Dr. Fricke starts this episode by describing the long-term negative trend for reproductive performance in dairy cows that took place from the mid-1950s to around 2000. The reversal of this trend is due to the use of genomics to select for fertility and the use of synchronization and fertility programs in dairy cows. (6:07)
Guests: Dr. Paul Fricke and PhD Candidate Megan Lauber, the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Fricke starts this episode by describing the long-term negative trend for reproductive performance in dairy cows that took place from the mid-1950s to around 2000.
The reversal of this trend is due to the use of genomics to select for fertility and the use of synchronization and fertility programs in dairy cows. (6:07)
Dr. Fricke explains the high fertility cycle starts with a change in body condition. Observations from the late 1980s and early 1990s showed that cows who calved at a higher body condition and lost condition after calving had worse reproductive performance than cows who calved at a lower body condition and did not lose as much condition after calving. This is known as the Britt Hypothesis. (13:27)
Paul describes studies aimed at finding the mechanism of action for differences in fertility. One study split cows into groups based on performance in a superovulation and embryo flushing protocol. Cows who gained body condition after calving had the best quality embryos, while cows who rapidly lost condition and didn’t gain it back had very poor quality embryos. (18:50)
In another experiment, cows were body condition scored at calving and 21 days later to measure postpartum condition change. All cows were on a double ovsynch fertility protocol. About 40% of cows lost condition over that time period, 35% maintained condition, and 25% lost condition, but milk production was the same for all. This implies that cows gaining or maintaining condition were eating more feed than those losing condition. Cows who lost condition after calving had a 25% conception rate. Cows who maintained condition had around a 40% conception rate, and cows who gained condition after calving had over 80% conception. These differences were not dependent on the synchronization protocol. (21:18)
Megan said many large farms are starting to body condition score cows at calving and 21-30 days after calving to measure and manage this. She also said cows who lose are less fertile and have a higher pregnancy loss than cows who maintain or gain condition post-calving. In a study where cows who lost three-quarters of a condition score or more from dry off to 30 days in milk had a 25% conception rate, while cows who maintained or gained body condition over that same time period had over 50% conception. (26:24)
One of Megan’s studies found cows bred with sexed semen who were submitted to a double ovsynch fixed-time protocol showed a 6-7% advantage compared to cows submitted to AI after estrus detection. The entire treatment effect was observed in cows who lost the most condition after calving. (33:18)
Paul and Megan encourage dairy producers to body condition score cows at dry off, at freshening, and 21-30 days after that. If cows are losing a large amount of condition, that could be playing a critical role in reproductive performance. In addition, the first test, fat-to-protein ratios, also tells a story about fat mobilization. A cutoff of over 40% might indicate that cows are mobilizing body fat and losing condition rather than going up to the bunk to eat to drive milk production. (40:03)
Megan and Paul said that taking a herd from a low fertility cycle to a high fertility cycle includes an aggressive reproductive management program, evaluating somatic cell count and mastitis to ensure those aren’t impacting fertility, and taking a critical look at the nutrition program, including grouping cows with different rations. (46:54)
Megan’s final thought for the audience is that having cows in the high fertility cycle with aggressive reproductive management to increase our reproductive performance really gives us a lot of power. Managing cow body condition score drives profitability and allows a lot of opportunities. (1:01:05)
Paul concludes that over his 25 years on faculty at Wisconsin, he’s lived through the whole reproduction revolution in the dairy industry. Right now, the high fertility cycle is the big barrier to the performance on dairies, but this is very doable. If you get herds into the high fertility cycle, everything is easier. Cows are healthier. Milk production is great. Reproduction's good. (1:01:55).
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Scott (00:00:07):
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Real Science Exchange, the pubcast we're leading scientists and industry professionals meet for a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal nutrition. Hi, I'm Scott Sorrell. I'm gonna be one of your hosts here tonight at the Real Science Exchange, and tonight we're joined by Dr. Paul Fricke and Megan Lauber from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. So I'd first like to start with Dr. Paul Fricke. He did a webinar with us earlier this month. Welcome Paul, and since we are in a virtual pub, do you have anything in your glass that's special tonight?
Paul (00:00:43):
Scott, thank you for inviting me. This is a lot of fun. I am drinking the world's best cup of coffee here. It's my, it is, my kind of custom is I have coffee in the morning and then I have one cup of coffee after lunch. So that's my, that's what I'm drinking right now.
Scott (00:00:57):
Oh, that's awesome. So I see you've brought a guest with you tonight. Would you mind introducing Megan for us?
Paul (00:01:04):
Yeah, my pleasure. So when I was asked for a guest to talk about this topic, the fertility cycle, I couldn't think of anybody better than my star PhD student, Megan Labber. Megan had it comes from a farm in Union Grove, Wisconsin. She did her undergrad at UW Madison, and then joined me for a master's degree. What year was that, Megan?
Megan (00:01:23):
2018.
Paul (00:01:25):
I lose track of time pretty quickly. So Megan kind of finished up her master's right through the end of the pandemic. And then we got a USDA grant funded, which was, which is funding her PhD students. So she's looking at all things sex semen right now, so.
Scott (00:01:42):
Very good. Megan, welcome. Would you mind giving us just kind of some background on the research that the grant that you got and, and the research that you're doing with it?
Megan (00:01:51):
Yes, absolutely. So the grant on I am on is looking at optimizing use of sex semen and lactating dairy cows as well as heifers. This is going from the practical implementation of this on farms with dairy heifers and cows. The economics of this, looking at how to model this and herds. So the best usage of this in relation to like heifer inventory as well as turnover rate. In addition, looking at some basic physiology of sperm between conventional and sex semen, and really trying to understand how this impacts embryo development and how that may be impacting fertility with sex semen. Because we know that the fertility we see with sex semen is about five to 10 percentage points lower than what we'd expect with conventional semen.
Scott (00:02:32):
Oh, interesting. And so do you have an idea of when you plan to graduate
Megan (00:02:37):
That's a great question. That's still in the works, so I, that's
Paul (00:02:40):
Probably a question directed to me. More than
Megan (00:02:42):
Me, but so I met candidacy, so I passed my qualifying exam, which is always a great victory during your doctoral degree. And so right now I'm working on the last couple projects of my PhD, so, okay. That timeline yet is still yet to be determined.
Scott (00:02:59):
And then plans after graduation.
Megan (00:03:01):
So my interests are actually having a position at a university for research extension. Okay. So I really love being able to ask a question, dig into that question, really try to address those key knowledge gaps and then take that information, have great functions like this, and disseminate this information to farmers producers, and really get that information out into the industry.
Scott (00:03:22):
Oh, excellent. Well, wish you the best of luck. Final question, What's in your glass tonight?
Megan (00:03:28):
So I also do have coffee because I need the caffeine boost. It's in an early day, but I do have it in a Guinness Cup because Paul and I were out in Ireland for a conference where it's one of their famous ad campaigns. A woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle. So kind of a fun, fun twist going back to
Pete (00:03:45):
Ireland. Sounds like Irish sounds like the Irish to me.
Megan (00:03:47):
Yes. Yeah. But there's no Guinness in it right now. Still got a little bit of lab work left to do. So
Scott (00:03:51):
Right. Very well. And so then for my co-host tonight, I've got Dr. Pete Morrow. Pete, you're not gonna leave me hanging, are you? I'm not gonna drink alone, am I? Well,
Pete (00:04:02):
Unfortunately you are seen as the time of the day. I'm drinking some lemonade, so sorry about that, Scott.
Scott (00:04:09):
Oh, no, that's, sorry. You
Pete (00:04:10):
Can carry that. You know, you can carry water
Scott (00:04:12):
It's not the first time, unfortunately. So, tonight, I'm drinking what they it's called iron smoke. I had this I went to a pub, I don't know, a couple months ago and, and didn't recognize any of my old faithfuls, and they had iron smoke. I said, what the heck, I'll buy it. And I got some, liked it, and then saw some at the local dispensary here. And interestingly enough, this is from the finger lakes of New York. So it's a bit of a local brew. I've got batch number 66, and it evidently was bottled on January 23rd, 2023. And I'll guarantee that it'll not see its first birthday, at least in the bottle. So bourbons don't last long around here.
Speaker 5 (00:04:58):
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Scott (00:05:20):
Guys, why don't we jump right into the conversation tonight. Dr. Frickey, the, the, the title of your talk was the High Fertility Cycle, and we're certainly gonna talk a lot about that. But right at the beginning of your presentation, you talked a little bit about how days open have changed dramatically. And I found that quite interesting and, frankly, a bit shocking. I think it started back in the 1955 or so open days were in the low one hundreds, and they then increased dramatically, almost straight line to about the year 2000 where they were in the high one thirties. At that point, they reversed and they came back down and been coming down since that point in time. Give us an idea of what's changed.
Paul (00:06:07):
Yeah, you know, that's a graph that my colleague Mile Mabank and I took from the center for the council on dairy cattle breeding. And so, you know days open isn't our best measure of repro, but it's the one that goes back into the 1950s. So we can look at that. And so you described the trend extremely well. I mean it for the, the classic example of reproductive inefficiency, or a reproduction problem was the lactating dairy cow. And so there's this long historic trend from 1955 to 2000 that showed this ever declining reproductive performance. Some famous papers were published with regard to that, you know, reproductive inefficiency in dairy cows. How, how, when will it ever end? I think that was one that's my friend Dr. Matt Lucy from the University of Missouri published, that's, that's been highly cited.
Paul (00:07:00):
And so it was just this long-term negative trend. And one of the things, yeah. And then in 2000, that trend just kind of reversed. And there's a couple things we can look at to try to explain that. One of them is just the genetics for fertility. And if you look at the the trend in the genty trend in daughter pregnancy rate that was going down that entire time, that reproduction's getting worse. So it's just that, you know, we were selecting for other things. We were selecting for milk production. We really didn't have indices looking at, at fertility at that particular time. And around the year 2000. So, so there's been two revolutions as far as dairy cattle. One's the reproduction revolution, which you, you just kind of described. The other one is this genomics revolution. So around the same time, genomics was starting to be used to select for fertility.
Paul (00:07:54):
So the geneticist kind of stopped the downward trend in the genetics for daughter pregnancy rate. But I've made the argument, and I kind of cleared this with my colleague Dr. Penig Guano at, at the University of Wisconsin. You know, we both agree looking at those data that the improvement in reproduction really isn't directly probably a result of increased genetics. The genetics has certainly have stopped that decline. It's not that genetics aren't important, they will be important, I think we should be selecting for genetics. But there's something else that we can look at to explain the improvement since the year 2000. And so the two things that I looked at in my talk was, number one, the advent of synchronization programs and fertility programs for lactating dairy cows. So I came to the University of Wisconsin in about 1995.
Paul (00:08:44):
That was right after personally, and Wilt Bank published the first paper on zinc, which was just a watershed moment, I think, for dairy cattle reproduction that gave us the ability to, to put semen into cows, improve the service rate. And then over the next 20, 25 years, we kinda churn that protocol into a fertility program. So double off sync, those kind of programs are good for fertility. You see, we see about a 10 percentage point in improvement in fertility if you breed a cow to a timed AI program, like a fertility program, like double off sink versus asterisk. But, you know, when I started looking at reproduction in herds, and Megan can maybe comment on this a little bit, I don't think you could explain the entire improvement in reproduction that we saw about that time. We just saw prey rates go through the roof. We saw things get a lot better. Of course, I think fertility programs had something to do with that, but it didn't fully explain that improvement. Wouldn't you say that's the case, Megan? We just saw fertility just increasing in these herds?
Megan (00:09:46):
Yes, I would agree with that. And yes, getting onto this point where this protocol is a part of it, but when we look at these herds, for example, using that same protocol such as a double off sync is very interesting that with some of these herds you did see differences in reproductive performance, even though there's complete compliance. And these herds are being very diligent about implementing these programs. And, and it's getting onto some of these issues with the high fertility cycle that I think you're gonna touch on here in a little bit.
Pete (00:10:12):
One of the things I saw in clinical practices, we would, you know, institute you know, fertility changes, protocol changes, and they would stay steady, but they would, things would just continue to get better, a year would pass. And we, maybe we'd be at a 24-25 preg rate and we wouldn't change anything. And then a year later we're at a 26, 27, 28 preg rate, and there was no really good way to explain that.
Paul (00:10:37):
That's exactly right. I, I like to hear you say that, Pete, because that's exactly what we were seeing. And it got to the point, and I'll, I'll throw this out there for a topic of conversation. It got to the point where dairy farms at least around here in the US, if their repro wasn't good, they were asking the question, how do we change our protocol to improve things? It was almost like the protocols were so successful that it was only about the protocol.
Paul (00:11:05):
And the exciting thing I think about this, this concept that we're talking about, the high fertility cycle is it gives us something other than the protocol to look at that is responsible for the improvement. And I think together those two things, this concept, the high fertility cycle, and then the advent of these fertility programs work together to really turn this repro thing around. And, and, you know, I can't emphasize enough, this is a reproduction revolution. I mean, 20 years ago I don't think we would've ever been thinking that we could achieve average 50% conception rates in high producing dairy cows. That was just not something that you saw we were seeing average conception rates in the mid 30%. I mean, that, that was kind of normal.
Megan (00:11:51):
Yes, absolutely, Paul, I agree. And with this reproductive revolution, it's just really opened up the doors for dairies to do things that I don't think we expected to have this options in lactating dairy cows using more advanced reproductive technologies such as sex and beef semen to manage herd inventory as well as embryos. And so, yeah, the really in the encompassment of this increased reproductive performance from these synchronization protocols as well as better peri management and this high fertility cycle, I think has really opened the doors for lactating dairy herds to really just change how they, they manage their reproductive performance and adopt new technologies.
Paul (00:12:27):
I kind of think about this whole repro thing as a pyramid, right? And so with this pyramid, you've got at the base of the pyramid, good, good repro. And so that's the base, right? If you have good repro, then the technologies that we're using within the dairy industry now are stackable on top of that. So that's the foundation. Once you have good repro. Now what do we have too many heifers? I mean, we never talked about having too many heifers. Everybody had to raise every heifer that was born on their farm. But now that we got repro better, we can use we, we have too many heifers. So now we can do sex semen and beef semen, really, which was the impetus for the grant that we wrote that you that got funded, Megan, that you're, you're funded on. We're looking at things like embryo transfer programs. We're looking now paying more attention to heifers. There's a whole series of things we can do when re repro is good.
Scott (00:13:17):
So we've hinted on this high fertility cycle, Paul, and, and during your presentation, you said that it's kind of a hot topic. Now, what exactly is the high fertility cycle?
Paul (00:13:27):
Yeah, so let's begin at the beginning. It has to do with change in body condition score. And I'll go back to the early 1970s. We've known for a long time the cows lose, that, lose a lot of body condition score post calving have worse repro, I think it was Bill Thatcher probably at the University of Florida that published the early data that said, you know, cows that lose more than a point of body condition score post calving had much lower reproductive efficiency than cows. That that didn't lose, that lost less, less than a point. It was probably in the early nineties. And this was part of the talk that I did where a scientist, his name's Jack Britt, he was, he was doing a number of different studies at the time, and one of the things he was looking at is how long does it take an activated primordial follicle in the ovary to grow up to, to ovulate?
Paul (00:14:17):
And it ends up, it's several estro cycles. And this is true in all mammals, right? So it's, you know, when we do ultrasound and we look at that last big follicle that comes up to ovulate, that's probably only about the last seven to 10 days of that cycle. But it happens for a long period of time. And so what Jack was doing in his small university herd, he was just body condition scoring cows weekly for 10 weeks. And he said, you know, if I take, I can look at my cows. And he said, in the first three weeks, there's two groups of cows. One group of cows calve at a higher body condition score, and they lose. And there's this other group of cows that calve at a lower body condition score and they don't lose. Okay? And then if you get those cows in those two groups, and you look at the rest of that 10 weeks, you see this very distinct pattern. These cows that cal at a higher body condition score, they dramatically lose for about five weeks, and then they gain back that condition. And I think we have taught, and I'll, I'll ask Pete this question. I think we've taught veterinary students, I think we've taught dairy science students, animal science students that all cows lose condition post calving. It's just a matter of managing that loss. What, what do you see? Do you, do you think that's what we kind of, the way we kind of think about it, right?
Pete (00:15:41):
The, the, you know, the, the mantra was is it's, it's not if it's how much, right?
Paul (00:15:47):
And that's perfects what we were trying to do
Pete (00:15:49):
It perfect is is manage and can kind of control
Paul (00:15:51):
That and have minimal
Pete (00:15:52):
Body losses, but it was an inevitable, inevitable problem.
Paul (00:15:57):
Yep. And in Jack's, in Jack, this, Jack didn't ever publish a state, it was just kind of an observation that was presented at the 1991 American Association of Bovine Practitioners meeting. So he had those two groups. So you got the group that loses for five weeks and then kind of gains it back. Then there's group that they cabin this kind of intermediate body condition score, and they just kind of stayed flat for 10 weeks. Now, there weren't a lot of cows in this study, which is probably the biggest criticism of it, I guess you would say. But when he looked at first service conception rate, the cows that maintained had like a 62% first service conception rate. And the cows that lost had like a 26% first service conception rate. And so Jack created this very classic figure, and what he showed was for the cows, he wanted to explain as a reproductive biologist, what was happening to the cows that lost, why was their fertility so low?
Paul (00:16:56):
So if you look at negative energy or energy balance, those cows starting at calving go into this negative energy balance, of course, that's associated with this loss in body condition. And then they kind of climb back out of it. And what he said was, these follicles that take multiple esra cycles to grow, if you just overlay those follicles over that period, the cow that we wanna breed at about 50, 60 days in milk, that follicle in the early stages was growing up right through that period of negative energy balance. And Jack didn't say what it was necessarily about that negative energy balance in that paper. He just said there was something associated with that negative energy balance that impaired the fertility of those cytes. And this became known as the Britt hypothesis. And I know Jack, he's, he's still out there giving talks, and whenever I see him, I give him a hard time.
Paul (00:17:51):
I say, you know, every scientist wants a hypothesis named after them, the Brit hypothesis. And, and what I kind of said in my talk is I think that hypothesis languished for a little while, it's a very difficult thing to test and randomized controlled trials. Right? and then what happened then at the University of Wisconsin is there's a number of us, Rick Gruer Myah, wilt Bank, Randy Shaver, myself, a lot of postdocs, a lot of grad students started kind of piling together data that we had and did a retrospective analysis of three data sets, okay? Looking at this relationship between either body weight or body condition score and, and aspects of fertility. And there's three experiments in that study. The first one is simply looking at body condition score at breeding. And what that study showed is that cows are too thin at breeding.
Paul (00:18:50):
They have low fertility. Okay? So no surprise. And I just use that to say yeah, we don't want our cows too thin, too thin of cows. We're probably dealing with the problem with anovulation, they're probably not growing follicles. They're kind of in a deep end ovulation. The second experiment is a really interesting one That was a superovulation and embryo flushing study, but looking at body weight change. And the key, I think, to that study was not looking at means and standard errors. And so Megan, Megan's a grad student. So the way we do statistics, okay, statistics is the, is the, is the method we use to be objective to show differences, right? We're trained as scientists to show means and standard errors. So if you look at the mean and standard error of all cows in their weight change post calving, it looks like all cows lose weight and then, and then gain it back.
Paul (00:19:45):
Well, what was done in this analysis was what's called a quartile analysis. And the picture comes completely different. If you look at the top 25% of these cows, they kind of gained in the first three weeks and stayed high, the next 25% were flat. The next 25% kind of lost like jacks, Brits, cows for five weeks and come back. And then there was this lower quartile where they lost like seven or 8% of their or their body weight in the first three weeks and just stayed low. And what that first study showed is that that group that had the 8% body weight change, negative 8%, they had poorer embryos, embryo quality was, was poor. So it kind of puts a mechanism to say, maybe, you know, what are we seeing with these things? As far as fertility goes, we see this negative fertility for these cows that lose a lot of body condition.
Paul (00:20:36):
So I think that was important. And then the last study I showed, I'll just jump into it and then we'll, we'll talk a little bit. I, I, I didn't show Megan's newest data. Sometimes I like to show the newest data because everybody wants to know all this new stuff. But I left it out on purpose. 'cause Megan's got a really interesting data set with regard to this. But I'll, I'll describe the third study in that experiment. This was an experiment that one of my grad students did. We were looking at feeding a certain kind of nutritional supplement on repro, and you know, you guys, you guys work with feed, right? So I will say this, I don't think we can just feed something to a cow and magically improve reproduction. That's kind of, kind of not the mechanism that we're looking at.
Paul (00:21:18):
But what was happening in that experiment was done on two large dairies in Wisconsin. We had my grad student was body conditioning scoring at calving, and at 21 days, so we could look at this postpartum change, and all the cows in this herd were on a double ops sync program for first breeding. So that's our magical, that's our, that's our best protocol for fertility. And I'll have to just remember the numbers off the top of my head. About 40% of cows lost, about 30% maintained and about 30% gained condition. It was probably 35% maintained and about 25% gained. And milk production didn't differ across those groups, which is interesting to me. The cows that, so the cows that are, are gaining given about the same milks the cows are losing, what do they have to be doing? They had to be eating more.
Paul (00:22:19):
They had to be intaking more feed, which is exactly what we wanna ruminant to do, okay? But the most amazing data was the fertility outcomes. And when you break 'em up into the cows that lost, the cows that maintained, and the ma cows that gained, remember, they're all on double ops sink. So the cows that lost had a 25% conception rate. And there's a, this is a big study. There's 1800 cows in this study. So we're talking hundreds of cows in these groups. So 25%, if they lost about 40% if they maintained, and over 80% if they gained, now my office is on floor too, in the building, right? In our building, we have a tower, right? Milo's up on the eighth floor, I could hear Milo ranting and raving up on the eighth floor from the two, from the second floor. Kind of the concept was how, how have we not seen this relationship before?
Paul (00:23:15):
It's one of the biggest explanatory causes of this, or associations with this tremendous difference. And one of the things I challenged, I think I did this in my webinar, I do, I do in live talks. How much of that difference, 25 to 40 to 80, how much of that was due to the syc the, the protocol that cows run? And of course the answer is none of it, right? And what question does every dairy farmer ask if their fertility isn't where it should be? What, what protocols should I put my cows on to fix that? And so it's really a neat concept as far as, as what's as what's happening. And then the last thing, I'll say this, this concept I'll, I do wanna give a shout out to my colleague and my friend Richard Perley at Michigan State.
Paul (00:24:06):
He had seen these kind of studies that we had done at the University of Wisconsin. He did one of his own in Michigan. And what he did is he, he correlated previous days open with subsequent outcomes in the next lactation and showed all the things that we did. It is a really nice way to do it. So cows that got pregnant quicker in the previous lactation, like towards the end of the voluntary waiting period, they had higher fertility, less health issues and, and, and all these things. So it all kind of fits together, put together a great paper, it's called the high fertility cycle. So, Richard and his crew over there at Michigan State kind of coined that term, but I think it really, it really explains what we're seeing. And so we put together a figure. And then the last thing I'll say, I'm talking a lot here, Megan, Megan used to me talking, talked a lot.
Paul (00:25:01):
The j d s communications is a relatively new offshoot from Journal of Dairy Science. And they had an issue specifically for repro reproduction. And so they wanted review articles. And so I had put together with Rich Richard Perley just a, an extension white paper pulling these things together, all the data that we had. And so we wrote this review paper called the High Fertility Cycle. So it's myself Milo well Bank at Wisconsin, and then Richard Perley, Michigan State University. And the editor at J D S C liked it so much that he said, this is an editor's choice paper. And so once it's an editor's choice paper, they blast it out to all the ag media. So it's gotten a lot of press. It's a really hot topic. And in fact, I did wanna mention Megan, I was perusing the latest issue of j d s communications the one with your paper in it. Yes. On the heifer stuff. Yep. There's two other papers now about the high fertility cycle looking at changes in body condition score in heifers, and one about changes in weight. So this, oh, this is great. It's become a really, it's become a really, really hot topic, I would say getting a ton, a ton of requests to talk about it. I think it's probably, probably the biggest rate limiting step to fertility nowadays, wouldn't you say?
Megan (00:26:24):
I would agree, Paul. And I think that's where we're starting to see, not even just outta research, we're seeing so many researchers focus on this to trying to understand, but just also on our dairy farms here in Wisconsin, seeing more herds actually trying to record this data. Yep. We've been working with herds that have sent us files of that are body conditioning scoring. And again, we're seeing these similar trends when we're looking at evaluating it through, through herd records that we have. And in addition to the pregnancy outcomes, I'll mention too, is that we see a reduction in pregnancy loss. So for cows that lose a lot of excess body condition, over a half to 0.75 points, those cows have higher pregnancy loss. With the herd I evaluated, that's about 7,000 cows that were recording body condition score at calving and about 30 days post, post calving.
Megan (00:27:09):
Those that lost over 0.75 points of body condition had 15% pregnancy loss, again, all submitted to a double SYC protocol. Protocols are not the issue here, but those cows that maintained or gained, they had 2% pregnancy loss. So just a dramatic difference in what we're seeing for not only pregnancy outcomes, but the loss associated with it. And so, with Pete, I was gonna ask you with herds that you may have worked with or have reached with, do you see some of these herds starting to implement body condition scoring? Or what do you think about that as a herd metric for herds to evaluate their, their high fertility cycle or prairie partridge management?
Pete (00:27:47):
I think body condition scoring is a tremendous management tool. It's very much underutilized. You know, now we look at it as basically, you know, do we have too many thin cows or cows losing a little too much weight, but bringing it back to repro, that hasn't been done. And you know, I'm, I'm hopeful with the more automated systems coming out that we can, you know, develop a, a system where we can much more closely manage body condition and then be able to have an impact on it, whether it be, you know, changing diets or bunk space or availability of feed, because it, it's a huge issue. It, you know, in addition to repro, it costs a lot of money to put weight on a cow and then let her lose it. It's not a very efficient use of calories, that's for sure. So hopefully we can, this is an area we can, you know, really attack in the future when it comes to management.
Paul (00:28:42):
So Megan, I, I was gonna have you go back and you briefly had mentioned, so, you know, we, we've got this one paper that kinda showed these relationships. There's a second paper from the University of Wisconsin, which shows this relationships as well. And actually what that shows is that cows, it, really had to do with their body condition score 21 days before calving cows that were thinner, three or less. That's where the cows that actually maintain or gain are cows. If you cab fat cows, and I think this is a really important concept, if you can't condition cows, they will lose. Okay? And this is where I think we get into the nutritionist aspect. I think so many times I've given this talk a lot to nutritionists and, and I kind of understand how, you know, where they're coming from.
Paul (00:29:36):
They wanna proactively manage this loss, okay? Which I think is really that's kind of a logical thing that a nutritionist might wanna do. How do we feed our cows differently to prevent this loss? But I don't think that's the issue. I think it has to do with them. If those cows are over-conditioned, I don't think you can hardly stop them from losing because the genetics of these animals, I think they can just mobilize his body fat very efficiently. It's the thinner cows that don't have that option. If they're thin and they've got a good appetite, they don't mobilize body fat. What they do is they eat and not, that's exactly what we wanna ruminant to do, is to have room and fill and to have a good appetite and to eat post calving. But Megan, back to your dataset. So Megan, we ran into a dataset from a 7,000 cow dairy here in the upper Midwest. Megan pulled out all those body condition scores that they, they had all those scores recorded. And I think you're right, Pete, you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna record something like that, it takes time and effort. How are you gonna use the data? That's a real question.
Megan (00:30:42):
Yeah. So
Paul (00:30:42):
Megan looked at this change in this period from minus 60 days to plus 30, and then you did a quartile analysis like we did before. What, what, what, how did that fertility look in that quartile analysis?
Megan (00:30:54):
So it's really interesting, again, with the quartiles, you see this beautiful relationship, a linear relationship where if you have that as a mean, it would be pretty deceiving to see what that fertility looks like. But when you have it as a quartile, you see this increase in fertility as body condition score loss is decreased, or cows maintain or actually gain body condition score. And it's actually almost doubling or slightly more where those cows that lost from dry off to about 30 days in milk, about 0.75 or greater body condition score points, their conception rate was about 25%. Versus those that maintained or gained it was over 50%. And again, so it's another herd, another herd.
Paul (00:31:35):
And these are, I think, one thing we need to, you know, I know that scientists are out there listening to us. We have to be very careful. These are not randomized controlled studies. Okay, yes, these are relationships. But the point I think I wanna make is, anytime we've looked at this, these relationships seem to hold up very tightly in these herds. And I can probably pull at least, I don't know what Megan 10 studies now out of the literature that are showing these same, these same relationships.
Megan (00:32:04):
I would say so, and again, it's coming up again, we're seeing more, more papers on this looking at adiposity loss, implementing some of those technologies Pete mentioned, of looking at body condition score loss using technology and how herds can implement that as well to make it an efficient way to collect that data and actually use data. Again, as we mentioned, it's hard when you collect data but aren't actually able to use it in, in attain actual, actual relevant information to make decisions with your herd.
Paul (00:32:31):
And Exactly. And if I look into my crystal ball, we have a couple of our colleagues at the University of Wisconsin that are looking at these camera based systems to try to assess body condition score. And I think once we do that, then it's just a matter of getting the algorithms and the big data. How do we, how do we crunch that and make actionable decisions? But I wanna, I wanna move on then, Megan, and because I think the thing that I didn't talk about in my talk was your most recent study. And this is, it's exciting because it's in Jersey cows
Megan (00:33:18):
Sure. So we worked with, as Paul mentioned, a large jersey herd here in the state of Wisconsin. And we were really interested in comparing basically groups of cows that are mated to either sex semen or beef semen. Again, here in the US we have very specific populations of cows, which are getting very different SEMA types. We wanna create our best replacements with those, with sex semen, use beef semen on our lower genetic merit cows to increase the value of those non replacements as dairy, beef crossbred calves, as, as we've seen those values being very, very high here in our current market values. And what we are interested in is comparing the fertility of those cows with a synchronized ovulation protocol, our double off sync compared to those with a synchronized asterisk, we're seeing more herds interested in adopting technologies to breed cows off of detection of asterisk.
Megan (00:34:08):
And so we are curious to see there's thoughts with sex semen that timing of insemination should be altered. And so we wanna compare this fertility with a timed breeding versus an asterisk. So we looked at that and kind of similar to one of Paul's former student van DeSantos with conventional semen, we found that there's about a six to eight percentage point favor of cows submitted to a timed breeding with sex semen. And, and similar with beef close to 10 compared to breeding that cow off of a detection of Este extras. But with this herd, I had some time on the farm. As Paul mentioned, in any PI, when you're working with them during grad school, when you're on the farm, make it count of all the data that you're collect, try to get as much as you can.
Megan (00:34:50):
And so I've always been interested in this body condition score aspect. And so I decided with the cows that I was enrolling in this study to body condition them at a week post calving about 30, 39 to 40 days of milk post calving and about 70 days of milk post calving which is when cows were being inseminated. And so this was really interesting for us because I had two groups of cows that had complete body condition scores and we were interested in looking at the body condition score loss between seven and 39 days of milk looking at that early part of lactation. And it's interesting, we were able to look at this in group of cows that were randomized to different reproductive management protocols. As Paul mentioned before, with those studies, he mentioned the protocol was all the same, but in this study, it's interesting, the protocols actually differed.
Megan (00:35:35):
And so what was interesting when we had these cows, I basically created these turnstiles. So three groups of cows that lost over a half a point of body condition score cows that lost a quarter of body condition score. So, very moderate loss and cows that maintained or gained. What was really interesting is we saw that cows submitted to a double off sync, there is no difference in fertility, whether they lost a half a point or a quarter a point, or they maintained or gained body condition, which is a little bit different than what we previously talked about. That's
Paul (00:36:07):
Compared to an asterisk. So the fertility program is really interesting. This first comparison like between timed AI fertility program and an asterisk, but there's no difference in those top two toiles.
Megan (00:36:17):
Yes, in those top two toiles. And then what the, where we're seeing this law, this difference in fertility is actually those cows that lose over a half a point of body condition score. And so this is on the upwards of 17 to 18 percentage points difference in fertility. So those double cows submitted to a double off sync protocol that lost over half a point had about 55% conception rate or pregnancies compared to those detected and asterisk and inseminated, that was at about 39 or 38, 37, excuse me percent pregnant at that time. So quite a substantial difference in fertility.
Paul (00:36:54):
So let me just reiterate, just so everybody can follow 'cause we're not, we're not showing any slides.
Megan (00:36:58):
Yes. That makes it a little bit more challenging
Paul (00:37:00):
So, overall, if you just compare, if you just compare, let's say sex semen, cows submitted to double op sync versus cows submitted to asterisk, there's about a six to seven percentage point advantage to double opsin.
Megan (00:37:15):
Yes. Right?
Paul (00:37:16):
Yes. So that's kind of, that's kind of what we've shown before. That treatment difference was completely manifest in that, in that group of cows, that tertile of cows that lost the most, that's where the entire treatment effect was. And when you look at that treatment effect there, it's like 18 percentage points. It's incredible. It's really interesting.
Megan (00:37:40):
Yes, it's super interesting. This is where when you show this to your advisor, other people are like, what's, what's going on? This is a little bit different than what we've expected. And there's some interesting differences I think between our study and the, some of the studies we were talking about before of this on reproductive management. I think one tool that helped a lot of our herds that they were using at the same time, that affects the magnitude of body condition score losses BST. So in the studies Paul mentioned before, a lot of those herds were using BST and T use of that. And so when they, when you look at the magnitude of body condition score loss, most of those didn't have body condition score loss. Over a half a point, only seven to 8% of those cows lost over a half a point of body condition score. And I don't know your thoughts, Paul, Pete of, I think that's pretty substantial how the magnitude of loss also impacts likely
Paul (00:38:32):
Utility. It's much greater in these, in these, in these jersey cows. Yeah.
Megan (00:38:37):
Which I think is really interesting. And, one part of this, I think we're kind of trying to think through, as Paul mentioned with some of this body condition score loss aspect, it's really challenging to test and randomize controlled studies to feed cows to a certain body condition score have forced those cows to either maintain or gain. It's really challenging to really try to pinpoint the physiological mechanism. It's been thought that NIFA's as Paul mentioned with the Britt hypothesis, how that impacts follicular development. But something that we're really interested in also is maybe how leptin impacts fertility of cows and how that could impact gene Rh and thereby LH secretion. So with this leptin is actually has receptors on what's called kisspeptin neurons, which regulate how gene r h is secreted. And so when you have these cows that lose a lot of body condition score during this time, if they don't have that leptin that's being produced from the ADI adipose tissue we might not have be having correct gene H stimulation, thereby LH stimulation to have adequate follicular development and ovulation. Paul, I don't know if you have anything to kind of add on to that.
Paul (00:39:43):
Yeah, I mean, it would be a mechanism we kind of go through that in the paper. It would be a mechanism by which say a, a GnRH based sync program like double op sync would overcome that because you're using exogenous GnRH treatments to get those ovulations to kind of overcome that particular problem.
Megan (00:40:02):
Yes, very,
Paul (00:40:03):
It's interesting. Very interesting data set. Megan and I, you know, that paper is under review now at Journal of Dairy Science. Hopefully that's gonna get accepted soon, but it's a newer data set, kind of another way to think and to talk about this whole, whole high fertility cycle issue. And, and one of the other things I wanted to get into here a little bit, Megan, is our experience. I have an extension appointment at UW Madison. So I'm, I get called out onto dairy farms all the time and I'll, I'll tell a quick little story. During the pandemic, I got a call from a nutritionist. And so I'll just tell you guys when a nutritionist calls me, they're in deep, deep trouble. Okay? It's like, we've got a problem here and you either fix it or we're getting a new nutritionist, that kind of a problem.
Paul (00:40:51):
And so this herd had a really, really terrible preg rate, and it was for a number of different reasons. They didn't have a good plan for putting semen into cows. There's a whole bunch of problems. But I ended up going out and visiting this dairy, and one of the things I always do to look at this high fertility cycle is I wanna see the closeup dry cows. So we went to the closeup dry pen, and I'm standing there with the veterinarian, with the nutritionist, with the herd owner and the herd manager. And I was making them body conditions score the cows in the closeup dry pit. And these cows were on average around four and they weren't phased. You know this. And what, what I, what I realized is that this herd was in, in a, in a state of what I would call normalcy bias.
Paul (00:41:42):
That's just what dry cows look like. And so I was trying to get them, you know, saying, okay, they got a four, okay, what pen of cows do we go to next post fresh? Okay, I went to the post fresher pen. These cows were probably 2.5 body condition scores on average. And again, I was making them body condition scores. These cows, they're suffering from normalcy bias. They were saying things to me like, you know, Dr. Freaky don't, you know, all cows lose by the kitchen score post calving? You know, that's what we've, you know, that's what they're telling me. And it was just a, it was an unusual situation. It's probably more extreme than I would see here in the us. I see this more often in foreign countries when I go there. But these cows in a very short period of time are going from a four to a 2.5.
Paul (00:42:29):
And that's not good for, that's not good for fertility. Okay? So you know, that's one story. Another story I can tell, you know, when I walk through herds with this, sometimes the response that I get is this isn't a problem. Body condition score is just not a problem in our herd. And I say, okay, let's let's go walk out, let's go look at these cows. So take me to the closeup dry pin, walk out to the closeup dry pin three cows. They're all fours. And I'm looking at this person going, your body. Yeah, they're a little heavy right here, you know, so you can't just say that it's not a problem. So Megan and I were talking about this. Megan, if you went to a herd and you thought this was a problem, what, what would your recommendation be as far as recording? We're big believers in data. You have to record data and then, and then look at your data at some point. So what, so what would you say Megan,
Megan (00:43:24):
You know, if I had heard that I thought this was an issue, I think a great starting point is just going out again and getting the body condition score of cows. Let's go and weekly body condition score cows dry off at freshening in 21 to 30 days post. And let's see with our group of cows how that condition's changing over time. I think that'll really reflect that as well as also I think our fat to protein ratios. Pete, I don't know if with herds that you're working with, if they kind of use that or as a ratio to understand, do we have a lot of cows losing condition? But to me, when I'm evaluating herds, I think that's also a great place to start and look at. Do we have over, I believe 40% is usually what I look at as a cutoff of cows with high fat first test fat to protein ratios. Are they really mobilizing body fat rather than going up to the bunk as we, as Paul mentioned before, and, and getting that energy from actual increased dry matter intake and feed rather than having that body condition score loss.
Pete (00:44:18):
Great. And, and I, you know, I have, I have some folks that will do that and look at those ratios. I don't know if they're managing hard around that or looking at it as a body condition issue as much as a ketosis issue, which obviously are hand in hand, right?
Paul (00:44:33):
Yep,
Megan (00:44:34):
Absolutely. Same thing.
Paul (00:44:34):
Same thing.
Scott (00:44:35):
Yeah.
Paul (00:44:37):
It's amazing, you know, the other relationships we've only touched on, there's a strong relationship between peri URI health problems and this body patient score loss. Cows. Cows that lose a lot of condition post calving have more metritis, more ketosis, more days, more, more of these problems compared to the cows that maintain or gain. Again, that's not cause and effect 'cause we have not randomized and controlled that kind of a thing. But the association certainly is there. It makes a lot of sense. And Pete, I would say what I think happens to these cows that get into this, this really severe loss is they kind of get immunosuppressed, they go off feed, they get immunosuppressed. So they're more susceptible to things like metritis or mastitis and some of these, these kinds of things. I, I don't know, we've not looked at that as a, as a mechanistic thing, but it does make sense to me that that might be something that we're seeing out there.
Megan (00:45:34):
Yeah, Paul, I'd agree and I think as we're working with herds to step out of this, you know, beginning the body condition score, getting an idea of what the herd, if that's an issue, I think is a first step. I think it's important because like this, we talk about it as a cycle, right? That this is a high fertility cycle and we wanna get our herd if, if they have body conditions out of this, maybe a low or medium fertility and get them into a high fertility cycle. That with it being a cycle, this is a long process. It's not necessarily going to happen overnight. If we have a herd that has issues with body condition scores and you know, working with nutritionists, it may not be that something with the ration or other things was the immediate cause. It generally is not of cows having excess body condition. There could have been other issues such as milk quality where we are having more cows with mastitis that also implements reproductive performance that we had cows not becoming pregnant early in their lactation and then beginning this lower fertility cycle. So I think it's a balance if we work with herds that as much as we love an instant fix, generally these types of fixes. Pete and Paul, if you wanna comment, aren't, are not quick by any means.
Scott (00:46:39):
Let's go back to that first example you gave Dr. Fricke, you know, they're in a low fertility cycle, right? What do you have a roadmap or steps they should take to get 'em from where they are today to operating in a, in a high fertility cycle? What would those steps be?
Paul (00:46:54):
Megan, you kinda went there with this. I think the question we get is, okay we believe your data. I gotta heard that's not in the high fertility cycle. How do we get 'em there? And I think what you said, Megan, is really important. It's, you know, this high fertility cycle, it's gonna take a while, right? And people get frustrated with that. You know, you can make a nutritional change in a ration and see an immediate change in milk production. I think it's gonna take a year to work through. You gotta work through the calving cycle within a herd that takes a very long time. So I'm gonna start, and I'm gonna say the first thing you need to do is put together a solid aggressive reproductive management program. And we've got those kind of programs available to us. Whether that's a double op sink at first breeding, I know I, I talked about these cows that lose a lot, have lower fertility, but yet we can still drive the service rate with these kinds of protocols. So we wanna get a really good reproductive management program in place that's aggressive. And so I'm gonna start with that one Megan. What would you say would be another step?
Megan (00:48:05):
Another step I would also include in that is if we have other issues within our herds, such as the somatic cell count issue I mentioned before, we have to address those accordingly as well. 'cause That's also going to impact our reproductive performance. So we wanna make sure some of those other management factors that we have are on par so we're not decreasing or decreasing our reproductive performance from other means as well. So as Paul mentioned, we really wanna have more cows pregnant earlier on in lactation. And so something like a high somatic cell count or clinical mastitis is also going to decrease our ability to do so. Yep.
Paul (00:48:39):
And I looked, I use an example in our UW herd, which has been in the high fertility cycle for quite a number of years now. If you just look in the, in the herd management software and run out conception rate by service number our herd is pushing 50% at those first three breedings. And if you've got a really aggressive reproductive management programs, so you're forcing the issue and you're really, really getting these non-pregnant cows re-inseminated quickly within a hundred days of the end of the voluntary waiting period, our cows have three chances to get pregnant. And if you tally up the percentage of cows that get pregnant in the first three services, it's like 90%. So we're getting 90% of our cows pregnant within, we have about a 76 day voluntary waiting period. So within about 180 days, we've got 90% of our cows pregnant.
Paul (00:49:31):
That's how you get cows in the high fertility cycle. Okay? And I always challenge people, if you look down that list, you know, you've got breeding one through eight. We have a cow in our herd, she's gotten eight inseminations. Okay? One cow, eight inseminations. And I always ask the question, why did this cow here, why did she get eight inseminations? And the answer is because someone fell in love with that cow, right? And I always say, you can fall in love with some of your cows. You can't fall in love with all of them, nor do you need to. But I think the issue that I'm really pushing people on is how many times are you gonna breed a cow before you say that this cow is simply run out of time? And I don't know if that's three services, four services or five services, you know, you may have to look at the individual cows to make that kind of a decision, but certainly that cow that's at eight inseminations, if you get her pregnant, she's not gonna be in the high fertility cycle the next time around.
Paul (00:50:26):
Okay. So there's that there. Another issue I bring up is that, you know heifers are relatively cheap now we can call our way outta some of these problems to some extent. Younger cows lose less condition, they have higher fertility. You can flip that a little quicker if you just get rid of some of these tail end cows that are having those problems. You can do that sort of thing. You know, I think one thing nutritionists always ask about is what should we be doing nutritionally in these herds? I'm not a nutritionist and I don't, I don't even play a nutritionist on tv, you know, but I did say at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But I don't know. Megan, what do you think? I mean, one or two rations for lactating dairy cows moving them between those rations? I don't know. What do you think?
Megan (00:51:17):
So we actually just had I'm a teaching assistant for Paul and Dr. Heather White's dairy Practical Management course. We hear forever senior dairy science students. And we actually just had a great group of nutritionists come in and, and talk about feeding management with our students. And, and I met with them after, and I was talking about this, you know, how many rations should we have for lactating dairy cows? And like most people, or most scientists, they say it depends. There's no agreement. It depends. And one, one thought I thought was interesting is that it may be beneficial for these herds that are not in the high fertility cycle that we maybe do have two lactating dairy cow rations, one for those high producing cows and not a low right ration, right? We never have low producing cows, but, but amid lactation diet or ration that maybe for those cows after pregnancy diagnosis, we can move them into that pen maybe not have as much excessive body condition gaining during that time.
Megan (00:52:10):
But it's interesting, I think for herds and, you know, one of these nutritionists mentioned, well, a lot of my really high performance herds are just on one ration. But again, these herds are in the high fertility cycle. So if we have her, so if we have, if cows conceiving early in that lactation, if we're having them all in this similar high producing ration, we don't see that, that gain. So maybe doing some nutritional grouping. Our colleague here, Dr. Victor Cabrera, has a great tool for herds to work and kind of decipher how we should group cows as well. Maybe also decrease some of those feed costs, as we know, that's a really large cost for dairies as well. So something I think to absolutely consider.
Paul (00:52:45):
You know, another thing I wanna bring up here, Megan, is a discussion we've been having when I start getting questions from a lot of different people in the industry, kind of the same question. The question is we're, we're having to dry off cows giving a lot of milk. Pete, I don't know if you're hearing this out there. That is, that is simply a function of better repro as, as your herd reproductive performance increases. You're pulling these cows back, they're having shorter lactations, right? And you're gonna be drying up cows, giving a lot, giving a lot more milk. And I always say, well, that's a good problem to have. It's a bad problem if they're not giving a lot of milk when you, when you dry them off. So the question that's coming to me now is, should we just increase the voluntary waiting period?
Paul (00:53:33):
Okay. Now there's a really interesting modeling exercise that was done by Kevin Vetter and what he showed, he asked that question. He said, let's say we've got herds with 70 day volunteer waiting periods. What happens as we increase that voluntary waiting period? All you do, particularly for the multiparous cows, the older cows, is you get more days of low production at the end of lactation. And so it's not economical to do that. So, so we want, we don't wanna do that, but, and the reason I'm bringing this up in this discussion is because you don't wanna increase the voluntary waiting period if you wanna keep your herd in the high fertility cycle, right? You wanna, you wanna aggressively get those cows and get those cows pregnant. So I think a lot of these things are, a lot of these questions are being asked. I think, you know, to me, I think if, if you're using a time AI program for first breeding Megan's data would suggest if I'm using sex semen, Megan, you know, at first breeding, my cows are on a fertility program for first insemination and I have about a 70 to 80 day voluntary waiting period.
Paul (00:54:38):
I just think that's the way it's gonna work best. And if you do that and you get your cows pregnant, you don't have to manipulate them nutritionally, they will take care of that problem themselves because then your herd's in the high fertility cycle, they don't spend too much time in late lactation, you know, in, in a low, low milk production state, eating a hotter ration. And so I think, I think we can do that. So my challenge, my challenge to nutritionists and herd managers is to get your herd into the high fertility cycle and, and keep it there. And we have lots of herds that are, that are like that. And Pete, you know, that's what we saw kind of in this, in the midst of this reproduction revolution. It's like you didn't do anything. You didn't make a change, but everything got better. The cows are healthier you know, everything looks better. They repro continues to improve. And so I think, you know, now we're just, we're able to just get very high reproductive performance in these, in these high producing dairy. Hers
Pete (00:55:39):
I'm gonna throw one challenge out there. And that is, if you look at what you know as you described the high fertility cycle, that cow that maybe doesn't gain or lose a lot of body weight, but eats a lot she looks bad when it comes to actually feeding efficiency.
Paul (00:55:55):
Mm. And interesting.
Pete (00:55:58):
I guess that goes to maybe my bias that feed efficiency is probably not a great measure in dairy cattle. And maybe it's interesting to look at, but I'm not so sure we should be managing around it. That
Paul (00:56:10):
Interesting, interesting. Yeah, we're we have a number of people looking at feed efficiency in our department looking at methane emissions and those kinds of things. And, but it is kind of interesting what you bring up these cows that do have, get off to a better start. Their feed intake is higher,
Pete (00:56:26):
Right? Your feed intake is higher if their production is the same right, then they're gonna be less feed efficient. But that, you know, the other side of the coin is, maybe when we're looking at feed efficiency we better be stratifying this data sets by body condition or body condition losses because Yep. The cows that lose the most appear to be the most efficient, efficient feed wise.
Paul (00:56:51):
Yep. I think another thing I wanna bring up Scott here is that, you know, this being kind of, I think there's probably a lot of nutritionists out there that are in the audience. When Megan and I go to herds and we suspect that it's a high fertility problem issue what we, what we say is things like, well, I think the cows are maybe losing too much body condition score. Who gets blamed on a farm if cows are losing body condition issues?
Pete (00:57:18):
Everybody
Paul (00:57:19):
Looks at the nutritionist, you're sitting at a table and you say it's a body condition score problem. Everybody looks at the nutritionist. And I think, Megan, you said this before, we're not blaming the nutritionist. It's not that you have to somehow feed the cows differently. I had a nutritionist look at me one time and he said, Hey, don't look at me. We're getting a hundred pounds of milk outta these cows. You know, it's really more an issue of the
Pete (00:57:46):
Repro
Paul (00:57:46):
Side of this. If you get your cows pregnant quickly at the end of the voluntary waiting period, that problem takes care of itself. So to the nutritionist out there, we are not trying to throw the nutritionist under the bus and say, you guys aren't doing your job. We're just saying that, you know, in order to fix this problem, I think we need to look at the repro aspect. It'll take care of itself. We don't have to change the rational. You don't have to manipulate 'em nutritionally. I don't know what you think, Megan. That's, that's a big deal. I think,
Megan (00:58:14):
Yeah, what I'd add and just say is cows are complex biological systems. We can't just say one thing causes the other. All these pieces come together and work and affect the cow as a unit. And so that could be issues with reproduction ketosis, other issues in the health period, pneumonia, how our facilities are managed, how are milk qualities affecting this? And so some of those incidences, like I brought up somatic cell count before is, is a easy one off the bat, we know they affect repro and unfortunately when we have decreased reproduction, reproductive performance from that, again affecting that cows, the biological system, that then seems to affect our body condition score. 'cause We're not getting cows pregnant efficiently. So the nutritionists in our groups, that seems to be the unfortunate consequence that we have to work with to try to deal with some of those issues. So as Paul mentioned before, yes, there's no intention to have some sort of blame, but the cows are complex biological systems and while it might not be the, the initial blow, it's something that we have to think about and manage and try to work with, with herds to get, get them into the high fertility cycle.
Pete (00:59:18):
Paul, Megan, Pete, this has been a fascinating conversation.
Scott (00:59:21):
I've thoroughly enjoyed it. It's gone by quickly, but I am out of bourbon. That means it is the last call. Alright. So you know, if you guys would just kind of give us one final thought that you would leave with our audience and, and I'm gonna start, Pete with you. What would be one key takeaway that you'd leave with the audience tonight? Tonight's last call question is brought to you by Nitro Precision Release Nitrogen Nitro Sure delivers a complete T m R for the room microbiome helping you feed the microbes that feed your cows. To learn more about maximizing microbial protein output while reducing your carbon footprint, visit balcom.com/nitro. Sure.
Pete (01:00:06):
I guess what I'm excited about when you discuss the high fertility cycle is, if we're, we're managing the group as a whole instead of trying to manage the average, meaning really where should cows get pregnant? And, you know, we're moving our voluntary waiting period to that period and getting them pregnant very quickly and very efficiently as opposed to saying, you know, we need to have a better average days in milk or a better average and let's push our voluntary waiting period down to where we actually, you know, don't really want cows to be pregnant, but it makes the average look better. So I'm enthused that we're, that we're really adding a lot of precision, right? We're, we're you know, narrowing up our, our, our bell shaped curve and get, you know, narrowing up the standard deviation and really trying to have a very quality system. Yeah.
Scott (01:00:57):
Thanks Pete. And, Megan, you've been a great guest. I wish you the best of luck as you continue your education and thank you for joining us tonight.
Megan (01:01:05):
Thank you Scott. And thank you Paul for the invitation as well as Pete. And I guess my final thought that I'd like to leave is that, you know, having cows in the high fertility cycle, having aggressive reproductive management to increase our reproductive performance really gives us a lot of power. And to me, as a young researcher, that's really exciting to see all the advanced technologies that we can see herds adopt with my research with sex semen. And so I'll just echo that to me, that, you know, having this, this herd, having our herds in the high fertility cycle and increased reproductive performance, it gives us a lot of power. And so, you know, using these tools, as we've talked about, to manage our body condition score and really assess this and have a, a plan set forth, it, it really, as your herd, it dries profitability and allows a lot of opportunities. Right.
Scott (01:01:46):
Thank you for that, Megan and Dr. Fricke, why don't you take us home?
Paul (01:01:50):
Well, I just think I've been at this a while.
Pete (01:01:53):
I’ve been at the University of Wisconsin for
Paul (01:01:55):
25 years on faculty, and so I've kind of lived through this whole reproduction revolution. And I would just say it's exciting. It's an exciting time to be involved in the dairy industry, especially with reproduction. We basically fixed a lot of problems. I think this high fertility cycle is kind of the big barrier to performance on dairies right now. And I think the positive message I would have for everybody out there is this is very doable. If you get herds into the high fertility cycle, everything is easier. Cows are healthier. Milk production's great. Reproduction's good. It's so fun to work with these herds that they can get in the high fertility cycle and just see these really, really, they just, they just click along. So fun time to be involved with the dairy industry. I think we're in a good place.
Scott (01:02:41):
Yep. Well said. And that's gonna be a wrap. I want to thank you guys for joining us. It's been a great conversation To our loyal listeners, as always, we thank you for joining us here once again at the Real Science Exchange. We hope you learn something. We hope you had some fun and we hope to see you next time here at The Sense Exchange where it's always happy hour and you're always among friends.
Speaker 5 (01:03:00):
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.