This Real Science Exchange podcast episode was recorded during a webinar from Balchem’s Real Science Lecture Series.
This Real Science Exchange podcast episode was recorded during a webinar from Balchem’s Real Science Lecture Series.
The primary goal of a replacement program is to raise the highest quality heifer that can maximize profits when she enters the lactating herd. She carries no limitations that would detract from her ability to produce milk under the farm’s management system. Ideally, one would wish to optimize profits by obtaining the highest quality heifer at the lowest possible cost, usually in the least amount of time. Dr. Van Amburgh presents a snapshot evaluation of benchmarks to assess the potential quality of replacements. (3:47)
When does the process of creating a quality heifer start? Probably before conception. In non-pasture herds, the first lactation cows giving birth to heifers produced about 1000 pounds more milk in the first two lactations. Heifers whose dams were supplemented with choline during the pre-fresh period had higher birth-to-yearling average daily gains and improved immunity. Choline also appears to enhance the quality of colostrum via increased absorption of IgG. This implies that maternal programming extends beyond the uterine environment via ingestion of milk-borne factors, known as the lactocrine hypothesis (14:29)
After the calf is born, the goal is anabolism or growth. The dam communicates with the calf via colostrum to direct calf development after birth. Not only does colostrum provide immunoglobulins, but it also contains a large amount of nutrients and non-nutrient factors that support gut maturation. In particular, IGF-1 and insulin may act on receptors in the gut to stimulate cell proliferation, cell differentiation, and protein synthesis. Dr. Van Amburgh summarizes several studies that showed increased colostrum feeding improved pre- and post-weaning growth and development. While the immunoglobulin content of colostrum is essential for passive immunity, the other components in colostrum are responsible for the increased growth performance. (27:39)
The hormones and growth factors in colostrum enhance protein synthesis, enzyme expression, and gastrointestinal tract development. This implies that the gut is now an even stronger barrier to infection, with more surface area for digestion and absorption, with an increased capacity to digest nutrients due to higher enzyme excretion. (36:33)
To investigate the impact of non-nutrient factors in colostrum, studies were designed where calves were fed either colostrum or milk replacer with the same nutrient content. Glucose uptake was increased for colostrum calves even though both groups received similar nutrient content. Plasma glucagon was higher in colostrum calves, indicating better glucose status and higher reserve capacity. Plasma protein levels were higher in colostrum calves, suggesting more amino acids available for growth and protein synthesis. Plasma urea nitrogen was lower for colostrum calves, indicating fewer amino acids were used for gluconeogenesis leading to more efficient growth. (46:55)
What happens to immune cells in colostrum? Leukocytes and other immune-related cells in colostrum are trafficked into the circulation of the calf. Maternal leukocytes can be detected in the calf by 12 hours, peak at 24 hours, and disappear by 48 hours. Long term, there appears to be greater cellular immunity in calves that received whole colostrum compared to cell-free colostrum. Uptake of cells from colostrum enhances cellular immunity in calves by providing, mature, programmed cells from the dam. (52:24)
The take-home message for colostrum management is to feed colostrum for four days. Give first-milking colostrum within six hours of birth and again at 12 hours. Give second-milking colostrum for day two feeding and third- and fourth-milking colostrum for days three and four. (56:04)
Dr. Van Amburgh answers a few questions from the webinar audience about dry cow management for colostrum quality and quantity, the impacts of pasteurization of colostrum on components, and the efficacy of colostrum replacers. Watch the full webinar at balchem.com/realscience. (58:25)
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Moderator (00:00:01):
The following podcast is taken from a webinar presented by Dr. Mike Van Amberg from Cornell University, titled “Successfully Developing a High Performing Heifers Calf and How Colostrum Impacts Her”. To view the full webinar and access the slides referenced during this podcast, visit balchem.com/realscience and use the search bar to jump down to this webinar presented on April 21st, 2020.
Commercial (00:00:36):
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Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:01:38):
Hi, everyone from my home office in King Ferry, New York in a 225-year-old house. Here we go. So they thank you for the opportunity to do this. Balchem. They asked me to, to reprise the talk that I've, I've given a few times about the role of colostrum in establishing the metabolism and the anabolic characteristics of a calf. So we're gonna jump ahead with that. So a little bit of an introduction. Why don't we start making quality heifer, and I'm gonna define a little bit of quality heifer in a few minutes. I'm gonna discuss effects of colostrum on growth and nutrient use, and we'll talk a little bit about the role of colostrum in gastrointestinal tract development, how it affects the immune system. And when I talk about immune system today, it's not necessarily gonna be about the igs.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:02:36):
I know that sounds kind of funny but it what we, what we now know, although we don't talk about it, is that there's cells in colostrum that actually enhance the the immune system of the calf. We'll talk a little bit about that, and then colostrum components and changes in metabolism. And then I'll summarize. So I always like to start with something like this. You know, what are our goals? And this is this is always, you know, an interesting discussion with people, sometimes with producers, because not, we don't always know what we want. We want good heifers, right? We want high quality heifers. I have, you know, in discussion groups in New York, I'll have, you know, and I'll work with people like Jason EYs or he'll, he'll pull me in and, and, you know, we'll get dairy producers say, well, we want the best quality heifer we can get.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:03:29):
And we'll say, okay, what does that mean? And most of the time when we reflect that question back to producers they don't really have good answers, right? This is, we want 'em to make good milk. We want 'em to be cheap, right? I hear, I always hear inexpensive. And as part of that, well, so, so Jason Jason's worked on this for many years. I've kind of partnered with him on a few of these things. And this is, this is some of the wording we've put behind those objectives, right? So the primary goal is to raise the highest quality heifer that can maximize profits when the animal enters the lactating herd, right? And that's gonna be herd specific, and it's gonna be a function of your environment. You know, genetics, there's a lot of discussion around the world about genetics, and I think where we're at today is there's not a lot of genetic differences amongst most of these animals anymore.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:04:18):
The majority of the difference that we see in performance is really environment, which is why we're gonna talk about the topic today. You know, 70% of what they do on a farm every day is gonna be due to their environment. 30 percent's gonna be related to genetics, right? And we could, we could stretch those numbers a little bit either way, but that's about how it works out. So if you get to the idea of a, a quality heifer, now we're talking about an animal that carries no limitations, right? Nothing's gonna detract from her ability to produce milk under the farms and management system. That concept of a detractor is really interesting. And you could spend, we could spend several hours just on that topic. An example of a detractor would be the calf was treated three or four or five times prior to weaning for some sort of a respiratory distress, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:05:15):
Or some disease and a fever, whatever. Poor respiratory behavior, coughing a lot, snotty nose, whatever it happens to be. Well, every time we treat that animal, if it's truly sick, we're losing growth. We're losing opportunities for, for later milk production, probably growth because maybe the lungs are getting damaged or maybe they just don't feel good and they don't eat. And we now know that the more they grow in that pre-weaning stage, the more milk they're gonna produce as a mature animal, right? So there's just one example of a detractor, right? And there's lots of them. And it's always fun to make a list like that because then it helps you focus your management structure about how do we minimize those kinds of things. And finally, we wanna optimize the profits by obtaining the highest quality heifer at the lowest possible cost.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:06:12):
Not the cheapest, but the lowest cost, usually in the least amount of time. And there's a, a lot of data out now that's not, again, we don't really talk about it. That pretty much says that the younger, the calving, the, the animal calves the more productive she is, the longer her productive life, right? And this is actually built in to our genetic evaluations. Now the folks down in Beltsville have incorporated some of that thinking, and they have interesting data out. So when we wanna get 'em in fast, we want to get 'em in healthy. We wanna produce heifers that have the greatest capacity to make milk when we don't know anything about a dairy. One of the things I, I, we came up with many years ago now, and, and you can debate the numbers a little bit, but not too much, they're still pretty pretty good is a snapshot valuation of the potential quality of a replacement.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:07:09):
And basically what this does is it gives you the ability to walk on a farm or even your own farm and say, okay, how are we doing? You know, part of the problem with some of these metrics, we don't keep good records, right? And, and that's a real problem. You know, I, I lead the Dairy Fellows program at Cornell, at least I try to. And you know, we're in the middle of a case study right now, and they don't take the time to record anything related to heifers. So we have no data. We know they have some problems, but we have no data, right? So that does make it difficult. That's also a problem, because you can't manage it if you can't measure it, right? And, and that's, you know, that old adage. Anyhow, as far as this this data, first calf heifer is treated as a calfer heifer.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:07:58):
You know, we're looking at 24 hours to three months of age, and we're doing that 'cause we wanna know, you know, what, what's, where's, if there's something going on there versus those that are four months to fresh, right? And we want this to be less than 30%. And if the majority of those treatments are in that 24 hours to three months of age, and it says, Hey, we've got, you know, we've gotta look at management conditions around calving. We've gotta look at our calving pens, we've gotta look at our housing, we look at our nutrition, we've gotta look at our, our air quality bedding and things like that. Maybe some of our SOPs around management. If it's four months to freshening, then we've got an entirely different possible issue, right? And it could be housing, it could be some management techniques, but it, it allows us to at least focus where we've gotta fix the problem.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:08:49):
DOA’s is really on there male versus female. That stuff is on there simply as to, to call attention to protocols. If you see bias towards males or females, well then you gotta talk about what that means. But if you see a lot of female DOAs, now you gotta ask about, you know, where are they calving in? How are they calving in? Who are they coming out of? Where's the majority of the DOAs coming from? Are they coming from heifers that are undergrown? And are they coming from fat cows? Whatever the case might be. But allows you to, to kind of decide what the problem is. I need to modify this one, this next line. First calf average peak. In other words, what happens once they cab, probably don't really need to do that. One is is 80% are mature. Because sometimes that's really hard.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:09:36):
'Cause Heifers are so persistent. The next one though is vitally important. Are your heifers making are your heifers making at least 80% of the mature cows in the herd? This is really the benchmark that I work from. And if they're not doing that, the question is why? 90% of the time, if they don't do that, it's because they cabbed in too light and they're growing at the expense of milk. And if they're not making at least producing at least 80% of the mature cows, then, then it's a lost opportunity, right? It's, it's it's, it's just, it's lost milk because they have the opportunity to do that. If you ca 'em in early and they ca 'em in light, right? 'cause We're not meeting the growth benchmarks, then, you know, they're always gonna put growth at the expense of milk. That's always gonna be the higher priority of use for nutrients.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:10:29):
Therefore you know, we're gonna take a hit on milk. And in some of our herds right now, I see this in the US there's a lot of herds that are probably losing somewhere between eight and 14 pounds of milk per day on some heifers that are coming in, you know, as light at 72 to 75% of the mature cows, right? 'cause We want them to be 82% of the mature cows so they can achieve this 80%, 82% of mature body weight, so they can achieve that 80% of mature milk. And of course, you've got this calf called so I got a question. What is the term? DOA dead on arrival, right? Sorry. A DOA is a dead on arrival and a dead on arrival has many different definitions. Most dairies, we'll call it the first 24 hours, some dairies extend that out to 48 hours.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:11:27):
I like to use 24 as my metric. Some are very strict. It's the calf that comes out and, and is just not viable. So the just, I saw that question come in. And then there's you know, for the rest of these metrics, first calf calls less than 60 days in milk. Yeah, we, we wanna be less than 5% of you spend all that time and money getting them to calving. You don't wanna lose them prior to peak milk. I don't like es, but your Emmys better be larger and greater than the mature cows. You don't want treat a lot of those heifers in the first lactation. But if you're treating a lot of heifers in the first lactation, you wanna understand why you want that to at least be less than 15. You'd like it to be less than 10, really? And then 85% retention, right? We just don't wanna lose heifers if you're losing more than 85% or if you're losing more than 15% of your heifers. You gotta figure out why. What is it about them that, that does that? Hey, we'll keep going here and I'll come back to one of those questions in a little bit real practical stuff, right? Whenever I give a colostrum talk, I always get this question at the end bottle or tube.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:12:52):
And I wanna show this slide just because it puts the question to rest. Here's a study that was done, published in the Journal of Dairy Science. They looked at serum IG levels and they fed three liters, and they either fed it by a bottle or they fed it by tube feeder. And you can see that they were identical. So I think the key to the whole thing is we just have to get colostrum into those calves as soon as possible. At least we're talking that first six hours, right? Because that's where we wanna get the maximum uptake of immunoglobulins. Once you get past that. We're gonna talk about feeding colostrum later than or past that six hours here in a little bit. But for the most part, doesn't matter how we do it, if you're gonna do it by tube, make sure everybody's trained, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:13:42):
We don't want people to drown calves, and we don't want people, you don't wanna cause bruising down on the esophagus either. Either. I've, I've opened up some calves and done some necropsies on calves where there's, there's been significant bruising down there from somebody being too aggressive on trying to get that tube in there. So you gotta be a little bit careful. And obviously all the other things related to, to tubing and tub management, right? So one's out of the way. So when it's the process of creating a quality heifer start, right? And I think, you know, for in, in today's science, you know, what we know about epigenetics and maternal programming and all these things. Some, some people would say, well, probably, probably starts before conception. And that's probably true. It's really hard for us to know a lot about that in, in calves and cows.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:14:37):
But what we do know is that it definitely is affected during development, right? Once we have a pregnancy, and this was a paper published several years ago, there's been various permutations on this. Once these guys published this, several other groups went looking for it. Some found it, some didn't. Right? In pasture systems, they don't see this in more intensive management conditions, they see this outcome, right? And this was Katie Hein, who's actually an evolutionary biologist that works in primates and humans. But she, we were at a big meeting one day and she asked me and a couple other guys, Hey, if a cow is pregnant to a heifer or a bull, do they change their milk production? And we, we thought that was a silly question, not really, because we thought, not that it was a silly question, we, we thought that the geneticist might have figured that out already, because she had, she had data from primates that said, yes, it was true that if they were carrying a female, that, that the mom would produce more milk in different milk than if she was carrying a bull.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:15:43):
So she went and pulled some records. She partnered up with a couple people at DHI and Barry Bradford, I believe, if I remember right. And they did this really fun study where they looked at the effect of fetal sex, either during the first pregnancy or the sec second pregnancy on first lactation or second lactation milk, right? And what they found, they had 2.4 lactations from 1.5 million cattle, basically. And they found that ca first lactation cattle giving birth to heifers produced about a thousand pounds more milk over the first two lactations are about 500 pounds per lactation, right? And some of the guys that work on the economics of decision making quickly put out a paper on the heels of this that said, you know, there's a $6 per lactation marginal return for average semen and a $12 lactation return for sex semen. It's probably not true anymore given how many heifers we've produced. But anyhow, the idea here is that, that the moms, the dams recognize the sex and can modify their behavior based on that, right? They made a little bit more milk for the females. And again, there's, there's been others who have backed this data up. There's others, other groups that have said, no, that's not true. When I separate those out, I usually find confinement versus pasture as the difference there.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:17:11):
What else do we know? And there was that, that movie right up front there talking about choline in pregnancy. And this is some data to, to kind of follow along that path. This is some data from Florida where they fed prepartum, they fed room protected choline and looked at this in Euro effect of yes to choline or no, to choline. And what happened, and you can see here in this data from Xenobi, you know, birth weights were you know, kind of different. You know, there was a trend there at two, two months, not a big deal. They were pretty much right on top of each other. But at 12 months, you saw significant differences in body weight and post calving, we saw significant differences in, in body weight. So when you looked at average daily gain of those animals from, from birth to yearlings, you saw about a 10th of a pound difference in average daily gain per day for those calves that who came from dams who were fed choline, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:18:19):
That's really intriguing, right? And it says, again, that there's things going on in utero that will impact the productivity of these animals. And then if you look at those animals, again, that hit lactation, that came from dams that were given choline, right? They were a little bit heavier at calving. You can see that change in body weight and early lactation. And then they recovered that quite well, which you can see that they always had that a, that they maintained a, a higher weight in those first few weeks post calving, which should translate into more milk, right? And that's exactly what they saw. So feed choline in the resh period, those calves respond differently. They grow better, right? They achieve a higher calving weight, and then they make more milk in that first lactation, right? Remember, this was all programmed in utero, right? And there's lots more data to this.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:19:27):
I'm gonna refer you to the folks at University of Florida to look at that. But this is just another example of when, when do we start making quality heifer, right? And this comes back to the idea of, well, what are the nutrient requirements of afresh animal? What are the true nutrient requirements of a cow, right? And then we see here, we're looking at about 2.2 kilos of milk difference over the lactation, okay? Which is economically significant, right? If you look at those same animals, incidences of fever, right? You have a larger percent of the animals that have fevers from the cows that didn't get choline than the, than the heifers that did receive choline, right? Again, this is all in utero. So implication is you've got a more functional immune system. And if you look at the leukocyte counts in those, in those calves, again, this is all coming from this is all coming from the in utero effect.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:20:29):
The dam received choline or didn't. And those animals that had received choline, the calves had higher leukocyte counts, better stronger immune systems, more white, white blood cells. And then if you look at you know, the effect of transition feeding and, and how that works, and again, back to the, in utero effect, back to 56 days of age, not a big deal unlike the previous study. But you look at 300 days of age, and again, you're starting to see those body weights open up. So over time, there's this long-term effect, and it's back to that 10th of a pound a day difference in average daily gain. So again, this is all being set up in utero. And then one more time here, if you look at colostrum from cows that were fed choline versus colostrum for cows that weren't fed choline, the NN and the cn, those calves didn't receive colostrum from choline cows, but the c the NC and the CC did.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:21:36):
And you can see that there's a, a fairly significant difference in the apparent efficiency of IG absorption. So again, there's some other factors going on here where the choline aided and embedded the quality of the colostrum, which is important in my mind, because this is going to enhance the calf over time. And it's not just about the igs. Be interested from my perspective, what are the things were affected during this treatment period? And you'll understand why I asked that here in a little bit, right? So, greater concentration of white cells, less incidents of fever, greater intake and greater average daily gain, right? All because of some in utero effects of, of the dam being fed choline.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:22:21):
Okay? So what does that mean? So if you, if we come back here and you say, all right, what is the implication? Well, the implication is that during the dry period, like that mammary gland goes through involution, and then it has to, to rebuild itself itself. It has to rebuild itself. And then while it's doing that, there's all sorts of growth factors and hormones in, in this process, right? So you see this mammary gland here. You got the prepartum period, and you got this dotted line, and those are some of those bioactive factors. And we hit lactation. And those bioactive factors are, can be transferred into the calf through colostrum, and then they kind of, in mature milk, they become kind of low levels, and the calendar's normal lactation. So we have a normal lactation curve, and then we get to the dry off period, and we go through evolution, and the mammary gland begins to rebuild itself one more time.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:23:26):
And now we have more of those growth factors and, and bioactive factors and hormones becoming concentrated in the mammary gland. So that's this period to provide, you know, this early lactation period is p varied to provide these kinds of things to the calf. And that's what you saw in that previous study. And there's a name for this now, some reproductive physiologists who study basically who've studied many things, but they were looking at the efficiency of reproduction in pigs. They were looking at how many piglets a sow can have. And they came up with this term, the kin hypothesis, right? And everybody's sort of endocrine, but they've, they came up with this term, the kin hypothesis. And that basically is the maternal programming extended beyond the uterine environment by consuming milk, right? By ingesting milk borne factors. And milk in this case can include colostrum.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:24:23):
I added that last part because they don't actually talk about colostrum in their definition, but it, it really is about colostrum the way we think about it. And, and these guys for years tried to figure out why certain pigs or certain sows with the same genetic line would have greater numbers of piglets. And it took him many years to do this a little over 30 years. And the, the advent of molecular biology helped a lot, and it's a great story. I'd encourage you to go read about this if you're interested in this kind of thing. But in neonatal pigs, what they realized is that relax and the hormone produced by the uterus is transferred in the colostrum. And then if those baby piglets get a little bit more colostrum, they get more of that relaxin. And that relaxant actually stimulates the expression of estrogen receptors on the strom and epithelial cells of the, of the juvenile uterus, which then allows for greater proliferation.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:25:24):
So basically, the first meal that these, these baby pigs receive can have this relaxant in it and this relaxant, the greater the concentration of relaxant, or the greater the amount of relaxant they consume in the first couple hours the greater expression of estrogen receptors on those cells in the uterus, and the larger the uterus is gonna be, hence greater reproductive efficiency, the larger the uterus, the greater capacity to grow more piglets. Okay? And they've got a great cartoon about it. Again, they've got the relaxa meetings here binding, and that being transferred up into the, the tissue, the epithelial cells enhancing estrogen receptor and then getting more proliferation, right? And, and it just feeds on itself. And then they, they looked at like, how many days has this occurred? It happens for about three days. The, the effect lasts for about three days after that first meal.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:26:22):
And then other estrogen mediated estrogen receptor mediated events take, take hold, like normal growth, right? But it's, so there's this interesting story about what's happening right up front, right? It's the first meal set those calves or those piglets up, right? So what does this mean, right? Okay. Probably not what you expected to see. So, so when you look at those two pictures, you know, the first question I have is, what does mom want for her calf? What do all moms want for their offspring, right? So you've, you've got two bodybuilders there. What are some terms that come to mind immediately, right? And because we don't have feedback here, I'm just gonna talk you guys through it. Well, I was a wrestler. I lifted a lot of weights. I was never gonna look like that. I'm assuming those guys had to do that with a little bit of help.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:27:21):
But the first term that comes to my mind, and there's a cheat on the slide. If you look in the bottom left hand corner you see the word anabolic, right? These guys are really anabolic, right? Mom wants them to grow. She wants 'em to be healthy. She wants an alum. The question is, is how does she do that? Well, it's obvious she does that by providing nutrients to the calf. Because if the calf was under normal conditions, they would suckle mom and eat grass and suckle mom and eat grass, and that would make them anabolic. But in this early stage of life, the question is, is, is mom doing something else to help that calf develop, right? So that begs the question with or without the steroids, right? It's hard to look like that without a little bit of help. And most people would say, no, mom is not gonna feed her calf steroids.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:28:15):
Well, maybe. So let's look at let's look at milk here and colostrum. So this slide is pulled together from a bunch of different sources. We've got energy you know, this is, so you've got colostrum in the middle and the mature milk on the right. You know, obviously there's a lot of igs in colostrum, not so much in milk. There's a lot of lactoferrin in colostrum, undetectable in milk. Wanna highlight a couple of these, you know, insulin 80 65 micrograms per liter about one immature milk prolactin, 280 micrograms per deciliter versus about 15 immature milk. I'd love to know what that prolactin's doing in there. And where it's binding growth hormone is actually fairly high for a hormone that isn't really transferred in the milk. That's pretty high for this stage. The one that's really more telling though, is the IGF one at 310 micrograms per deciliter, incredibly high, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:29:19):
So you've got these hormones, you've got two hormones like insulin and, and IGF one that stimulate protein synthesis. Yes, they're, they're involved in a bunch of other things, but they do, one of their major roles is to stimulate protein synthesis if they're not working on, you know, up taking glucose and things like that. And you've got TGF alpha, a lot of cortisol, of course, that is expected. And then the, the estradiol, right? There's a big, big dose of estradiol there, right? So, so if you look at that, first thing I would say is, Hey, mom wants to make those calves anabolic. And the question is, is how long does that last? So, pulled some data together here again, we got first three milkings characterized, and we'll go right down to the bottom. And you look at IGF one 3 41 micrograms per liter, 2 42 micrograms per liter, 1 44 micrograms per liter.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:30:14):
Remember, mature milk is gonna be about one. Insulin is still high at the third. Milking vitamin A actually has hormone like activities early in life at, especially at those levels of 295 micrograms per per deciliter, right? And vitamin E is quite high. So, you know, in those first few meals, there's a lot of signaling going on that will tell the calf, Hey, you, you can grow, you can develop, you can do things. It might be not systemically, it might be locally. And that's what we're gonna talk about here, right? So what we know is that colossal provides igs, but, and it contains a high amount of nutrients, has a lot of non nutrient factors that support things like gut maturation. We talked about IGF one and insulin might act to your receptors in the gut to stimulate cell proliferation, cell differentiation, and protein synthesis.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:31:11):
So in effect, colostrum is one way the dam communicates to the calf after the calf is born, right? Because they can't have that, that direct relationship as they had, but now maybe they can do it through milk. Is there any evidence that there may be something going on there? And the answer is yes. And so this was a paper published you know, 15 years ago, brown, Swiss calves, two or four liters of colostrum at birth. And, and then some of them received some more colostrum over another six to eight feedings. And so those calves that received four liters a day, that daily gain is actually pre-pubertal daily gain, right? And I need to change my slide there, but it's pre-pubertal average daily gain. So we're talking up to about you know, 700, 600 to 700, 800 pounds, 1.76 versus 2.2. So you're talking not quite just over three tenths of a pound difference in average daily of the gain.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:32:06):
They were all fed the same thing, all managed the same way, all in pens, right? So we don't have any intakes. That begs the question, why are they growing faster? And age of conception was pretty well controlled survival through the second lactation was greater actually for the calves of the four liters. And then milk yield, those that survived made more milk, right? So you see some indication that more colostrum is better. If we look at early life, we see some efficiencies here where, you know, and this was a study done with colostrum versus colostrum, replacer, and this is over the first 29 days of life. And in the interest of time, I'll just cut to the bottom, there was no real difference in intake. But notice a difference in feed deficiency. The calves that received mom's colostrum had much higher feed efficiency than those that received the colostrum replacer.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:33:03):
They were no differences in igs. And, and that's really important. There were no differences in igs. This is all the extra things in colostrum other than the igs. You see the same kind of data. Again, there's some work from Illinois, and I'm gonna go over to this intensified side here, this column on the right. And they looked at they didn't have direct data, but they could do it by, you know, level of ig, poor level of ig or good level of ig. And you can see that in the serum concentration, 6 0 9 versus 2000. And you look at the average daily gain when they were given enough calories and nutrients to allow them to grow. And you can see not quite, you know, three tenths of a pound difference in average daily gain. So as we get, it's not just more colostrum, it's a better colostrum, or it might be more colostrum.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:33:55):
In this case, we don't really know. But if you use IG as a proxy, you know, there's this effect, right? We did a similar thing and repeated it four liters versus two liters. And the, in the four liter calves, they got an extra two liters at 12 hours. We fed them on auto feeders in an ad lido system and took lots of samples. And you can see, you know, the two liters versus four liters is here. You know, IG concentrations, this was all pool colostrum, highly managed. If I was gonna repeat this study with Fernando, I would probably just add some igs to make sure that they were equal, but I don't believe that's the effect. Anyhow, even the two liters were very good IG status. The four liters were tremendous at 2,700 milligrams per deciliter. But you could see the weaning weights were significantly different.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:34:49):
And the average daily gain was significantly different. We use birth weight as a covariate when we do all these calculations in each calf as their own control, right? So we've taken that into account. If you go to 80 days, you still see that difference, right? So now we're post weaning, we see that difference in average daily gain. We see differences in hip height measurements, right? In, in terms of hip height gain. The calves that received more colostrum were, were, had better bone growth, right? And that's really, really, that's really unusual. And it implies that you're getting some sort of a somatotopic axis effect because bone's, the slowest growing tissue in the body, and it's really hard to stimulate that kind of growth. Somatotropin will do that, right? Little bit of difference in, in feed intake in those animals. But overall pretty good.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:35:45):
Look at the average daily gain post weaning, right? 2.4 versus 1.8, basically. So, so it looks more like that brown Smith study, right? And we're starting to see better intakes than those animals post weaning. So, you know, it implies that the more colostrum we get in these calves, the better they're gonna perform. You know? And we're pretty convinced now that it's not the immunoglobulins, it's all these other factors that are in there. And I'm gonna show you why we think that. So, you know, if you think about what we just talked about, you know, general response, you know, is enhanced protein synthesis enhanced in enzyme expression and greater gastrointestinal tract development? Well, the gastrointestinal tract is your barrier, right? You know, the, the, the guts the largest barrier immune system that we have. So, you know, if we make it stronger, we're gonna improve health more surface area, gonna get us better digestion and absorption.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:36:46):
We have more capacity to digest nutrients because maybe we're gonna get better enzyme secretion, right? So mom maybe is helping in this process. So there was YRG Blum and Harold Hammond and all of their grad students over the years did a remarkable series of studies dozens of studies where they looked at the really short term effect of colostrum and colostrum extracts on growth. And I'm gonna show you just a couple slides here of where they made a colostrum extract through, through centrifugation, right? And this was published quite a while ago, but you can see the IG cons IGF concentrations down here at 23 versus 1.1 insulin at 365 versus 67. And lactoferrin actually went down in the extract, right? Must have gone out with the fat, right? So if you look at what they then fed was a milk replacer, or colostrum replacers, but basically a milk replacer to these calves.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:37:43):
And then it added the extract, right? And then harvested the calves and looked at villus heights. So they're looking at the length of the VII in the small intestine, which would be an indication of their ability to absorb nutrients. And you can see that adding the extract significantly enhanced the length of the VII and the height of the VII in there, which means they'd have more surface area to absorb nutrients, right? So MOM is helping set that up. They looked at the crypt cells at the base of those vii those, and we, they use VRDU as a marker for proliferation. You see a trend for that occurring where you've got greater proliferation in those crypt cells to drive that villus heights and that, that length, right? Again, creating more surface area notice in this data that they're talking about, day five of life, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:38:37):
So it's not just a one day occurrence that guts responsive over the first four to five days of life based on everything that we know. And again, those studies were repeated where they gave them just colostrum versus a, a nutrient identical or a nutrient similar formula. And you can see that colostrum always enhanced, or in this case, again, enhanced crip cell proliferation in these calves, right? So something in the colostrum stimulated the development of the gastrointestinal tract, and again, back to an extract, they fed 'em a formula. It gave them some of the calves, the formula plus the extract. And again, day eight of life, they see this trend for greater BRGU incorporation or cell proliferation in those crypt cells. Okay? So mom is helping develop that gastrointestinal tract. It's not just the first feeding, it's not just the ig.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:39:38):
She's trying to do this over time to improve the performance of that calf, right? So, you know, to ask the question, how would a calf grow better than what does this mean? How does that translate? Well, xylose in this particular slide, we have xylose which is a, a non metabolizable analog of glucose and glucose on the slide. So on the left side you have the xylose absorption, and in the the dark lines, the diamonds, you have those calves fed the colostrum. And in the open squares, you have the calves fed the formula. And again, these are nutrient similar to nutrient identical formulas. So calves are receiving the same amount of nutrients. And you can see that the xylose absorption is greatly enhanced significantly enhanced in those calves fed colostrum versus the formula, right? And then if you looked at the glucose, a lot of times it's hard to look at the glucose because it's metabolized so fast.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:40:37):
But in fact, you can see on the right panel this, on this high in this grade increase, or much greater increase in glucose concentration in the plasma than in the formula fed calves, right? So they're looking at about five millimoles per liter in the formula fed and about eight millimoles peak in the, in the in theum fed calves. And notice this is on day five, right? So again, we're not looking at that first day, we're looking five days out and we're still seeing this effect, right? So these guys did a, a really fascinating study and published it in 2011. And it's a head scratcher. I'm gonna go through the simplest part of it. 'cause They use isotopes to figure out where the glucose went and how it moved around. We're not gonna do that. So they had seven calves fed glostrum and seven calves fed a milk-based formula four hours on average after birth, very comparable in macronutrients, took lots of blood.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:41:37):
And again, we're not gonna talk about the isotope data. So you got a pretty good idea of how well they did their study. Here's the lactose concentration. So the top is the colostrum. Day one, day four, you got 201 grams per kilo, 2 63 41. You look at the formula 2 0 1, 2 63 38, you can do the same with the protein, the same with the fat, the same with the crude energy. And you realize that that formula, you know, very nicely mimics the nutrient profile of the colostrum. However, you don't, you're not gonna find the hormones in the formula, or if you do, they're gonna be very low concentration, right? So if you look at the IGF one levels though, in that colostrum 3 73, 1 92 days, three and four, we're still around 86 micrograms per liter. So again, we're not at mature milk yet. So that means if we were to ask a cow, Hey, how many days do you make colostrum and let her make the decision, she would probably say at least four days, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:42:44):
Whereas we tend to focus on that first 24 hours when in fact, or maybe first six hours, when in fact that's maybe not true. You know, it looks like it's not true, right? So then if you look at you know, what's going on with glucose, right? Back to the idea that mom is trying to make this cow or this calf anabolic. So the blue bars are the calves fed colostrum, and the green bars are fed the formula. And this is postnatal concentrations before feed intake. So this is every day before feed intake. And you can see what's going on here. The colostrum fed calves had greater circulating glucose concentrations than the formula fed calves, okay? And if we come out here on day four, and they looked at time of feeding, which is basically what they're doing, so it was on day four at time of feeding, you see that same difference, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:43:40):
Significant difference in plasma glucose and then the two hours after feeding. Yep. The formula fed calves did increase, but not nearly as high, not as nearly as great as the calves fed the colostrum, right? So something about feeding colostrum enhances the anabolism of the calf by increasing the amount of glucose she can absorb, right? Whether that's facilitated or it's just more mature gut and greater enzyme capacity we're still not quite sure. So it's always the fun thing. So when glucose goes up, what's supposed to happen, the insulin, well, it's supposed to increase. So here's day four. This is taken right from the, from the study, from the Journal of Dairy Science. Here's day four, here's the insulin on day four at time of feeding. Here's the insulin on day four, two hours after feeding. Okay? So those of you that are paying attention now realize you have a conundrum because when the glucose goes up, the insulin's supposed to go up. When the insulin goes up, the glucose is supposed to go down.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:44:52):
When in fact, what we see here is that the insulin and the glucose are both up, right? And I, I've got lots of stories about this. Fernando generated the same kind of data and it took about two hours of his PhD defense to get through some of this because the two physiologists in the room just did not believe that this could be true. But we've repeated this several times. It is true. So what it means is the insulin has to be transported across the gastrointestinal tract. It also means that while it's being transported gas across the gastrointestinal tract, it's facilitating the transport of glucose somehow, right? Again, true anabolism. And so this is one way that you could get higher growth rates in these calves if you gave them more colostrum. 'cause You're now establishing this greater uptake of glucose, and we haven't tasted forever, but we see that it happens.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:45:49):
It seems to persist, right? So whether it's programmed or not, I don't know, but it looks like that uptake persists, right? And if you look at sorry, that slides out of place. If you look at the idea of lactase activity and villus height and crypt depth, you can see here the first panel on the left is villus height, decrypt depth. And you can see that the colostrum fed calves had more greater those height decrypt depth. And if you looked at the right panel, that's lactase activity. The calves fed the colostrum had higher lactase activity. So the colostrum is actually stimulating the synthesis of the digestive enzyme so we can digest more lactose. Okay? So not quite significant, but, but higher. So glucose uptakes increased even with similar nutrient content. Plasma glucagon is higher. We got better glucose status, kind of an indication of higher reserve capacity.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:46:47):
Plasma protein levels were higher, which means you'd have more amino acids available for growth and protein synthesis, and it means that you have less protein turned over or oxidized for glucose, right? That's kind of interesting. And because of that, you'd have lower plasma urea nitrogen because you didn't turn over as much just as many amino acids for gluconeogenesis, okay? So you'd have more efficient growth, right? So feeding colostrum for four days looks like a good thing, or we're gonna come back to that. When you don't understand something, you kind of repeat it. So here's just one of our, our simple studies. We took 12 calves, went out, purchased went to the local store, purchased some colostrum, replacer. This is made by Saskatoon purchased through Land O'Lakes in half the calves they received went into Overton's lab, sold a bunch of his expired human insulin from some of his studies, and then Dan Lopez dosed each one of those glossary replacers for half the calves with about a thousand IUs, which was much more than we wanted him to do, but he didn't do the math on this.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:47:56):
That's okay. Nobody died sampled calves. You know, we had catheters in the calves we put in at first, so then we could sample blood. And this is what we found, right? So exactly what we would think. You put the insulin in the commercially available colostrum, and you can see the normal insulin rise. The green line is the control. That's the in, that's a color placer without the insulin, right? Or the blue line is a colostrum placer with the added insulin. So you can see that the insulin is actually being transferred into circulation through the colostrum. And that's human insulin. And again, it's it was simply just added and mixed into the colostrum and fed like normal colostrum.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:48:44):
And again, what's fascinating you take that same set of calves and you look at the glucose. So here are the controls. We're at about 70 milligrams per deciliter of glucose in those control calves. And we're about 81 to 82 grams per deciliter in the treated cab. So just adding insulin to the colostrum replacer increased the circulating glucose concentration of those cals, right? So it just replicates what we've seen, what was observed in those other studies, and just reinforces the idea that these hormones have a lot of activity and they're anabolic. And the, what it also says is, mom is really trying to help the calf. She's trying to help direct nutrients and make those calves more anabolic. And so it's not just about that first feeding a colostrum. It's about how mom is systematically trying to help that calf get better, which means that all those subsequent milkings, at least, you know, four to five more milkings of that colostrum or what she could, what we would not call colostrum, but transition milk is important for that calf to help her be more anabolic create better growth and health.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:50:02):
This is a study that one of my master's students did, Katie Andrews Steinberg now. And this was a commercially available colostrum extract. We need to redo this study. This is the, this is the preliminary study. We were trying to figure out how much of this we needed to give, right? So this we had a, there's a longer story here, and I don't have time for it today, but, so in our preliminary study, we were feeding a set amount of colostrum. You can see that four liters of colostrum, and we have no dose. We gave one dose of this extract, two doses of the extract, or four doses of the extract. All the calves received the same amount of colostrum. And you can see the difference in, and this is for the first 21 days, this is pounds per day gain, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:50:56):
So we did that at birth and then we measured them for 21 days to see if we could see an effect. 1.3 pounds a day, 1.4 or five pounds a day, 1.65 pounds a day, 1.85 pounds a day. Those cals all receive the same on a milk replacer, right? So we see this increase in the efficiency of growth fed iso nutrient diets, right? We did a large study but because we're feeding a colostrum extract, I elected, we have a problem with rot of Corona at the research farm. We usually give the calves an oral vaccine at birth. I elected not to do that. 'cause I didn't wanna block any of this effect. And sure enough, we had over 50% clinical rot of Corona. So we lost the big study to, to rota Corona. And we had, as Darryl Knight would say, you got really healthy calves for being that clinical.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:51:54):
So, so it says there's an effect here, but we gotta redo this study. That's why I'm throwing you this preliminary data. Okay? So there is something to these extracts and something to colostrum. I wanna change gears real quick. Watching the time here. I'm running out of time. What happens to immune cells in colostrum? One other thing about colostrum, and I'll go fast through this. There's other cells in there, there's a lot of leukocytes in there, and there's information now that says that those cells are trafficked in the circulation. So you can ask the question, does this have any impact on the immune system? So if you look at the data that exists, and I know there's other scientists out there that are looking at this and have been trying to replicate this, they were able to figure out that maternal leukocytes, what we would call sematic cells, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:52:42):
Most of those sematic cells in cholos or leukocytes, you can see them in, in circulation in the calf. It gets sequestered in the tissue, but they have been measured in circulation up to five weeks after colostrum. And based on what they have, the data they have, there appears to be greater cellular immunity in those calves that receive whole colostrum compared to cell-free colostrum. Okay? And there's, they've looked at markers on the cells. I'm gonna skip over this slide in the interest of time, but this is a really cool study, right? So what they did is they, they directly tested this concept, so they fed whole colostrum, frozen colostrum or cell-free colostrum within four hours after, and then they, they pulled leukocytes out of those calves, you know, from one to 28 days after ingestion. What they did then is they looked at proliferative responses against bovine viral diarrhea virus and mycobacteria, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:53:45):
The interesting thing is, the dams received a vaccine containing inactivated BVD, but we're not vaccinated against the mycobacteria. So this is interesting because if they, if these cells are transferred to the calf, then when you pull those cells back out of the calf, they should respond to the vaccine, right? Which means you directly sent memory into the calf from mom's cells intact that they could make use of. And in fact, you know, no ig at birth, but allotted day one calves that received whole colostrum and enhanced responses to the BBD antigen, one in two days after ingestion cas that received the frozen or cell-free colostrum did not respond. There was no difference in mycobacteria, right? So to take home here is that uptake of the cells from colostrum enhanced cellular immunity and calves by providing mature program cells from the dam, right? So a bunch of takeaways here.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:54:52):
I went through that really fast. You know, what does that mean about pasteurizing colostrum? Well, it means you probably shouldn't, but we're never gonna tell people to do that. Yet. We still want people to pasteurize colostrum because we, we don't know how important this is, but it is interesting, right? So maybe five years from now, or 10 years from now, somebody will have done the research and says, all right, we gotta figure out how to keep those leukocytes intact and alive for that first feeding so we can get them absorbed, because this is really how we get enhanced immune function, right? So there is a really interesting area for active research. But I thought that would be interesting to people. I've been asked to, to review some of this stuff in the past. I'm not an immunologist. But I find some of these things really interesting, and I know there's at least a couple researchers out there who have repeated this and published it and, and can get similar finding find, find similar outcomes, right?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:55:45):
So the take home lost repeating for four days, right? And I know it's, everybody goes, oh my God, that's a lot of work. Well, yeah, maybe we're already doing it a little bit, right? So first milking colostrum, you know, within six hours of birth, four quartz for large breeds, two bit go fast, doesn't matter. Just be efficient about it. First, milking colostrum again at 12 hours wouldn't have to be four quartz, could be two quarts. You don't have to tube it. Let 'em suckle it if they want, maybe they won't want two because they're already full second milk and colostrum, right? The key to the whole thing is because we used to use blanket antibiotic treatments, we had a lot of what we call transition milk that was loaded with antibiotics. So first and second day usually went someplace else. So that part is not new.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:56:40):
What it means is we gotta keep it, isolate it, and then give it to those calves one to four days of age. That's really what you're saying. So second milking, and then third and fourth milking colostrum for days three and four. And it, it doesn't have to be just that colostrum, that doesn't have to be their sole meal. It just means that we want to take that and make sure we get it to those calves one way or another. And in the herds, you know, Bob James has fed back to me about this. He's had a few of the herds that he consults with do this. And he says, what happened is you reduced all the standard error around the growth, right? Didn't necessarily make all of 'em faster but you got rid of the outliers, right? And made much more uniform outcomes than calves.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:57:23):
Okay? So feeding colostrum for at least three to four days for those younger calves. So in summary, mom's trying to send information to calf via MA secretions. Some of our approaches are management approaches that short circuited this kind of this, this information flow. You know, there's a lot of things in colostrum that impact development of the calf, especially intestinal development in independent of anything related to nutrients. We now know that colostrum can positively impact pre and post weaning feed deficiency, and that mom makes colostrum for more than one day. And this has additional impacts on calf development. We just have to figure out how to deliver it that I'll, I'll stop, take any questions.
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Moderator (00:59:03):
Alright, thank you very much. Dr. Van Amberg. First question is, will a heifer calf treated four or five times reach her full potential or is it better? Are you better off just calling her at an early stage?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:59:18):
Yeah, I, if, if you gotta treat a calf that often she's a good candidate for somebody else's farm? Yeah, I, all the information that we have, if, if they're, they're chronic, if they're that chronic, that early in life, un unless you've got some very special calf we would, we would be moving them off the farm.
Moderator (00:59:41):
Okay. Great. Next question. What can be done during the dry period to improve on colostrum quantity, but more importantly, colostrum quality?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (00:59:53):
Boy, that's a really complex question. It's a great question. It's one that I spend a lot of time on. I, I think with the advent of these high filled diets, the, the, the thing that I see happening too many places is we don't analyze some of that straw or some of those poor, what we call poor quality forages for data stability. And we're not balancing at the right MP levels. I see a lot of mature cows that are probably deficient on metabolizable protein, and I used to think this wasn't possible, but I've done enough case studies here actually in Europe and in the US where I see a lot of these high fill diets in the, in the MP levels, a hundred to 250, almost 300 grams short on metabolizable protein. And those cows tend to have lower quantities of colostrum and definitely lower quality.
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (01:00:51):
And that's, that's very true of the heifers. If I get on a farm, then one of the things that they tell me is that the heifers don't produce a lot of colostrum. The first thing I look at is the dry cow pen or the resh pen. And most of the time a growing heifer should probably not be put on a dry cow diet because she still has significant requirements for growth and fetal development and mammary development and liver hypertrophy and all those things. And you put her on that high filled diet with low mp and she can't eat enough of it. And now she's really in trouble. And I've seen a bunch of heifers that have problems there. So I, I now look at that MP level and make sure, you know, at least 1250 in the heifers. And I'd like to be 1350 1300 to 1350 in the mature cows could be better. It depends on how big your cows are. If you've got 1800 pound, 2000 pound mature cows then you better be higher than that.
Moderator (01:01:50):
Alright, great. Next question. Does pasteurization of CLOs have any impact on igs or other maternal cells in colostrum? What about freezing it?
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (01:02:04):
Yeah, so based on everything that we know, freezing and pasteurizing will knock out those leukocytes. So that, yeah, that, that won't happen. It, it doesn't affect the hormones though, as long as you follow standard guidance guidelines on pasteurization of 60 degrees Celsius for 60 minutes and you got a tight tolerance on your pasteurizer variance, right? It's 60, it's 59 and 61 or 60 and a half. That then your, the hormone aspect of that remains intact. We've analyzed that for her in some place. It's published now. I just don't remember where but the, the, the leukocytes, yeah, they'll, they won't survive pasteurization or freezing and it looks like they have to be alive to have that effect.
Moderator (01:02:57):
Great. and in the interest of time, Mike, I know you have a class to teach here in a few minutes. I've got one more question for you. Can you speak to the efficacy of a colostrum replace or in providing necessary things like relaxing
Dr. Mike Van Amburgh (01:03:14):
I'm only laughing 'cause I'd love to know the answer to that question. We, we analyze some relaxin right now is not a typical hormone to measure. We didn't have the capacity to make an RIA for that. We bought some kits. They're very expensive. We test a little bit. I can't find any in colostomy placers. There's definitely some in cows, so but I, I can't speak to all colostomy placers. I just it's, I would love to be able to test that.
Moderator (01:03:52):
Alright, great. Well, listen, I want to thank you Dr. Van Amberg for spending a few moments with us today. It's been very insightful and I'd like to thank everybody for attending today's webinar. If you have any questions, please submit them to a h.marketing at alchem.com. With that on behalf of Alchem and Dr. Mike Vandenberg, I want to thank you for joining us and have a great rest of your day.
Commercial (01:04:19):
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