 I'm going to go pretty fast. One of the things I learned yesterday from Carl Dahl and that I only got 20 minutes. And so I've tried to shorten this down as much as I can. I'm not sure I've ever been asked to speak for only 20 minutes before in my life. But we're going to try. So I've called this weaning stewardship the art of weaning without stress. I'm not sure that's possible, but that's the title they gave me. So here we go. I want to talk about four things basically, but keep all these four points very brief. Why do we wean? Purpose of weaning. What's risk all about in terms of weaning stress and risk of respiratory disease? Talk a little bit about weaning strategies. In other words, different types of weaning. And then finally finish up with some things on vaccination. Are these slides advancing quickly for you? You should be on stewardship purpose of weaning. All right. So why do we wean? What's the purpose of weaning? Well, in my mind, and I'm going to try and use this term a lot, because I want all of us to be familiar with this stewardship term. There's a stewardship responsibility to the land resources we have, to the cattle that we have. And in this case, I got three bullet points. We reduce the demand on the available pasture and water resources by weaning. We want to maintain adequate gains in those calves. So there's a stewardship responsibility to those young calves. And finally, we want to maintain adequate body condition score in the cows for the winter and calving season. Which ultimately impacts reproductive rate in those cows as well. So that's the purpose. Specifically, how does that happen? Well, when we wean those calves, it reduces the demand on the land and on the cows. So dry cows consume 30% less forage than lactating cows. They also require only 60% of the energy and 50% of the protein. Dry cows require 60% less water than lactating cows. Makes sense. On the calf side, we want to maintain gains in those calves. And it's obviously more efficient to feed calves directly than to feed the cows to feed the calves. And the last point there, calf performance is not going to be compromised. And health need not be compromised either. We'll talk about that a little bit more later on. OK, this is kind of a famous picture that's circulated around the web for some time. I love this picture because I'm sure this bridge was used for years to cross over from one side to the other of this drainage canal. And I'm sure at that time that this bridge was built, people were perhaps even using horses and horse drawn cultivators and planters. And then they went with a little heavier tractors. Never thinking that when they reached the stage of this tractor that it might not hold up any longer. That's sometimes what happens to us in our cattle operations. As we increase the number of cattle, a whole lot of other things increases. And it tends to increase the risk to those cattle of getting sick as well. So I just want to spend just a minute here on this risk issue. The definition of the term risk is the possibility of loss or injury, or sometimes called peril. It's interesting to me, it actually comes from the French term called risqué, which most of us understand what that's all about. But I'm using it in this context. The purpose of utilizing the science and proper animal husbandry is to reduce the risk. Reduce the risk to those animals by stressors. It might be the stress of weaning. It might be the stress of comingly. It might be the environmental stress. It might be the stress of handling. Nutritional stress and people's stress. If we reduce those stressors, it ultimately enhances performance and reduces the risk of clinical disease. The reason I'm bringing this up is that we're going to talk about vaccination later on. Does vaccination reduce all of these stressors? No, it doesn't. It only reduces one of those. Sometimes we can get hung up on vaccination thinking, well, the calves got sick. I vaccinated them. Therefore, the vaccine didn't work. Well, we have to focus on perhaps other stressors that might have broke the bridge like that tractor did. OK. I'll maybe just skip over this one real briefly and maybe talk about it a little bit later in the different contexts. But a little bit of stress is OK. A lot of stress is not OK. I use the term piling on when I'm talking about too much stress. For those of you guys that have played football, you know what piling on is. And sometimes we do that to our livestock when we get too many stressors involved. A little bit of stress is OK. It's a little bit of stress is OK for people, too. Because I think we perform better than if we have no stress. Cattle probably perform a little bit better. And they're able to cope with it with just a little bit stress. When piling on occurs, then the bridge breaks. OK. Got a quick collage of pictures just here showing you a whole bunch of different stressors that can contribute to that calf right in the middle of becoming sick either early on or late. You have that image up in front of you? Yeah, you must. OK. All right. I'm going to leave that purpose of weaning. I'm going to leave the short little discussion of risk and talk about weaning strategies all by themselves. I mean, most of us have weaned calves for years and years. We've probably not really thought a whole lot about different strategies regarding weaning. So what I've done here is listed four different strategies. First one is pasture, where we actually fence line wean. In other words, we're weaning those calves out on grass, out on pasture, the same pasture that the cows have been on. But we got a fence between the cows and calves. Second one I want to spend a slide or two is on what we would call it a two-stage weaning strategy. And that's where we put a no suck device in the nose of that calf that keeps them from suckling the cow. And after seven to 10 days, then we separate the calves from the cows. So this no suck device stops nursing while maintaining companionship with the cow. Third one is confinement weaning, which most of us do. And then you couple that with minimal separation. In other words, a cow might be right alongside the dry lot that we've confined that calf in. And finally is confinement weaning with complete separation. I got a little bit information on each one of those. The first one I'm going to deal with is pasture weaning. There's not a whole lot of science or literature behind this one. You'll see down at the bottom there the anecdotal evidence there. But the definition is that calves remain on pasture while the cows are removed or pastured adjacent to the cows. The advantage is that there's less labor, typically. Less stress, typically. Lower feed costs, maybe. The disadvantages and the others can speak to this. Gains maybe less, depending on forage quality. Treatment can be more difficult if you actually have sick calves. And finally, you're going to need more than just a couple of barbed wire fence structure. You're going to have a pretty solid fence to keep those calves separated from the cow. I've never done this one myself. I'd like to try it, but I've never done it. I think it's a good way to reduce the stress of weaning and leave those calves on a diet that they're used to already. I think that's the advantage. I've just got down there, maybe expect one to two to 1.5 pounds per day. But again, it's totally dependent on forage quality. And you may supplement those calves out on grass as well. The anecdotal evidence I have here is from Progressive Farmer 2001, where they reduced morbidity from 25% to less than 1%. You're not going to see that every year. I mean, there's other factors that lead to whether those calves get sick or not. Talks about, in this case, using a three-strand electric fence. Just one slide that I have on anti-suckling devices. This is one I can't remember the trade name of this one. There's one that's made in New Zealand. There's others that are made in Canada. They actually work quite well in preventing that calf from nursing. Although there are a few calves in the population that will figure out how to nurse even with these on, they'll practically turn upside down just to be able to nurse. But there's a number of operations that I'm familiar with that have used this. I used to think that this technology was for people with 25 cows that didn't really have facilities. Yet I know very well a ranch in Nebraska with 11, 12 different ranches running about 5,000 cows where they actually use this technology quite successfully. This slide here just talks about potentially some of the advantages of reducing stress with these anti-suckling devices. In other words, what you do is you put this anti-suck device in this nose of this calf. And at that time, it presents a great opportunity for also pre-weaning vaccinations. And then somewhere around seven to 10 days later, you pull, you wean those calves and pull those devices out. You really don't want to leave them in any longer than that because then they start irritating the nasal passages, which you don't want to do. The only thing this slide here is telling us is that those calves exhibited less stressful behavior after weaning when they had these nose sock devices in them. So it allowed them to get over the temptation or the sense of needing to nurse cows and that you're able to wean them with a little bit less stress. This in some of these, I got some studies listed down below here and gains were similar by 50 days post weaning with those that had gone through normal weaning strategies compared with those that had these anti-suckling devices. Just want to switch gears a little bit to what may be more of what you and I would participate in and that's what we call confinement weaning. These next two slides just talk about confinement weaning with contact with the cows, with the mother cows versus complete separation. We'll tell you one little quick story. We actually made the mistake one time of moving the cows away from the calves. In other words, weaning calves in a confinement lot and then hauling the cows to a different pasture. We had cows all over the county. So that does not work very well. I'll just throw that out to you. But in this case, what they've done here is confined the calves and then at least move the cows away so that they couldn't have nose to nose contact in this dry lot situation. All I'm looking at here is the days after weaning. This is a two year study and the gain by days after weaning. You don't really see a whole lot of difference. There's some year to year variation here. In 1996, just look at that first column day zero to three, there was a significant advantage of those calves that had still had contact with the cows. It evened out, generally speaking, as they went farther along into the weaning phase. The next slide is 1997. You actually see in the first three days there that the gain actually improved for those where the cows were separated. What was interesting in this study is that 1997, there was a two times antibiotic treatment in those calves that where the cows were separated versus those that had maintained contact with the cows. I don't know if I have a good explanation for that, that sometimes the year to year variation you'll see with morbidity and mortality, okay? So all this trial did here was to compare dry lot separation, dry lot confinement, maintaining contact with the cows versus dry lot separation where the cows were completely away from the calves, okay? All right, another study comparing a little bit different, not different things, but kind of drawing a lot of these things together. What I've got here is four different, actually five different treatment groups. Not where they actually had a control where calves were maintained on the cow. In other words, they weren't weaned. And you had one treatment group where they had fence line contact but they were weaned and on pasture. Another group where they were separated, okay? Separated from their dams completely and still remained on pasture. And then the two final ones where they were separated but they had been preconditioned to hay and then separated not preconditioned to hay. I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time on this because it's gonna take too many minutes to really digest the whole thing. The only thing I wanna point out and this relates to what most of us feel like when we wean calves, if I can get them to eat, I've really, I've really complained victory because most of the time those calves are gonna perform better and have less illness. So I just want us to look at those five different treatment groups and look at their eating, the number of calves eating. Percentage of calves eating. When they stayed on pasture, not weaned obviously, during the observation time, a lot of them were eating. When you look at fence line contact, there wasn't a whole lot of difference. In fact, there wasn't any statistical difference between those in fence line contact with their cow, with their mothers remaining on pasture and those that were non weaned and stayed on pasture. So that was what was interesting to me is that those two groups statistically were the same in terms of their eating behavior. When you separated on them, separated the calves and they remained on pasture, separated from the cows. In other words, the cows were not in contact changed their eating behavior as did the rest of the treatment groups as well. So it kind of gives us an idea that staying on pasture is a good thing. If you can maintain fence line contact, you'll maintain some of that good behavior that the calves already had when they were still with their mothers, okay? All right, couple slides. Just talking about advantages and disadvantages of confinement weaning, which I'm imagining most of us do. Advantages that it allows us to feed a total mixed ration, which is Carl and John alluded to, you can usually predict gain better. You probably can shoot for higher gains when you've got those cattle confined. They're easier to spot when they have abnormal behavior. In other words, if we need to pull and treat them and then they're easier to pull and treat. The disadvantages are related to stress. In my mind, you got more commingling, more cattle closer together. You have to have a new pecking order, especially if you're bringing different cattle in, even from different pastures, there's closer contact between animals, greater chance for transmission of pathogens. And then sometimes the environmental challenges are greater when we confinement wean. Confinement with no separation. In other words, the cows are right outside the fence. There's less weaning separation stress, but all these other stressors are still there. The potential for commingling, the pecking order and the pathogen stress. When I compare confinement weaning without separation with confinement weaning and separation, I've got all the ones I just talked about, plus I now have the weaning separation stress. So in my mind, if I was gonna rank all those in terms of health, I would fence line wean on pasture, okay? And then I think I would confinement wean without separation, in other words, have the cows right on the outside of the fence. And lastly, and I know this doesn't fit everyone's management, lastly for me in terms of health would be confinements plus separation, okay? Mike, getting running out of time here. Okay, let me just jump. I wanna jump to weaning health and talk a little bit about vaccination. So this, the slide that you should have would be risk and vaccination, okay? So the purpose of vaccination is not to reduce all those other stressors, it's to reduce the stress from what I call bad bugs. To reduce the spread of bad bugs and decrease the risk of those calves becoming sick from what we call BRD, well, vine which is hard to disease or pneumonia, okay? Been just a little bit of time talking about vaccination because all of us practice it or most of us do, we need to know kind of what we're doing and why we're doing it. As a veterinarian, I try and have a philosophy of vaccination, okay? And there's three simple questions that I need to answer before I wanna stick a needle into an animal. Number one, is it actually necessary that I do this? Or do we just do it because we've always done it in the past? I don't think that's a good enough reason. I think we have to have a necessary answer for why we stick a needle into an animal. In other words, in the case of vaccination, is there a risk that these calves might get sick from this certain pathogen, okay? If that's true, then I need to answer the second question, is there a vaccine that's actually effective? And finally, if there's a vaccine that's effective, is it safe to use? Pretty simple philosophy, but I think it's an important one to ask ourselves. And actually most, I hope, most of our veterinarians that you deal with abide by this philosophy as well because it tends to keep vaccination protocols pretty short, okay? Which I think is a good thing. Use only what's necessary, use what's out on the market, demonstrate to be effective, and that it's safe to use, okay? All right, let's skip this. Am I out of time? I'm getting close. Okay. Let me go down here. Let me go to this slide, logic, management, and vaccination protocols. Remember that as a producer, and as I as a veterinarian, we've only got so many times in the life of those calves we can handle them. So I've called this handling events. Handle them early in life, we might handle them pre-weaning, weaning and post-weaning, okay? So that's my chance to put vaccines in those cattle or do something else to them, okay? In the context of vaccine, I've got two slides left, okay? In the context of vaccine, so I'm gonna base what I do to those calves based on what I think is necessary, what the risk is of those calves are developing disease, what my labor situation is and my philosophy of vaccination. I can choose to do nothing. I can do things at weaning alone. I might do things early in life and post-weaning, early in life and at weaning, early in life at pre-weaning, and on and on. You can see I have many different options depending on what the management is for that particular operation. What I've done here is rank these from the highest. If I have, if I do nothing, I expect there to be a considerable risk of developing BRD to all the way down at the bottom. So this is going from doing nothing at high risk and trying to reduce the risk in this last bullet point, okay? And finally, what do I think needs to be done? Early in life, modified live respiratory virus, seven-way claustridial, pre-weaning five-way modified live respiratory virus, claustridial, manhemiahemolytica, optional histophilus at weaning the five-way modified live and perhaps manhemiahemolytic histophilus, okay? That was a lot of stuff. I apologize. And I probably didn't maintain that 20-minute rule and it would be the first time anyway, so I didn't meet my goal. Sorry, Carl. Actually, Jerry, you're right at 20 minutes. So with that, are there any questions out there that there might have for Jerry? People are still wondering what I just said. Hey, Jerry, this is Carl and Fargo. Are you there? Yes. Yes, we're here. Can you comment about whether there's data out there that talks about the impact that creep feeding might have on weaning stress? Yeah, and in fact, I think I had a, I might have had a bullet point on one of them. And this, I don't know of any literature on that, Carl. What my bias is, is that when we creep feed calves prior to weaning, and I'm only talking about, my strategy is to do it only three to four weeks perhaps prior to weaning. Maybe longer, but that just depends on when we wean. Is that we get those calves to eat a lot quicker. They come into that weaning confinement wherever that is and they already know how to eat. And when they know how to eat, it seems to make my weaning strategy much smoother. What you may be referring to is if we allow those calves to get too fat and now you throw the stress of weaning and perhaps even another change in diet where they actually go into a short, little short-term weight loss, then health seems to be impacted negatively in that case. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's my bias anyway. Do we have a question here and a little more? Yes. I run a feed lot. And there's one other weaning method that you didn't address and that's called sales bar and weaning. Laugh all you want, but from September through first part of December, half the calves in there are all bawling. So the question becomes, do you trust the producer, the cow calf man's, say so that he's given them shots? The only way you can really know is if he's got a veterinarian sign certificate. Right. And buying these calves, and I know other feed lot operators, they have a seven day confinement pen and they get one of three things. These are nasal gen, micotill, or Draxon. Along with that, what I'm wondering is because I don't trust what the cow calf man is telling me. Should a guy be also incorporating a back double shots, even if the producer says he gave him fall shots because I'm giving them Draxon upon arrival at my place? If I'd have known you were gonna be here, I would have incorporated something in on buying bawling calves at the sale barn. That's kind of a topic all by itself. I've never met a dishonest cow calf man though, so. But they may not just not know the answer as always. But in your case, if you're buying bawling calves at the totally different situation, you've got all these risk stressors that I just talked about all at one time, all in one place. And so you end up doing, your strategy is gonna be entirely different. In most cases, I would recommend, depending on where those calves came from, that you're also gonna include an antibiotic into your receiving protocol. On the other hand, if you are able to buy calves with documentation that they've received vaccines, you still may use antibiotic on arrival, but the risk of those calves is less, but you still may have to use antibiotics simply because of the co-mingling effect and the pecking order stress that those calves are going through. So I wish to have more time to develop that, but I don't, but that's a totally different discussion.