Guests: Dr. Bill Weiss, The Ohio State University; Dr. Marcia Endres, University of Minnesota Dr. Endres begins with a description of a dataset she collected containing individual body weights from 34 robotic milking herds. Weights were collected for every cow; every time that she came into the robotic milking station. Dr. Endres’ team was interested in the relationship between the amount of body weight change in the first 21 days of lactation and subsequent production. (7:34)
Guests: Dr. Bill Weiss, The Ohio State University; Dr. Marcia Endres, University of Minnesota
Dr. Endres begins with a description of a dataset she collected containing individual body weights from 34 robotic milking herds. Weights were collected for every cow; every time that she came into the robotic milking station. Dr. Endres’ team was interested in the relationship between the amount of body weight change in the first 21 days of lactation and subsequent production. (7:34)
The team chose to use the first 90 days of production as their production measurement to make sure they had as many cows as possible in the dataset - the longer into lactation, the more likely to lose cows due to culling. Their results showed that 90-day production was extremely highly correlated with total lactation production. Drs. Weiss and Endres discussed the implications of young cows’ requirements for growth in the first and second lactation, which were easily observed in this dataset (13:13)
Dr. Endres’ team found a quadratic relationship between body weight loss in the first 21 days and milk production in the first 90 days of lactation. This suggests that if cows don’t lose enough, they aren’t productive. Or, if cows lose too much, they aren’t productive. The optimum amount of weight loss for cows in their second or greater lactation was around 5%, while for the first lactation cows it was 7.4%. Dr. Endres hypothesizes that cows who lost more than the optimum may have been sick because they’re probably not coming to the bunk if they’re losing that much weight. And cows who gained weight might be animals who just do not have as much genetic potential to produce milk. (17:15)
Dr. Weiss and Dr. Endres emphasize that today’s dairy cows are designed to mobilize body weight early in lactation. They are not able to eat enough to compensate for the amount of milk they are producing. Intake is going up as they move through early lactation, and cows can lose some weight and not have issues. The guests discuss the importance of an aggressive fresh cow management plan and designing diets specifically for the fresh cow group. (22:09)
Dr. Endres explains at the extremes, the highest producing cows produced around 30-35 pounds more milk each day than the lowest producing cows. But even halfway in between, it was 10-15 pounds of milk per day and those are not small numbers! Monitoring and managing body weight change has tremendous management potential, particularly with the increasing technology available to dairy herds. Identification of poor performing cows could happen sooner and appropriate interventions could be identified earlier. (26:37)
Is there any reason this can’t be extrapolated to conventional farms that are not using robots? Dr. Endres thinks it would carry over, even though the conventional farms are feeding differently and can’t supplement individually like the robot systems. These results point to feeding fresh cows in their own group while paying close attention to access to feed and limit overcrowding. If Dr. Endres could do the study over, she would like to have reproduction and health records to compare with the milk production and weight loss data. (28:22)
Each panelist summarizes their takeaways from this research. Dr. Morrow suggests that the industry is probably not managing fresh cows nearly as intensely as they should. Their needs for calories as well as amino acids in early lactation are probably greater than we know, and we must do a better job supplying those nutrients and allowing cows to be comfortable, eat, and reach their peak potential. Dr. Weiss agrees and adds that female mammals are designed to mobilize body reserves. The idea that cows should not lose condition in early location is wrong. We don’t want them to lose too much, but losing some is perfectly normal. We need to work around that balance and include it in our formulation goals. Dr. Endres emphasizes the focus on fresh cows and suggests technology is going to allow for more and better data that will help monitor fresh cows and intervene as needed. (33:38)
Dr. Endres wraps up with a brief description of the upcoming Four State Dairy Nutrition Conference in June and Balchem’s Amino Acid pre-conference symposium on the first day to open the conference. (35:40)
The paper can be found here: https://www.jdscommun.org/article/S2666-9102(23)00041-8/pdf
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Scott Sorrell (00:07):
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Real Science Exchange, the podcast where leading scientists and industry professionals meet over a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal nutrition. Hi, I'm Scott Sorrell. I'm gonna be your moderator tonight, and I've got my co-host tonight is Dr. Pete Morrow with Balchem. Pete, how's it going? Good to see you again.
Dr. Bill Weiss (00:26):
You know, we're having a great day here in Wintery, Wisconsin.
Scott Sorrell (00:29):
Yeah, good stuff. Well, I was on vacation last week. It's wintery here as well. And I, I'm, I'm, I'm dreading the fact that I had to come back. We're also here with my favorite retired professor Dr. Bill Weiss from Ohio State University. Bill, that's, it's been a minute, but it's good to see you again. So how have you been?
Dr. Bill Weiss (00:50):
Same here Scott. Real good, Scott. Same here.
Scott Sorrell (00:51):
Yeah, anything interesting?
Dr. Bill Weiss (00:53):
Go ahead. It's not so winter in Ohio today? Not,
Scott Sorrell (00:56):
No, it's,
Dr. Bill Weiss (00:57):
We're having winter.
Scott Sorrell (00:58):
Oh, okay.
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:02):
I have a Sid Red Ale, so
Scott Sorrell (01:05):
Cheers. Sounds good. Cheers. I myself have a Basil Hayden. My son gave this to me for Christmas. I'm surprised it's lasted this long. But it's Basil Hayden and he gave me this glass. It's a whiskey glass, you can't see it very well, but it's got the crest of my fraternity on it, which was Alpha Gamma Sigma there at Ohio State University. So small ag frat there in Ohio. Anyway, Bill that's my story tonight. I see you brought a guest with you. Would you mind introducing your guest for us?
Dr. Bill Weiss (01:38):
Oh, it's Dr. Marcia Endres extension specialist at University of Minnesota. I think we've known each other for 20 plus years, so we've been on many programs together.
Scott Sorrell (01:49):
Yes. Excellent, Marcia, thank you. And, and welcome. Anything in your glass tonight that's interesting.
Dr. Marcia Endres (01:57):
Yeah, I have something probably unique. So this is called Fernet Fernet. Bronca is from Italy and was created back in 1845 in Milan by a person called Bernardino Branca. That's why it's called Branca. And it's composed of about 27 different herbs. And it was created as a, basically a cure for worms, for fever, for cholera. So it's supposed to be a tonic that makes you healthier, but it does have alcohol in it. Yeah. Good. Usually I don't drink it by myself. I have a half a pool here, and I learned when I was in Budapest back about a month and a half ago, that I can have Jagermeister with ice. So I'm doing Fernet with ice, and so
Scott Sorrell (02:41):
How that goes. Oh, nice. Excellent. So Marcia, are you Italian?
Dr. Marcia Endres (02:45):
No, I'm not, but I'm, this, my, this my parent, my, I guess I said my ancestry. Half Italian, half German. Okay. So I do have a little bit Italian in me, so I guess that brings that spirit.
Scott Sorrell (02:59):
Cheers. Very well. Well, cheers. Here's to a great podcast this evening. Cheers, everyone. Yes,
Dr. Marcia Endres (03:04):
Cheers.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
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Scott Sorrell (04:16):
So, bill, this is a little bit off the beaten path for you, the topic that you selected. So kind of give us kind of a real quick overview of the paper that we're gonna be reviewing and how'd you come to pick it?
Dr. Bill Weiss (04:30):
Well, this is, unlike other podcasts, this is out a j journal called JDS Communications, which is published every other month by ADSA. And it's composed of what I call very concise, very focused papers. And I actually like this journal better because the papers are very, very much on point. And I, I'd recommend this journal highly. And again, it's a sister publication of JDS. The paper today is by graduate student Mathias Pieter et al. And Marcia will talk about her him in just a minute. But the paper's entitled Association Between Change in Body Weight during Early Lactation and Milk Production in Automatic Milking Milking System Herds. And the reason I picked this is I, in the last couple years of my career, I developed quite an interest in fresh cow nutrition, and this fits that very well. So, first, Marcia, could you tell us a little bit about the student who did this work?
Dr. Marcia Endres (05:34):
Sounds great. Thank you, first of all, bill for inviting me to join you in the podcast. It's exciting to be here. So the student that works on this particular paper is one of his chapters for his thesis, his PhD thesis. He is originally from Brazil, Dr. Mattel Spider. He's a veterinarian, trained as a veterinarian like I am. So he came to me first as an intern doing some vet work. And then he decided to stay for a PhD. And he worked on various projects related to data that we collected from robotic milking systems. We also have an interesting paper on rumination time and how that is associated with peak milk yield that was published in the journal Dairy Science as part of his thesis also, and some other papers on this topic of robotic milking and data, if you will.
Dr. Marcia Endres (06:24):
And how that has, is related to health or production. So Mattos graduated and is now working for Cargill in their Cargill Digital Solutions Division. So he is the director of North American Sales, which is not really sales, it's more like connecting with various companies that have technology technology that can be used for monitoring hers, monitoring cows, improving nutrition and so on. So he actually works across Canada and us in this role. And he's based here in Minnesota still, but again, it's a remote position. So he could be anywhere, but he chose to stay in Minnesota. So I'm very pleased to, to see him going moving forward and this in this role and this direction. And it's an area that I'm really been focusing on the last few years, whole precision dairy farming. So he's still in that area. So we are colleagues now in that field. So it's really nice.
Dr. Bill Weiss (07:23):
Well, thanks. I'm gonna ask you the same question. I almost start, start all always with is, why did you do this experiment? Or what was the hypothesis behind the experiment?
Dr. Marcia Endres (07:34):
So a lot of the work that I do is observational in nature, meaning that I work with a lot of commercial dairy farms in the region, be it Minnesota, Wisconsin. Sometimes we go to South Dakota or Iowa. And so just from the get go, we need to make it clear I'm not doing cause and effect, you know, controlled studies. I'm doing like more associative kind of things. But we had a data set that I had, we had collected for other reasons, but this data set had body weights, individual body weights for every cow that comes into the robot box every day. And we're not using the data. So I talked with materials and I was thinking, we have these individual weights. Let's, you know, for the farms that we have, this data set had about 60 farms, but 34 of them had individual body weights that we could trust, if you will.
Dr. Marcia Endres (08:28):
So every time the cow gets into that box, we get the weight. So it's different from previous research where we maybe get body weights once a day or maybe weekly. And then we look at relationships with health or production and so on. And I, I thought, why don't we see that during the transition period, we always talked about cows will lose body condition score. We know that's a fact. Our cows are selected for high production or hosting cows and these are all hosting cows and we know that they lose condition, but we do not have a lot of data on body weight change in our lactation. So we're curious to see if the body weight changes in the beginning of a lactation, that the first 21 days of the transition period would have any relationship with their productivity down later in lactation.
Dr. Marcia Endres (09:20):
And we did not measure health. Unfortunately, we do not have the health data here, but we know the productive cows healthier cows are more productive cows. So it's more like a proxy for health. Unfortunately, I cannot talk about that 'cause we didn't measure it. But we wanna see is it okay for cows to lose body weight during that transition period to be productive? We're surprised to find what we found with, I think we're gonna discuss later, but my, my hypothesis was we're gonna see some ch some change in body weight, but I did not know exactly how, how much would be the loss that would be influenced productivity, if you will, or if cows that lost a lot of weight or gain weight, what would be their productivity? Is there any influence on that? We're surprised to see what we found. To be honest, we did find somewhat the red type of relationships that I didn't expect necessarily to see. And we're gonna discuss that I think a bit in more detail. But yeah, I was very, it's just exploratory. I like doing these exploratory studies because there's so much data these days with technology we can explore different avenues. So it's exploratory nature, hopefully leading to more controlled studies by somebody else down the, down the road maybe.
Dr. Bill Weiss (10:34):
Well, and this is a huge, you know, for more than, again, for more than 4,600 recorded cows.
Dr. Marcia Endres (10:39):
Right,
Dr. Bill Weiss (10:39):
Right. So this is a huge data set, I mean Right, right. A university could never generate this type of data.
Dr. Marcia Endres (10:45):
Exactly. Exactly. Yes.
Scott Sorrell (10:48):
I, I'm curious, Marcia, did you also collect any reproductive data? I'm recalling a podcast we did with Dr. Paul Frickey on the high fertility cycle. And it was related to weight loss as it relates to reproduction. I'm just kind of curious if, if you, if you measured that as well.
Dr. Marcia Endres (11:05):
We did not measure reproduction. One aspect of these systems I'm talking about here, the software and all that, that exists for robotic systems. Unfortunately reproduction is not very good, they don't have very good metrics for that. They're improving. So the new layle horizon software, it does a little bit better job looking at reproduction metrics such as pregnancy rate for example, and things like that. But at this time the dataset we had, we do not have a lot of data on repro, so I could not go there. Alright,
Scott Sorrell (11:38):
Thank you.
Dr. Marcia Endres (11:39):
Yeah, that's observational. So we don't Hmm. You know, we cannot have everything we want. Yeah. So I did not have it. I wish I did.
Speaker 5 (11:47):
I think it's interesting too that you're able to use actual body weights. You know, the, the standard, the industry has been body bothered condition scoring, but Right, right. That's done on various different days by different scores and whatnot and an actual weight and, and averaging that weight and as said in the paper over a time period, right. So we're very accurate and, and doing it on consistent days, I think this is an opportunity to really measure a much more accurate level of body weight condition loss than, then maybe other methods.
Dr. Marcia Endres (12:16):
Right? That's what we thought. So that's why it went in this direction. Yes.
Dr. Bill Weiss (12:20):
I think without a question, body weight change in production studies are the weakest measurement we have. Right. And, you know, we measure once a week, maybe cal's body weight can change 10-15 kilos by the time they walk across the scale. So this, this date I think is an excellent data set for body weight and body weight change. Thank
Speaker 5 (12:40):
Really help normalize for gut fill and, and as well as, you know Right,
Dr. Marcia Endres (12:44):
Right.
Speaker 5 (12:44):
Utter fill and whatnot. So that, that's, that's really exciting.
Dr. Marcia Endres (12:48):
Yes. And, we did have an average end up, and this is a reviewer suggestion, we had two days before the reviewer set across three days. So I do appreciate the reviewers, kudos the reviewers when they do help us make our papers better. So we changed to a three day average in the beginning and a three day at the end also. And then we called the initial body weight and the 21 day body weight. But that evens it out even better. So hopefully more accurate. Yes.
Dr. Bill Weiss (13:13):
And I, I don't, in these podcasts, I don't like to go a lot into statistics, but in your model, you, you took in season, which we're not gonna talk about, no. Broke cows down into first parity, second parody, and third plus. Right. And then correlated or looked at the relationship between body weight change and milk production. And, and you picked the first 90 days of production. Is there any reason you picked that or,
Dr. Marcia Endres (13:41):
So one reason we did is that we wanna have as many cows as we could. 'cause Sometimes cows might be cold later on, so we wanna make sure we had the most cows. So by going up to just 90 days, we were ensuing our lactation. We have this high producing, high producing cow group. We did the correlation all the way to 120 days. And I think actually Mattos might have checked even to 150 to the cows that we still had at 150. We have a very high correlation of point 99. So it was representing the most productive cows, if you will, like the production of those animals. So 90 days allowed us to have this, oh, like you said, almost four, 4,000, 700, 700 cows in the data set, which gives us more, you know, more replication if you will. So that's kind of the reason we chose 90 days and previous study.
Dr. Marcia Endres (14:27):
We found that the peak milk for these cows is more around 50 to 60 for the mature cows, about 70 or so maybe for heifers and robots. So we were kind of past a little bit past the peak milk, but still high and high production. So we, we decided to choose that was just I dunno, could have picked something else, but we picked 90 to get enough animals and, and get a little more of a longer period than just the beginning of lactation, you know, like, go a little further in. So 90 was a good compromise there.
Dr. Bill Weiss (14:59):
And it, correlates the whole lactation production pretty well. So, I mean, if there, there, the differences here will probably continue through the whole lactation
Dr. Marcia Endres (15:08):
The relationship.
Dr. Bill Weiss (15:09):
You found
Dr. Marcia Endres (15:10):
The relationship with being the most productive cow. Yes.
Dr. Bill Weiss (15:13):
Okay. One, one thing again. 'cause This is such a good data set of body weights. You know what I, what I know is you had, I rounded these off a little bit. The first lactation started at 600 kilos, second at six 93rd at 750 kilos. You know that they have to grow a lot. Mm-Hmm. Those first two lactations are a huge amount, I think much more than people think.
Dr. Marcia Endres (15:39):
Right? That is true. That's very true. Yes.
And many times we manage these herds around them only growing in their first lactation when we forget about the continued growth.
Dr. Marcia Endres (15:49):
Yeah. We separated for that reason. We had, we call the sophomores and know the second lactation. Is there a difference? So we separated, they behaved similarly to the ma mature cows in terms of loss of body weight. And their response was very similar, about 5% body loss, and then being the most productive cow. Over the years I've been doing research with data from these robots, and I find that the second and third lactation cows are somewhat similar, how they respond in terms of rumination time, and in this case, by the way, change and so on. And the first lactation cows are very different. They, they, they have to be treated differently in these systems and on farms in general because, like we just said, they're growing. They're a different, a different animal. And in this case, we're surprised to find that most productive heifers actually lost more body weight on a percentage basis than even the older cows. Also a little surprised about that actually.
Dr. Bill Weiss (16:40):
I guess one last comment before we get into your actual data.
Dr. Marcia Endres (16:45):
Okay. Sorry. Yeah,
Dr. Bill Weiss (16:46):
No, that's fine. When I calculated these cows had to grow about 200 grams a day Wow. From, from calving up through the third lactation. That's 365 days a year. That's a kilo and a half, two kilos of milk in the energy equivalent to one and a half to two kilos of milk. So that's,
Dr. Marcia Endres (17:04):
That's a very good point though.
Dr. Bill Weiss (17:05):
We can't ignore this growth. And like, like I said, it's the second lactation as well.
Dr. Marcia Endres (17:10):
True. Very good point. So they're growing and they still need that. Right. Good point. Okay.
Dr. Bill Weiss (17:15):
So the gist of this was loss in body weight relationships. So why don't you, how much did these animals lose approximately, if you can remember?
Dr. Marcia Endres (17:24):
They all lost body weight. I remember on average, of course. And okay, so the average body weight loss was, let's see here 3.65%. But it's kind of the overall body weight change, but across, across all cows, because some actually gained weight and some lost a lot more. Right. So, about that 5% range there, or 4% was the overall average, the best Cows probably not yet. But the base cows are the ones that are kind that middle range above the four.
Dr. Bill Weiss (18:02):
It was about, they average about 30. I'm again, rounding things off about 30 kilos. Right. Across the three groups. Right. In 21 days, that's, you know, cal, that's more than a kilo. It's more than two pounds a day. They're losing so again, these cows lose a lot and mobilize a lot of body. And you, you found a quadratic relationship. Between body weight loss the first 21 days and, and, and milk production the first 90 days.
Dr. Marcia Endres (18:33):
Right.
Dr. Bill Weiss (18:34):
Which would suggest that if cows don't lose enough, they aren't productive, or if they lose too much, they aren't productive. So, first of all, do you remember where that optimal was the optimal weight loss with respect to milk production for the three groups of the two groups?
Dr. Marcia Endres (18:50):
So, yeah. The optimum appears to be for the, the older cows in one second and greater would be around a 5% ballpark range. Like so more specific, it was I think 5% for the second and fi 4.5 for the older cows. And then the half for the first lactation cows, that was 7.4% was the optimum. So those animals were the ones that were most productive. So like I said, the ones that gained more, more than that, or lost a lot more than that, they are our assumption, again, we cannot test this hypothesis, but our assumption was that cows that lost more were the, the cows that were sick, potentially cows that did not go to the bunk. They're off feed, they're had ketosis. I mean, they, they just didn't do as well. So they lost more weight the cows on the other end that gained more weight. Were again, thinking maybe these are animals that do not have the genetic potential as much to produce milk. So they're not diverting or using as much of their body reserves to get to that high production. Like the cows that lost 5%. That's kind of our assumption. Again, this will have to be proven by more controlled studies, but that's kind of what we thought might be happening.
Dr. Bill Weiss (20:09):
Well, it makes sense to me that, you know, if they lose a lot, they're obviously not eating enough. And sickness or health is used, like contributing and, and if they don't lose enough, you know, it could be genetics or it could be the diet, you know, we found adding protein to these fresh cow diets really increases production and increases mobilization. So it could be also diet related as well.
Dr. Marcia Endres (20:35):
Good point. Yes. That's one thing we could not necessarily include as a factor for for the analysis, because we don't have, we have maybe the TMR for these farms, but we do not have, should say the partial mixed ration protein content, but we do not have the content of the grain that was fed in the robot. And that varies depending on the level of production and stage lactation. So that'll be really difficult to include in the model. But we do have again, it's just at one point in time, which makes me nervous, is that we did test all these partial mixed rations for protein and NDF and so on and fat, but it, we didn't, we did not include in the model here for that. And I think we had a pretty good report here somewhere, the, how much the model explained the variation in body weight. It was a lot, it was pretty high. It was very high. Which I was surprised actually, when Mattels told me that and showed me the data from our, I was like, wow, what's going on here? That's a pretty high number because the body weight is a marker for other things. Exactly.
Dr. Bill Weiss (21:41):
Exactly.
Dr. Marcia Endres (21:42):
Exactly. It's just what's happening. But it was a pretty strong model. Yeah. I was pretty happy with it when you told me that. I was like, wow, that's pretty good. Let's put that in the yeah. Point nine was our r square for the model, which is really high 0.99. Very good.
Dr. Bill Weiss (21:59):
And like you said, body weight change is a marker for all intake per, a lot of things go into that. So you'd expect a pretty good fit.
Dr. Marcia Endres (22:07):
Right? Right.
Dr. Bill Weiss (22:09):
And I think what I, I really would want to emphasize here is a lot of people think cows should not lose weight when they cal. And, and they should. They're designed to not too much, but they're designed to mobilize body and Right. This idea that, if they're not losing a little condition is a good, may, may not be a, a good idea.
Dr. Marcia Endres (22:29):
Very good point. Especially the cows we have. Right. Well, we selected these holding cows for this, so they are going to lose weight because they cannot eat enough for what they're producing. So it's expected that as long as they recover, they can lose some and not have problems, they're gonna be productive healthy cows. Yes. I completely agree. And I think we're, yeah. We need to get that concept in our heads. I think. And
Dr. Bill Weiss (22:53):
You know, at, at your optimal body weight loss, they were averaging one and a half to two kilos of body weight loss a day. Exactly. Again, this is only three weeks. So you, we hope they're, hope they're coming back.
Dr. Marcia Endres (23:07):
Starting back, right?
Dr. Bill Weiss (23:08):
And, and you know, it's actually worse 'cause they're getting, their intake is going up at this time, so, you know, gut fail is going up. So the Right, the actual loss in body, true body weight is greater than what you recorded here. So these cows are designed to lose a lot of weight.
Dr. Marcia Endres (23:25):
Yes,
Speaker 5 (23:26):
Absolutely. It'd be interesting to see it at what day the nadier of body weight was. Yeah,
Dr. Bill Weiss (23:32):
I agree. We
Speaker 5 (23:33):
Guess 40-50, right. Somewhere in there or 30
Dr. Marcia Endres (23:36):
40 when I might have that. I don't remember if Mattels looked that at, but yeah.
Dr. Bill Weiss (23:39):
That would, if you have that data, that would be very useful because you have such a huge data set here.
Dr. Marcia Endres (23:44):
Right, right. Good point. I don't remember if we did or not, but I have to double check. Yeah. Because
Dr. Bill Weiss (23:49):
The data we use for that is, is quite old, these counts probably have changed. So
Dr. Marcia Endres (23:55):
That's very true. Cows will change as we improve genetics and so on. So,
Scott Sorrell (24:00):
And how we feed them
Dr. Marcia Endres (24:02):
Yes. How we fit them has changed. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
Speaker 5 (24:06):
This emphasizes to me how much, maybe more management pressure or, or management intensity we need to be on fresh cows rather than kick them to the high group and hope for the best. Without
Scott Sorrell (24:19):
A doubt. Maybe
Speaker 5 (24:19):
We need to be managing body condition, body weight changes a lot more aggressively.
Dr. Marcia Endres (24:24):
Yes. That would be very helpful. Mm-Hmm.
Dr. Bill Weiss (24:28):
And, computer herds you have, or robot herds, you know, you have a little more flexibility in managing these but even in, in a confined, regular confinement herd, you know, a fresh cow group. I'm a big proponent of a fresh cow group that has fed a very specific diet.
Dr. Marcia Endres (24:43):
So I agree. I think that makes a huge difference.
Scott Sorrell (24:47):
And how long would you have that fresh cow group? How long would they be in there, bill?
Dr. Bill Weiss (24:51):
I think I like three weeks. Okay. Because, you know, it's, it's, if you go to, it's gonna be an expensive diet, so you can't leave them in there forever. And if it's only a week or so, you gotta say, is it worth all the effort? So I, I don't have any data, that's my opinion, but I think right around three weeks is a good number.
Dr. Marcia Endres (25:08):
I think most successful farms do have that group. Right. And they feed them a little bit differently. I'm gonna mention a study that we've done recently, that's not really this at all, but we had a supplement, and I'm not gonna name the supplement I guess, but we had a supplement that was fed to cows just in the first 30 days in milk and in robots, we can feed cows in a, in a group, they're all together, but we can feed something else in the robot assigned treatments, which was very cool for my student. It's a different student. But to do that, we saw a response of seven pounds of milk from feeding the supplement to these fresh cows. So yeah, that, that, that is absolutely a place to have a fresh cow group and feed them something more expensive that will really bring them up. And of course, if they peak higher, they'll be producing more milk throughout their lactation.
Dr. Bill Weiss (25:55):
Exactly.
Dr. Marcia Endres (25:55):
And there's more to be done. You
Dr. Bill Weiss (25:56):
Got, and you, you want 'em to eat, obviously. Right. They have to eat more too. If you just get more milk with no intake, you're right. Not gonna be happy with the results.
Dr. Marcia Endres (26:05):
Yes, yes. So they were fed more of this additional supplement, if you will, that really helped them. Yeah.
Dr. Bill Weiss (26:11):
Yeah. Yes. Just you know, I'm looking at the graph here that came with this paper on the, the, the quadratic shape and on the, the difference in milk yield between, you know, the worst and the, the optimal body weight change. And then compare it to kind of the extremes. We're not talking small amounts of milk here. Can you give us, do you give us some idea of how much of a, again, from the extremes, more or less, which,
Dr. Marcia Endres (26:37):
Yeah, I think we had kind of tried to put a number in there just for helping with calculations, so for people to kind of have an idea. So we, let's see, let's see, for the older cows. So basically if you look at cows that lost the, the mature cows, the PP tree, tree and greater, so the ones that lost more weight, they had a production during that period of 3,600 kilos. And the ones that gained, there's 3000 compared to 4,500. So we look at anywhere from a thousand to 1500 kilos per day in 90 days. 30, 35 pounds of difference per day. So between the, the lowest producing and the highest,
Dr. Bill Weiss (27:34):
Those are the extremes. But even if you go halfway in between Right. Still, you know, 10 or 15, easily 10 or 15 pounds
Dr. Marcia Endres (27:42):
A day. Right. 10 or 15 pounds a day. Right. Of difference. Yeah. It's huge. It's not small numbers, it's big numbers. Right,
Dr. Bill Weiss (27:49):
Exactly. So man, managing and monitoring body weight, I think body weight change, to me has tremendous management potential. Yes. Especially with technology now where we can, can do it in a lot of herds.
Dr. Marcia Endres (28:00):
Right, right. Definitely. Definitely. I mean, if we can use this as a metric, if it's available, I definitely recommend because we can identify those cows that might be in trouble right away, or we can identify cows that are, need to be fed differently, like you said, maybe to not gain that much weight, but reduce more milk, like you said, maybe it's a nutrition reason that they're gaining so much. Just that management would be really good.
Dr. Bill Weiss (28:22):
Okay. I guess my, my last question would be, you know, this was a robot herd. A robot herds, right? Is it, is, is there any reason this can't be extrapolatable to, you know, conventional farms?
Dr. Marcia Endres (28:38):
Well, they feed them a little bit differently, right. Because they have a partial mixed ration, and then cows are supplemented. But most of the farms, and most of the farms' bills will be supplementing based on milk yield. Right? So it's possible that animals they were producing, which is actually even the opposite cows producing less milk, should be getting less supplements. So why did I gain more weight? That makes me think, oh my god. So I think it is probably extrapolatable because yeah, the difference could be even more, more. And it was not. So I think if we can feed those fresh cows in a separate group, I think we can, you know, be able to monitor or manage this a little bit better and gain some benefit from monitoring the weight of those cows. I just, it's more difficult in a conventional herd, however, to feed them more individually versus in a robot, I can adjust based on the, what we learned here, I can adjust maybe a cow getting more or less of that supplement that's in the robot and then make sure they did either don't lose too much or they actually don't gain too much.
Dr. Marcia Endres (29:45):
I think it's more, it's easier to manage when we can individually feed in the robot, which we cannot do in a conventional herd. It's a bit harder, I think. But then we have access to feed, make sure we don't overcrowd the fresh pan. So cows have the ability to eat what you put in that fresh cow diet to make them make more milk. That becomes very important. So I'm a proponent because also one of my areas of emphasis is cow comfort research. Let's make sure they have space so they can access the feed. The feed is pushed up. So those submissive animals that might not be able to eat as much for whatever reason and maybe lose weight, they have access and they can't eat and not lose too much, let's say. So I think it takes that management, which is not easy. It's easier said than done, but found
Dr. Bill Weiss (30:32):
It's out. It's well worth the effort on fresh cows. Yes. That pays, that pays or, or it either costs you or it pays for the next 300 days. So
Dr. Marcia Endres (30:41):
Exactly. So fresh cow emphasis we need to do better yet, we've improved, I think, in on farms, but I think there's more room yet. And definitely like your talks recently, bill about the peak lactation and then monitoring fresh. No, what you do on fresh cows is excellent. So appreciate you coming to talk to our conference in June. Pleased to have you come and talk to us at the Forest State Dairy Nutrition and Management Conference. It's always great to have you because you are such a draw and we wanna have you there. So thank you for coming for that. So a little add here, sorry, but
Speaker 5 (31:15):
I was gonna say, with the genetics we have right now for milk production, we are probably throttling a lot of cows in early lactation because of our inability to meet their calorie as well as amino acid requirements.
Dr. Marcia Endres (31:28):
Very good point. Exactly. Very good point. So we're limiting those animals and they're not getting to their full potential. That's an argument that, for example, robotic companies have, is that robots allow those cows to reach full potential because we are feeding them to their potential, which that's what they say. It's not quite that far, but yeah, there is a little bit more room for being able to do that.
Scott Sorrell (31:50):
Marcia also, I was, I was kind of curious if you were to do this study over again or, or, or, or do a, a new study, what kind of data would you want to capture that you didn't capture this time?
Dr. Marcia Endres (32:01):
Yeah, you mentioned the reproduction data, right. If I had access to that, to be able to include what does this does to repro and also have health data. So I could say that's what I was thinking. Yes, these animals that were losing a lot of weight, we could prove, if you will, that those are the animals that had some health issues, so these farmers didn't do a great job of monitoring and recording those things. So I could not include it in the model. I would have maybe a handful, maybe 10 or 11 farms that were recording things that I felt like these are good records, so I couldn't use it. So I have better health records for health. Would be, would be great. This is a huge number of farms, so I don't expect that we could be on all these farms to do our own assessment of health. It's really difficult logistically speaking. But if I could, you know, have a billion, billions of dollars and multiple people to actually test cows and get beta hydroxybutyrate and nifa and everything, and kind of know what's going on, that would've been fun to have also.
Scott Sorrell (32:59):
So, you know, kind of in closing, what I'd like you guys to do is just kind of talk a little bit about what may be some of the, the practical implications of this study for, for the dairy farmer nutritionist out there. And Pete, can we start with you?
Speaker 4 (33:15):
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Speaker 5 (33:38):
Not to beat a dead horse or, or get too, you know, repetitive, but I think we are gonna have to, as the dairy industry evolves, understand that we probably are not managing fresh cows nearly as intensely as we need to be. And understand that they, their needs for, for calories as well as amino acids and early lactation are probably greater than we knew of, or, and we need to just do a better job supplying them and allowing them to be comfortable and allow them to eat and, and really to reach their peak potential.
Scott Sorrell (34:14):
Hmm. Yeah. Well said. Pete, Dr. Weiss, any final closing comments?
Dr. Bill Weiss (34:21):
I just lot what Pete said. I agree a hundred percent with, and I just to expand this a little again, is that cow mammals are designed to mobilize, female mammals are designed to mobilize body reserve. So this idea that cows should not lose any condition and early lactation is wrong. We don't want 'em to lose too much, but losing some condition is perfectly normal. We have to work around that balance, including that in our formulation goals.
Scott Sorrell (34:51):
Yeah. Very well, Marcia, I'm gonna ask you to do two things, kind of give us a wrap up. And then the last thing I want you to do is give us a brief commercial for the four State Nutrition Conference and why people should attend this year. Kinda just get a real quick overview.
Dr. Marcia Endres (35:05):
So I agree with both points that were made and I definitely think we should be doing better as we work with these fresh cows. And also be not concerned, if you will, if they lose some weight, that's normal. And in addition, I think technology today's gonna allow, hopefully allow us to, to have more data, not just body waste, but other data that's gonna help us better monitor those fresh cows and intervene as needed. So I'm, I'm proponent of technology for that reason too, as we monitor individual animals. The Forest State Conference we're excited to have in June, early June. I think it's the fifth and 6th of June. So we are very excited to have our pre-conference sponsored by Balkam Preconference symposiums. Always very good attendance. We usually get, most of the attendees come for the pre-conference which starts at 8:00 AM or 8:30 AM on the, on the first day.
Dr. Marcia Endres (36:03):
And most of our participants come earlier for that. I would say 80 to 90% of them actually. Our attendance is really, really good. And we are from five to 600 people. We have mostly nutritionists they attend, but others, veterinarians, a few their producers also. So it's a great event that has been around many years before my time. But I'm on the planning committee from Minnesota alone, which I'm sour was from Minnesota. It's four states Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. So each state has two people on the committee, foreign committee, and the rest of the again. We continue at 1:30 PM and we start our conference, if you will. And now we have some presenters like Dr. Weiss and others participating. And we do have nice discussions too, during that. For example, this, this session, we're gonna have a panel for a couple, maybe nutritionists coming in to talk about how they feed cows and achieve this high peaks and how they maybe manage fresh cows and so on.
Dr. Marcia Endres (37:08):
Anyway, we end the conference around noon on the second day. So for the state theory conference, if you Google that you'll find our website. I think programs should be already all uploaded and posted. We have great sponsors, of course, welcome being the platinum sponsor this year. So appreciate your sponsorship. And we have this pre-conference. We already have companies signed up to 2032 right now. So it's a very very competitive pre-conference. Lots of people want to be part of it. So it was your turn this year, so I'm very pleased. And we're looking forward to seeing you in Dubuque, Iowa in
Scott Sorrell (37:46):
June. Yeah, very well. Well, without a doubt, it is one of the premier nutrition conferences in the country, and we are certainly privileged to be able to host that this year. Bill another great paper. Perhaps this might even be in the top 10. I, I, I like this one today. Oh, wow. Very, very interesting. And I kind of like this new abbreviated format. I think this might work out well. So we'll see how the audience thinks. So I appreciate you picking this now, Marcia Peter Bill, thank you for joining us tonight to been a great conversation to our loyal listeners as always. Thank you for joining us for another podcast. We hope you learned something. We hope you had some fun and we hope to see you next time here at the Real Science Exchange, where it's always happy hour and you're always among friends.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
We'd love to hear your comments or ideas for topics and guests. So please reach out via email to anh.marketing at balchem.com with any suggestions and we'll work hard to add them to the schedule. Don't forget to leave a five star rating on your way out. You can request your Real Science Exchange t-shirt in just a few easy steps, just like or subscribe to the Real Science Exchange. And send us a screenshot along with your address and t-shirt size to anh.marketing at balchem.com. Balchems Real science lecture series of webinars continues with ruminant focused topics on the first Tuesday of every month. Monogastric focused topics on the second Tuesday of each month, and quarterly topics for the companion animal segment. Visit balchem.com/realscience to see the latest schedule and to register for upcoming webinars.