that point you know the converse of that is how early ingestation do you want to check if you want to check these cows that you know 25 to 28 days you know that the pregnancy specific protein or the ultrasound are pretty much your your only options and then the final question here do you want additional information so do I do you want to know the sex of these fetuses that kind of thing that's your last consideration so last thing I'm going to point out on this particular slide is that there is not a single method of pregnancy determination that can tell you if a bull that's in with your cows at the time of preg check did he breathe that cow yesterday or did he breathe that cow three weeks ago she could very well be pregnant but if you don't pull him off and get him out of your cow herd you're not going to be able to tell whether or not you've got a pregnancy there all right so other things that you want to consider all right why do you want to preg check do you want to reduce feed requirements for some reason okay if we come into a drought situation you've got limited feed resources then you can go ahead and identify those open cows get them out of your herd do you want to reduce overall cost you know every day we feed a cow we've got an additional cost on that animal so the rationale for some people is to only feed those cows that are indeed pregnant and are going to give you some financial return in the form of a live calf the following year do you want to sort cattle into groups for some reasons if you're running kind of a stalker option operation with bulls there's some real financial incentives to kind of do an early preg check on these animals and you have a group of pregnant heifers but if you do this early enough say you go out there and you preg check in these girls in August you're going to be able to get these pregnant or these open heifers into yearling feeder calf markets okay that's going to be a whole different financial situation than waiting until December to find out that these heifers are open because then they won't fall into that category of yearling cattle for feedlot use okay the other way people may want to do this is they want to directly sell their open cows into calm markets or they want to take those open cows off put more weight on them another way to sort these cows is to use your information about age of the fetus and make some concentrated cabin groups so you go out and you know that today I'm going to concentrate on this pen of cows it's up close to home and the others they're going to be I'm still going to go out and look at them but they shouldn't have for a little while longer and then you can also identify potential issues so do you have some fertility problems out there you've got herd nutrition bull problem something like that if you do an early preg check you can identify those problems and you can do something about it the other thing that you can identify as twins but back up to the fertility problems you know preg checking isn't your only option here and this is where I'm a big proponent of getting out there and looking at those cattle seeing what's going on in your herd because if your bulls are out there and they're busy they're actively breeding really late in the breeding season maybe you've got something else going on here or if you see a lot of open cows a lot of riding activity when most of them should be pregnant go ahead and try to do something about that well you can still salvage the breeding season you may have some late calving cows but at least you've got cows that are calving all right so the last slide I've got here I put all of these methods into one graph and said all right well what's important if I want to compare side by side and I made this graph for you guys to look at your individual operations when you're deciding which method you may want to use so the first line is detection limit you know this is basically age at which you can do these things and I've got them circled up here ultrasound and pregnancy specific protein if age is your thing you need to get these cattle project early then one of these options is best for you okay now the accurate fetal aging this is going in and identifying how old this baby is you can't do that with pregnancy specific protein you can do that with palpation at certain stages and you can do that with ultrasound at certain stages early on in pregnancy ultrasound is going to give you the most accurate fetal age later on in pregnancy palpation is going to get a better age simply because you're feeling for different things with rectal palpation than you are with ultrasound identification with twins and determining the viability of a fetus ultrasound is a way to go if these things are important to you and consider that next line I've got in here is veterinarian required I mean we're in a state and actually the whole nation has got a shortage of large animal veterinarians so if we've only got a few veterinarians out there they can't cover everybody's cows all the time so if you don't have a veterinarian or nobody to do it pregnancy specific protein may be your answer speaking of answers do you need an answer right now so if you go out and you want to sort off your cold cows today palpation or ultrasound are the way to go you can't do it with pregnancy specific protein experience and here I'm talking about how long has your person palpating your cows been palpating cows you know a story about a year and a half ago I had a call that said you know we have this issue and according to the ultrasound all these cattle should be calving around a time that's much later than anticipated and it was simply an issue of experience the operator didn't know what they were doing okay you don't have that issue with pregnancy specific protein now your veterinarians that are out there in your communities they've been doing this a long time they're pretty darn accurate alright and then price the final issue if you're only concerned about price either the palpation or the pregnancy specific protein would be the way to go and actually there's times when this pregnancy specific protein is cheaper than palpation but again that's kind of on an individual basis in a relationship you have with your veterinarians