 This is Dr. Gerald Stucca, Extension Veterinary and Livestock Stewardship Specialist. I want to talk to you today about managing for weaning and backgrounding and talk about this in terms of perhaps a not a mathematical equation but perhaps a statistical equation and how many different factors go into determining whether cattle stay healthy or not perhaps before weaning and even after weaning. The first picture I have for you is just to remind everyone that this time of the year if you have cows that haven't bred yet you'll have a whole string of either steer calves or bull calves that haven't been cut yet chasing after cows so it's kind of a sign that maybe you need to wean those calves and put them in a pen by themselves where they can thrive and do different do better on a pretty determined ration. I want to start here because I want to talk about where health costs come in and losing calves and treating calves come in. It's been determined that 50 70% of the cost of keeping a cow is feeding pasture and if that's true it's pretty easy to come up with $700 to $900 per cow per year which is a lot and so it costs us that much to keep a cow per year where does our income come from while it comes from how many calves we have to sell and also the what the cull animals that cows that have either showed up open or bred heifers that instead of breeding and conceiving have come up open and even some cull bulls. And then some people like to use the term live calves per acre. You'll notice that I don't use anything like weaning weights or pounds. All these animals have a value and I'm more concerned with selling calves per acre of resource that you have. The subtractors from income which of course includes disease but open cows, stillbirths, weak calves, abortions and an actual disease like scours early on or somenomonias when they're still nursing the cow or even pink iron foot rot detract from income because of the cost of treating and the labor and the time it takes to treat. And then of course if we backgrounding our own calves or buying in calves that post weaning BRD as a loss and particularly if you lose one or even if you have to treat one it's a subtractor from income. This is just a relatively new North Dakota Farm Business Management figures that I pulled up recently and all I'm trying to point out here is where some of those subtractors from income come in. If we just take the beef cow calf average per cow not looking at that far right column where they're we're looking at with backgrounding but pregnancy percentage on a group of cows in this case almost 300 cows over 12 12 ranches. Pregnancy percentage is about 95.7 which is which is really good actually and then some of those pregnancies will lose throughout the winter time up in the northern plains 1.8% calling percentage about 12.4% you end up calving somewhere around 94% and then by the time you wean those calves you've got about 90.5% that that really should somehow equal with that that 4.1% death loss and sometimes you lose some cows and so on and so forth. So what's giving you here is an idea of what many use as a determinant of how productive their ranch is net pounds weaned for exposed female in this case it's 492 pounds and I know many of you have higher weaning weights than that but when you include everything when you include all those females that you put out to be bred with the bull from the year prior and how many calves you weaned and what they weighed that's the number that at least in this data data set shows us about 492 almost 500 pounds the average weight of the beef calf sold in this data set was 547 average price per 100 weight was 153.45 if you look over there on the on the whole herd with backgrounding the numbers change a little bit you got less you got just a little smaller cow herd size that's doing that 185 pregnancy press percentage again really high 97.3 we lose some of those pregnancies we have a 15% culling percentage 96.3% calving percentage we weaned only 91.9 to me that looks pretty close to that four and a half percent calf death loss percent and there was some cow death loss percent as well pounds weaned per exposed female in this data sets about the same 486 versus 492 an average weight of beef calf sold is 670 versus 547 but that's because we we grew those calves after weaning and hopefully gaining more dollars per calf so maybe it's good to have some idea of what we expect in terms of sickness and even death loss following weaning and I guess for many of of you that raise their your own calves you wean your own calves at your place you wean them for a period of time might be 45 days might be 60 might be 90 might be even longer there does include some risk of death loss and I've put that in at 0 to 5% 5% is way on the upper end that I would expect in the Northern Plains and but zero is within my expectations zero to maybe a half a percent is where I would expect these things to be what's really interesting though is that if we look even farther beyond our own our own ranches and where that animal goes to be fed that even when these animals go to a feed yard and this is focused on the feedlots from K state steers coming in at 799 or 59 pounds he had first coming in at 721 pound or 721 pounds and 175 days on feed for steers 3.68 average daily gains so on and so for death loss even at that weight you know you can see they're being fed for 100 about approximately 175 days but death loss is 1.7 for steers and 1.88 for heifers you would think that at that this time in their lives that death loss would be considerably less my point is is that we haven't made a great deal of progress on death loss we still see death loss in categories of animal where we would not expect there to be much death loss and certainly not much morbidity either I'm sharing I'm sharing this information with you just to give you a reminder that I can't see we're really doing any better we may actually be doing worse over time this is looking at focus on the feedlots death loss over a period of 20 some years and death loss and the feedlot has actually gotten worse so and I kind of attribute this this is my speculation on the fact that we don't really do enough systems thinking and by that I mean we're what are the things from a management standpoint that we can control that may in fact contribute to healthier calves throughout their entire lifetime so this is my health production assurance equation and I want to spend a little time in this and share some pictures with this is because I think this is where all of us need to think when it comes to producing healthy calves and calves that produce and even healthy females has heifers and those females that last a long time and I heard and breed back every year so I say in this slide there's a relationship of calf health and expression of genetic potential to a set of risk management factors some of these things you and I have control over and I would argue a fair amount of control over and some not so much so I have calf in the second bullet point calf health and productivity equals in other words good calf health good productivity equals and I've got fpt and that's an acronym for failure of passive transfer and I've outlined that a little bit better and saying failure or partial failure of passive transfer in other words some type of immune stress when a calf is born and gets up and nurses quickly and doesn't have any difficulty doing it because it was the right size coming through the birth canal had enough energy and vigor to get up and nurse right away failure or partial failure of passive transfers is basically not going to happen so you and I have some control over that and we'll talk about that as we get into the images that go along with this weaning stress a psychological stress is part of this health and productivity equation as well how do we wean what's my method what's my management strategy for weaning co-mingling do I put calves together even on my home ranch from the same pastures or from a bunch of different pastures that's what's what we call co-mingling it's a stress it's not only psychological but it's a social stress there's a little bit of difference between those two environmental stress when do we cab what time of the year do we wean other things I can do to avoid some of that environmental stress and again we'll refer to some of those images I'll share with you nutrition how have I wintered those cows when they're pregnant how have I fed those cows prior to calving when they're pregnant have I provided enough energy and protein and and provided trace mineral supplementation to those cows or are they under great a deal of nutrition stress what kind of exposure have they had when they were pregnant or right before calving do they have a good functioning immune system have I vaccinated for some of the the the pathogens that I can vaccinate against and finally do we have enough labor to get this accomplished and so there's a lot of things rolled into this this huge equation and I want to share some pictures with it this help us to think about this big system that we're trying to manage I start here in this lower right lower left hand corner with birth weight and calving ease and so to me both of those EPD traits are health and productivity traits I want a calf that's born quickly unless there's some abnormal presentation gets up quickly and nurses quickly and I want a mother that's been a fed appropriate fed appropriately during the time that that cow was gestating that calf those to me are health EPD traits when is my calving season do I have if I calve early in the or in the middle of the winter do I have enough facilities enough barn space enough bedding enough windbreaks to carry that out so there's there's not much stress on the cow there's not much stress on that newborn calf and there's not much stress on human beings that are trying to accomplish the tasks that are required when we calve when the weather is not favorable or have I can I change my calving season to a time of the year when it's more favorable or less risk of bad weather albeit knowing full well that that changes many things as well it changes your marketing structure it perhaps even changes some of your supplementation strategies as later in the summer when we have lower quality forage the the type of grass the availability of grass may not be the same when we're trying to rebird breed those cows some of those things can lead to calves getting sick early in life and obviously that we look at this calf we can probably determine that calf is not feeling well looks to me like it's probably got scours and some of those relate to the time of the year that you have and also to some of these factors here related to back to the cow the nutrition during gestation and also bath birth weight and calving ease and and environmental stressors here how do we wean those calves do we have we got a management strategy that allows us to low stress weaned calves can we put them in a large enough area with tight enough fences so the mothers can be alongside and they can they can bellard each other for a number of days have we fed the cows and calves together prior to weaning so that they get over their co mingling stress even though they're on the same rents they came from different pastures can I feed them together for a few weeks so they get used to one another and they're used to eating by that time and so that some of the stressors that are associated with weaning will be minimized they won't be completely taken away but they'll be at least be minimized and then some of that co mingling if they're all the calves are on the same ranch and bringing different pastures together by feeding them together you minimize some of that co mingling if we're buying in other calves and we're bringing several loads trailer loads or we're mixing them all together you are introducing a great deal of co mingling stress into those cattle and you need to figure out a way to manage them perhaps a little bit different maybe have more pens smaller pens fewer animals per pen you load a pen during a couple days and then you don't put any more calves into that pen again or maybe you have some other strategy that helps you manage some of those calves that you know are likely to become sick after arrival it could include for example giving all of them antibiotics on arrival kind of biosecurity and vaccination programs don't have in place if I'm buying calves am I convinced that I'm not bringing something into my place for example like BVD that can spread through the entire herd very very rapidly do I have a sound vaccination program not only in my own home raised home wing calves and have I vaccinated them perhaps twice prior to weaning and do I have a solid protocol if I'm buying in calves or am I buying calves that have already previously been weaned and vaccinated so all of these things that I've talked about so far can certainly be be managed and when I comes to processing do I have a low stress processing environment or management strategy do I move cattle quietly and and not quickly necessarily but efficiently through the processing facility what about low stress handling this ties in with processing and loading cattle and working cattle and most of us have made dramatic changes in the way we handle cattle we we've discovered it's no longer necessary to use words just movements and then and move cattle to where they need to go and let them figure it out in many cases and all these things are under our control that lessens the risk of a calf that's looking like this that needs that needs our attention all of these things can have enough stress in the life of that calf so that it affects the immune system and I'm just sharing you with a little a little image here of a of an immune cell that's in our bodies and in the bodies of animals and those cells don't work as well when those calves are stressed sharing this with you because this is an interesting slide so it's a case report that I got a number of years ago and I've used it several times and I just want to share it with you because it allows you to think about things in perhaps a different manner and my point is in sharing this with you that sometimes we give vaccines too much credit so a number of years ago we received a an email from a veterinarian in Georgia about a bull test station where they bring in young bulls they're sent to the bull test station and as you can see in the second bullet point as per a vaccination protocol sent to a bull test test years ago by someone at the vet school okay incoming bulls must be vaccinated two to three weeks prior to arrival which makes sense with an IBR, PI3, BRSV, BBD type one and two and of course that's a viral component they also receive manheimy hemolytica, pastoral amyltosidohemophilisomus and claustridial seven-way and then at processing the boosters are given using whatever vaccines have been donated I think this particular colleague of mine was a little put out by the way this was done his second question came or a second part of this history of this this bull test station was this typically processing in is around July 5 and the bulls are sold around December 7th within seven to ten days after arrival there are numerous cases of BRD which is bovine respiratory disease years ago we call this shipping favor which in a way was somewhat appropriate which are treated and may be retreated and the process really runs to late November that's a long time to be dealing with BRD so this question was if the protocol pre-arrival and it processing was an IN which stands for intranasal administration of a vaccine like TSV2 which is an old vaccine that we've used for years or I might add in in force 3 and an intramuscular subcutaneous injection of manheimia pastoral a vaccine plus claustridial emitting the amyltosidohemophilisomus with their let be less be BRD I'm just gonna answer this right now wouldn't make any difference at all none it says nothing to do with vaccination strategy but give you the answer right now this has all everything in the world to do with the stress of commingling that's what's happening these bulls are not going in pens by themselves they're being commingled with pens all over the country and that's the big deal vaccination has very little almost nothing to do with the outcome of these cases of BRD just a little bit of comment here regarding some immunology principles and this will come into play in a few more slides in very very general terms from the time an animal is stressed until the time it starts showing signs in other words depression high fevers off feed so from the time it's stressed to the time it shows signs and symptoms of respiratory disease or shipping fevers about seven to ten days with a tremendous amount of stress this could even be shortened even more on the other hand on the other side of the coin is the immune response takes time to begin three to ten days to begin longer with calves that have never been exposed and maybe peaks in two to four weeks you can see that if I'm dealing with calves that I'm buying in and I'm expecting vaccination to improve the their health status and they've never been vaccinated by vaccinating on my rival I'm kind of behind already aren't I yes I am it's very difficult to vaccinate on arrival and change the outcome or change the health status of those animals with on arrival vaccination at least for calves that you buy in that have had no history of previous vaccination just a one slide on talking about vaccination strategies I want to use only the vaccines I think are necessary okay because there's a risk and there's certainly a risk of respiratory disease so I only only use respiratory disease vaccines but I want to make sure the second bullet point is understood as well I want to be reasonably assured that they work so I want them to be necessary I want to be reasonably sure that they work and I want some information behind that expectation in other words if there's research or I have observed it or there's some anecdotal evidence that the vaccine works that gives me some level of comfort and finally number three I want to make I want to be certain that they're safe to use that I don't have a bunch of insecticide lesions that I don't have some of the sweats and cattle and as it relates to pregnant cows anyway that I'm not inducing abortions in pregnant cows but we're talking about respiratory disease in our discussion today and so really the safety issues would be hypersensitivity reactions injection site lesions and maybe cattle just not feeling well after vaccination and that does happen you can't always predict it some cattle that you expect to to really kind of drop off not have very good feed intakes after vaccination that have just arrived they'll fool you and they'll go right to the bonkin start eating and some calves that you don't expect to feel a little bit tough after vaccination they will on the other hand back up a little bit on feed not look real great for a couple days this slide is here as a reminder to us that most vaccines require a second dose even modified lives vaccines will benefit from a booster dose so all i'm showing you here is on the left hand side on the why what we call the y-axis antibody concentration when i give an initial dose i can gonna get a little bit of a response in really young calves it's difficult to measure that immune response because many of those calves carry immunity from their mothers when they're really young but in truth if i was to measure a different response that we call cmi or cell mediated response i would be able to to measure a response okay so but the point here is that when i come back a second time with that booster dose and we're not sure exactly what the perfect time is for booster doses on most labels at 21 28 days after the first dose we've done some work at streeter at ndsu heard out there looking at some calves that we vaccinated somewhere between eight and 12 weeks of age and actually getting a nice booster response 150 days later which coincides pretty well with many of your management strategies so do these programs work do these weaning and vaccinating programs actually work well let's look at one that now this one was done some number of years ago and i was part of this research project it was back in 2003 but i think it still tells us a story and i'll share that story with you here so these cattle originated in what we call the southeast anyway and they were purchased at the joplin regional stockyard in carthage missouri cattle were trucked to cater county feud yard in opal and kansas where they were fed until may and they were shipped to excel and dodd city for slaughter and some of these cows were actually shipped a little bit early and part of that's because of the market market disruption we had in that year that the cow that stole christmas with the bovine spongiform encephalopathy encephalopathy episode that year so that's where the cattle came from that's where they were fed so really they were this was set up to have four treatment groups but because we started late i'll just tell you right now the t3 there the pre-vac program where the cattle were vaccinated but were not weaned that one kind of fell out because we just didn't have enough calves in that particular treatment so what we ended up with and what we really concentrated on was t1 which is the controls these are unweaned calves of unknown health history at the time of sale t2 at that time was a Pfizer program as wean vac calves weaned for at least 45 days prior to sale and had received certain vaccines and the t4 was a similar wean program steers weaned for 45 days and had a different a different companies vaccines that were utilized in that in that trend this is the the sickness rate morbidity means sickness so 42.63 percent of the unweaned calves with unknown health history actually were pulled and had to be treated for respiratory disease the other two programs are almost identical the other 45 day in the wean vac 15.4 percent of the calves were pulled and treated this next slide just breaks us out a little bit further because it gives you a little bit better idea of the animals that were pulled once and pulled twice and pulled three times and if you add those columns up on the right you'll see where that's where that 42 percent comes in those unweaned calves with unknown history so maybe a better way to look at this and a way that I look at this gives me a little bit better idea of the health status of the calves I just look at the first column the percentage of steers actually pulled one time because we're never sure did these steers get pulled at the right time were they too late was the wrong antibiotic and so on and so forth so let's use these numbers 20 26 percent of the calves from unweaned unknown health history were pulled and treated one time the other 45 day weaning programs were like this 13 percent for the the one group and 11.69 percent obviously no statistical difference between those two groups at all okay what i'm sharing with you here is this disease curve that I in many times this relates back to this when I talked earlier about how long it takes to develop an immune response and how quickly does disease result after a stressful period so what I've done here is I've taken the weaned back calves and compared them to the control calves and just constructed a disease curve the disease curve is simply looking at the number or it could be the percent number or percent of calves that were pulled by day this DOF on the bottom is days on feed so what I've got outlined in this kind of maroon color here is the control calves so I started pulling on those calves almost almost on day one day two day three I had a peak here day five day six it went way down here I don't know this for sure but I'm speculating that this might be Sunday and that if they would have truly pulled on Sunday this thing would have continued right going up from here to here would have been a almost a straight line I don't know that for sure but that's what I surmise and then they treated a bunch and then it followed off the next day and they came back and treated more this is more of a true disease curve that I would expect and it's because we have calves that are unweaned and unknown health history and they start breaking pretty early because their stress occurred way back here perhaps even at the auction market as they were co-mingled together and then they were co-mingled at the feed yard and now I've got this scenario taken place so 26 percent of these cattle were treated at least one time for BRD we'll contrast that with these weanback calves so this weanback means they're weaned for at least 45 days and vaccinated they really didn't have much of a disease curve at all the highest point here was on day five where they pulled five animals which is interesting but really didn't continue up from there they had to decline the next day again probably Sunday and a few more and what it here's what it points back to is that co-mingling occurred way back here sometime so by the time they were sold in Joplin and got enough animals to put it make a potload it took a number of days before those cattle arrived and so that's why this seven to 10 day incubation period fits in with what I'm looking at here what's really interesting about these there's two really interesting things in this slide here in in treatment two and four and if you remember that both of those were the weaned and vaccinated animals they identified six bvd pi animals who remember in that slide earlier I talked about bvd and if you have a persistently infected animals those animals will actually spread that disease within a pen within that group very rapidly so there were six of those animals that were in those two groups they remained in the pen three remained healthy interestingly enough two died and one was sold early so we had tremendous exposure in these weaned back calves and yet they held pretty strong throughout some of these late polls may have been due to that but the fact is that we're vaccinated that that that virus was spread into that pen probably made a huge difference on whether those some of these polls are related to that but it also points up to the fact that weaning those calves prior to them coming to the feed yard and make sure that their vaccination history was strong has contributed to those calves staying as healthy as they as they could there's some really interesting points to make in that slide this is death loss 1.2% for those with unweaned unknown health history 1% for the 45 day and 0.3 for the weaned back calves all this gives here all this tells us here is that these calves here were 4.2 times more likely to die than the ones in this group right here the problem is to sort this out we'd have to have much higher numbers even though this one tells us that 3.5 times more likely to die than this group I don't put a whole lot of confidence in this in these numbers here because the n the number of animals involved in here and the number of animals that actually died was really low another interesting point that I want to make here when I combine controls the ones in the two separate weaned and vaccinated groups and I looked at all of those that became sick and all of those that stayed healthy in other words they were never pulled and treated there was a reduced average daily gain by 0.43 pounds per head per day through the finishing period 336 head were treated in these three groups they had average daily gain of 3.07 in the groups that stayed healthy there was 1,100 head 3.5 average daily gain interesting in the fact that even though these cattle perhaps were treated early there's still a cost to the cost of treatment the antibiotics of labor is one thing but you can see that performance and we also know that carcass quality becomes impacted want to share another case report with you a different one than I shared earlier but again it highlights some of the things that that I see that are some of the main risk factors that don't get paid attention to in some of these home raised home wing calves these are five to six to eight calves approximately 400 head springborn approximately six to eight months of age calves had been weaned into a common pen by groups over a time period of four weeks beginning in late September and into the month of October approximately three to five weeks after the first group was weaned clinical signs of respiratory disease were observed they had a number of calves that appeared ill all in one day they were treated a small number died the veterinarians that were attending this these calves recommended administering an antibiotic and then they boosted them with some different vaccines the outbreak was slow and two calves have died since the intervention oops let me back up if I can no I guess I can't back up here what I wanted to tell you is that in that last slide though if you'll recognize how they weaned calves in that situation they weaned them over time so they were commingling new groups of calves into that group over time that's the reason and corn harvest was going on at the same time so they were shorter labor so the risk factors I was talking about early on they were shorter labor corn harvest was going on they weren't paying attention they commingled calves together their feeding system wasn't great they had hay feeders they had a bunk line that only could feed 150 animals at a time and yet they had foreign animals in the group so this had nothing to do with vaccines it had to do with labor commingling and feeding and and and those are the those are almost always the components I find when I am investigating some of these problem hurts just want to spend a little bit time at the end just reminding you that antibiotic use is under scrutiny in this country if not in others but certainly in this country and I want you to visit with your veterinarian about what antibiotics to use what the dosage is how to administer them and and of course with times I also want to remind you that when it comes to pulling and treating cattle treat these things as if it's life-threatening don't pull cattle in the morning and wait till the afternoon before you actually treat them and I know we get short of labor there's too many things to do in one day and sometimes we're overloaded sometimes corn harvest takes place but the life of these animals is important as well and so treatment has to be prompt use only antibiotics on arrival and are on the groups of animals if you really need them high-risk animals where you're combing like a bunch of cattle from different places different auction markets those I would consider to be high risk especially if they're balling calves especially if they've been kind of maybe even more than one auction market it does make a difference on the health management of those cattle a couple comments about the veterinary feed directive remember that we we do have permission to use antibiotics in the feed and they can make a difference on managing cattle but do you need to involve your veterinarian to write you a veterinary feed directive and that he will write give you the dose and how it's to be used and the length of time and so on and so forth so it's an important component it's important tool that we can use to manage some of these these risks and and currently there's there's relatively what I would say easy ways to put together these veterinary feed directives again visit with your veterinarians by now many of your veterans know exactly what they're doing with these and can put you in the right label the right category and the right dose and figure out how much you need just to finish up this was an interesting survey that was done through cattle facts and this talks about usb herd information and I want to zone in on a couple things here I would like air let me just I want this one right here do you have a vaccination plan for your cow herd this NP stands for northern plains that's us 79 percent have developed you have developed it on your own which surprising me uh 17 percent with your veterinarian please use your veterinarian to help you design your vaccination programs and then where do you gather no where do you regularly use antibiotics and it talks about feed or water or injectables so on and so forth and where do you get your advice in northern plains 52 percent of years get your advice from from veterinarians I want that to be 100 percent of you okay go to your veterinarian and ask him or her about what antibiotics I need to be using what they are set up that treatment schedule with your veterinarian and demonstrate to our public that we use veterinarians in a judicious and wise manner covered a lot of ground in this backgrounding talk but when you want to talk about health and productivity maybe there's a checklist that you follow and that checklist should have all of these things in it because this is part of producing healthy calves that are productive maternal immunity calving season weaning season combingling environment exposure nutrition immunity and as it relates to vaccination and finally labor these this is the management equation that is under your control yours and your veterinarian and your and your nutritionist you pay attention to these components and you will indeed produce healthy calves that are very productive for for a long time so thank you very much I always like to finish with this you and I have a have been given a social license if you will to raise cattle most of us raise cattle on on great deal of forage and I love this reference says he causes grass to grow for the cattle and crops for man to cultivate bringing forth food from the earth it's our stewardship responsibility to the animals it's our stewardship responsibility to the ground that they're on and it's our stewardship responsibility to those of us that that consume this these this food products that come from from the earth that we that we live on so thank you very much for listening in I hope this was valuable and beneficial to you thank you so much