Guests: Dr. Trevor DeVries, University of Guelph; Dr. Tom Tylutki, AMTS Joining the group at the pub for cold brews and conversations this evening is Dr. Trevor DeVries and Dr. Tom Tylutki. While Dr. Tom Tylutki’s passion lies among dairy cow nutrition through various research in growth and maintenance management, Dr. Trevor DeVries has focused his career on studying animal behavior through academia.
Joining the group at the pub for cold brews and conversations this evening is Dr. Trevor DeVries and Dr. Tom Tylutki. While Dr. Tom Tylutki’s passion lies among dairy cow nutrition through various research in growth and maintenance management, Dr. Trevor DeVries has focused his career on studying animal behavior through academia.
Both joined together to lead the pubcast this evening covering dairy cow consumption and nutrition management.
Dr. DeVries reflects on his career and shares insight into the synthesis between intake and production, adding that when trying to optimize production, optimizing dry matter intake for cows also occurs. His point being, if the goal is to have cows eat more, changing their behavior is important. 11:30
Dr. Tylutki highlights his consulting experience in nearly 46 countries educating livestock owners by commercializing ration formulation packages and notes the critical importance in gathering research data to better understand behavior. 16:20
Dr. DeVries adds his perspective in forage quality variation and the studies of both him and Dr. Tylutki have done on fiber length and digestibility. One key point Dr. DeVries shares is the value in making specific recommendations instead of generalized solutions, due to varying factors, operation goals and even some breed differences. 25:32
Dr. Pete Morrow also joins the evening discussion, sharing his thoughts on rumination monitors for management practices, highlighting the potential artificial intelligence has through management data points. 37:14
Dr. DeVries suggested the cow’s behavior is just as important as the diet itself, which is ultimately impacted externally. Adding, continuous improvement in technology and automation management is also going to play a large role in welfare longevity. 1:04:37
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Scott Sorrell (00:00:07):
Good evening everyone. And welcome to the real science exchange. In the podcast, we're leading scientists and industry professionals fed over a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal nutrition. Hi, I'm Scott Sorrell one of your hosts at the real science exchange tonight. We're talking about how dairy cow behavior impacts the nutrition she gets, regardless of the ration formulation. We've all heard about cow sorting, but tonight we're gonna look more deeply into how all factors work together to determine what she's consuming. Joining us at the pub tonight is Dr. Trevor Dre from the university of Guelph, Dr. Dre joined us for the real science lecture series back in June for a complete review of this subject. And we'll share the link to that to the full webinar in the show notes. But this is the first time I believe for you to be at the real science exchange. Is that correct?
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:00:59):
Yes, it is pleasure to be here, and thanks for the invite.
Scott Sorrell (00:01:02):
You're very welcome. And thanks for joining us as is our tradition. Tell us what's in your glass tonight as we start our conversation.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:01:10):
So in my glass, tonight is an American whiskey, as a good Canadian. I like my rye whiskey and I mostly drink Canadian rye whiskeys, but one of my favorites is a fairly common American rye whiskey, and that's a frontier rye whiskey.
Scott Sorrell (00:01:29):
Very good. Are you, in the habit of drinking any Mosson?
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:01:35):
We consume a little bit of Mosson product, I think 20 years ago, 25 years ago, maybe a little bit more, but not as much in recent times,
Scott Sorrell (00:01:44):
The only reason I ask is I had a Canadian live right across the street from me and that's all he drank even have, had a dog named Mosson. So that was just top of mind. Yeah. That's,
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:01:53):
That's quite common actually. There are many dogs in Canada named Mosson,
Scott Sorrell (00:01:58):
So Sen probably has a few blues as well. Yeah. All right. Very well. Would you mind introducing the guests that you brought with you tonight?
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:02:08):
So our guest tonight is Dr. Tom Taki from AMTs and Tom's interest in, in, in behavior, I think lies well, a lot to do with the modeling of that, and including that in their nutritional model. And over the years has incorporated various research that people have done in that area, including work from our group, and thought it'd be a great addition to today's podcast to have him be here and discuss that topic.
Scott Sorrell (00:02:43):
Yeah. Welcome, Tom. Glad to have you here.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:02:48):
Thank you very much, Scott. Thanks, Trevor. That was, that was very
Scott Sorrell (00:02:51):
Nice. A nice introduction. Yeah. Yeah, it
was Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:02:53):
Was, it was
Scott Sorrell (00:02:54):
Tom, would you mind telling us what's in your class tonight and then telling us a little bit about your background and also your company. Arts,
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:03:02):
I'm happy to do that. Well, I'm doing something different for what's in my glass. I have this, this is homemade moonshine. You're the first
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:04:22):
I dare to say, it's close to passionate of mine to deal with requirements like this. And, and also, you know, just even from the consulting work that I've done with, with various farms and, and viewing, you know, looking at their facilities and looking at how cows move and, and just, I'm, I'm kind of the odd one. My, happy place is standing in the middle of a group of cows or, actually even better grabbing a chair and sitting in the feed bunk and watching cows eat. I think I can learn so much more from that, that than most other things on a farm. So my company had 2005, three of us spun out Cornell to farm AMTs. We left with a license to the core biological model and we started commercializing the ration formulation package, we started with zero clients, zero money, and a hope and a dream.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:05:25):
We now have clients, I think in 46 countries. I think we're up to feed anything from, well, we had a cheap in goats, so anything from cheap and goats or, or grazing dairies or, or cow-calf all the way through a hundred thousand cow herds in, in various spots around the world before COVID I spent about a third of the year out of the country teaching people how to feed and, and manage cows and nutrition. So it's, I've gotten to see a lot of things around the world. I'm, I'm really fortunate in that. And along with that, you know, we've, we, we also believe heavily in, in providing some educational things. So several years ago we started a webinar series as well. That, that well, Trevor's been on it. We've we've had we've, we've reached a lot of people that way, too. So these things, these educational type moments are, are really, really important for our industry.
Scott Sorrell (00:06:31):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, thank you again for joining us tonight, and look forward to the conversation. My co-pilot tonight is Dr. Pete Morrow. Pete is a technical service manager in the Midwestern United States for Bache Pete who's in your class tonight?
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:06:47):
Well, Scott, I wish I was a little bit more interesting, but I've gotta take my kids tonight and, and, and do take them for a little drive. And so I'm drinking a Virgin vodka and lemonade, also known as a lemonade
Scott Sorrell (00:07:02):
Lemonade. All right. You could have got at least put a little bit of iced tea in there, had an Arnold Palmer. Trevor, I, I, I usually have a brown liquor like yourself, but tonight I'm kind of changing it up a little bit and I'm having an IPA. We were at the animal science meetings last white last week. My wife went with me while we were gone. My college-age son had a party at the house. So this was left in the refrigerator. I have no idea where it came from. I do see that it's from Philadelphia. I like IPA, so it's pretty tasty. So that's kinda the story behind while I'm having tonight a yards IPA you to kind of get,
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:07:38):
So, wait, God, I gotta ask, was this Ascension party, or was this family out of town? Let's have fun.
Scott Sorrell (00:07:45):
Yeah, it was one of those, but, but he's a trust trustworthy young man Penn state kid. So he's a good guy. So we, we trust him. So anyway, Trevor gets started. Can it give us an idea of how you got started studying animal behavior and how long you've been doing it?
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:08:06):
Yeah, no, that's a, it's kind of an interesting path. It wasn't something that I necessarily yeah. Envisioned myself doing, coming out of my undergraduate. I, I grew up in Western Canada, British Columbia, and went to school at the University of British Columbia, like many young people who go into animal science. I wasn't exactly sure. The thoughts of becoming a veterinarian were in my brain and got introduced to research in my junior year. And, I had a major professor in my final senior year of my undergraduate that yeah, offered me a graduate position and he was a room and nutritionist. And so I envisioned myself getting into graduate studies doing that. So this was well, 21 years ago in 2001. And when I started my graduate studies there and I didn't know where that was gonna take me, and through yeah, a variety of events, I ended up so my first major professor passed away actually in the first year of my program.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:09:13):
And it was very unfortunate but at the same time, it forced me into a couple of things. Number one, it forced me into teaching that year, which I think paved a little bit of a way for an academic field for myself. And at the same time, I had to switch advisors. And so I was ready to be co-advised by Dr. Karen Bosman, who is a research scientist here in Canada very well known in the area of permanent nutrition and, and fiber digestion, and as well as the behavior of cows as well as eating behavior. And, then I was kind of orphaned at the time and they gave me to another professor, Dr. Marin, Ben Kaiser link, who was coming in at the time as a new professor and needed grad students.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:10:05):
And she had an interest, in dairy cow behavior and welfare. And so I kind of amalgamated my interest in Ru and nutrition with the behavior side of things. And that took me through my Ph.D. And following that, I did a little bit of a postdoc but started with the university of Guelph 15 years ago. So in 2007, and since that time, yeah, we've, we've built our, our research program around the behavior of dairy cows focusing mostly on eating behavior, but also other aspects of time, budgets of cows and how nutrition impacts that. But also housing and management and milking systems, et cetera all influence the behavior of cows and then how that then translates into yeah. Physiological effects on those animals and downstream production and health effects. And so, yeah, branched out into a variety of different areas and, and it worked kind of globally, so to speak in, in that realm.
Scott Sorrell (00:11:10):
Excellent. So, well, let's kind of dive into some of your key learnings over the years, right? I know during your webinar, you talked a lot about dry matter intake and it driving milk production, generally speaking. And so what are some cow behaviors that drive dry matter intake?
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:11:30):
Yeah, that's an interesting one because one of the things that we know is inherently intaken and production are, are linked, right? And so production can be driven by intake, but it can also pull intake as well. And so generally when we're considering trying to optimize production, we're trying to optimize dry matter intakes for cows and cows, if we want cows to eat more and I always make that point, if we want cows to eat more, they, they, they have to change their behavior to do so. Like the cow can't just magically consume more feed that has to come along with some type of change in their eating behavior. So cow wants to eat more dry. She's gotta either spend more time eating or eat faster, or have more meals per day, or have bigger meals or, or larger meals.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:12:22):
Right. And so some of our work has yeah. Focused in that area as well. Thinking about how we, or what, are the most important? And again, it's, it's not a simple thing, like lots of studies actually, there's some conflicting kind of evidence. So some would say, oh, cows have to have more meals per day. Some would say, no, cows have to have bigger meals. I think in certain situations, those two play out,, it often depends on the diet and the type of diet the cows are eating. Some of our data would suggest that from an intake and probably room health and efficiency standpoint, it's probably most important to get cows to yeah, have as many meals per day, and not eat too fast. Maximize the amount of time that they can at the feed bunk so that they can maximize how much driving they consume at the same time. And, and that goes to some of the modeling type stuff is we also don't want cow spending too much time standing there and, and eating because if she's forced to spend too much time chewing her feet that can then potentially kind of trickle down into have negative impacts on how much time she spends standing. Right. And causes too much standing time in cows. And that can have a trickle-down effect in terms of their production and health as well.
Scott Sorrell (00:13:45):
So, Tom, why don't you give us some insights into how you model that?
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:13:49):
Well, I, I, I wanna pick up on, on where Trevor went, because that is, that is, that is so true. And if we look at some of the stuff that, that Rick grant and, and Heather, Dan has done it minor playing with P U PDF or in digestible PDF and part and particle size, and, and that chewing time, it it's really, it it's how long it takes them to choose something for them to swallow it. So, all these diet interactions impact eating time that we're just starting to learn about. And, that's the challenge. When we go to model some of these things we can look at, you know, if we look at the data that's in the literature now, there's, we can come up with some basic relationships, but if there's a lot of these questions that are starting to pop up that are gonna have massive, that is gonna have some really big changes for us in terms of how we do model it. So we're limited by the data that we have available and it could be, you know, and what's going to be interesting is the next generation of the core biological model from Cornell goes dynamic. So there has to be a, a, an intake model associated with that because it it's going to more represent how the cow sees that feed, that, that she's swallowing so that this is gonna become even more critical over the next several years.
Scott Sorrell (00:15:20):
And you say, you're gonna need some data. Is that data that you're gonna need to get from, from laboratories analysis, that kind of data, or, yeah,
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:15:30):
No, this is research data. So it, it, we rely heavily on, on the type of work that Trevor does. Got it. That pioneer Institute does so that we can build these relationships
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:15:39):
And, and Tom correct me if I'm wrong, but like a lot of the model two to date has focused on the activity of the cows and the impact that say eating time has on lying time and, and lying duration and, or standing time as an alternative. But I, the other part of that is, yeah, do we have a good way of modeling? Not only those impacts on the standing lying time of the cows, but also just how eating time can play a role there and how things that influence eating time affect intake and not the other behavior of the cow, so to speak.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:16:20):
No, we don't have that. You know, and I, I remember when I was still at Cornell and, and we, we made a version I had come out of extension and, and Danny Fox who, who was my major advisor. We sat there listing all of these things that we knew impacted intake things like Edmont Heights. You know, you look at all the old free stalls in, in the Northeast from the sixties that have the feed bunk in the middle of the barn or how rough, how the concrete's all worn out. And it's just all this stone, that's, that's there, all this aggregate, and the cows have to kind of suck through stone to try and get feed and some of the other management-related things. And we, I forget how long the list was of everything that we had in there, the end of the day, it all had to come out because there's absolutely no data for us to quantify any of it. And, and it's huge.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:17:30):
Yeah. And I was gonna say that like, yeah, it's, it, it amazes me like, again, we've been doing work in this area for like our group for 15 years. Some of this work goes back, right? Like, well, Rick, Rick grant from the minor, Institute's been doing this for years before that thinking of some of the work that Jack aright did years back. Right. And looking at this, you go back into the seventies, there's literature on this. And then as you say, there are still lots of gaps in terms of what, what we don't know, so to speak. I, I probably get an email every week or two from someone with a question related to feeding management or barn design. And I would say 75 to 80% of the time I'm giving them kind of, a best guess type answer rather than basing it purely on empirical evidence that we have. Right. Cause a lot of these things, yeah, we, we have good kind of field experience or, or we have, we can, we can piece together things that probably make sense, but we don't necessarily have the data that you were just describing to be, be conclusive about some of these, some of these areas.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:18:44):
Well, and, and we can jump in, let's jump in, jump in the whole side of forage, particle size on that. You know, you look at for how many years now we've talked about making the length of cut on corn silage longer with shred and its impact on P PDF on P PDF of the diet. Has that limited our intake in a lot of casesinnandd some cases, it probably, it has I look at the feeding systems I deal with around the world, hell, the number that, that are still feeding in, in tractor tires, in, in dry lots in South America, he, the, the sorting he, the wasted feed, I mean, and how it's presented and, and stocking rates and all these things, as you said, Trevor, we have Gutfield, we have, you know, there's a little bit of data that we can say we should do this, but to take that, and model that management, that feeding management, we don't have the data.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:19:46):
And I, I always kind of yeah, kind of, well, look at it, kind of like we look at forage quality, right? Like forage quality is influenced by so many different things. But if you look at the percentage of variation of forage quality, that's dictated by different things. Like just time of harvest is like, I dunno, 60, 70%, right? And like forage varieties and right. All these kinds of things just contribute to that we little bit. And I look at kind of diets for dairy cows the same way where it's like, we can do all these kinda little tweaks and we can add little bits of this and this to the diet, but at the end of the day, in terms of intake and what the cow receives and consumes and gets from that diet has very little to do in a lot of cases. I don't say all the cases, but in a lot of cases has very little to do with what that formulation is. Right. And, and that's, that's our challenge often in the industry. Right. And it takes often it takes good. Yeah. Consulting nutritionists and advisors on the farm for picking up on those things. Right. And identifying bottlenecks, that might be limiting the, yeah. The effectiveness of those diets that we're putting, putting in front of cows.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:21:02):
I can formulate to the nearest milligrams of zinc, but I'm relying on someone to go load a 20,000-pound mixer with a payloader and hoping that they're within 1%.
Scott Sorrell (00:21:16):
Yeah.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:21:17):
Hell, how many farms you can know how many cows are in a pen?
Scott Sorrell (00:21:21):
Yeah. So what are some of the big things that we do know right? And the guidance that we can, we can give dairy producers and nutritionists relative to rice and composition, fiber length moisture, that kind of things, to optimize dry matter intake.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:21:40):
That's a big question too. Like, yeah. Again, we have lots of knowledge of these things. I, I don't wanna, I don't wanna downplay that either. Right. but, but I think one of the points and just the, to the point, Tom was making too about fiber length. Like we've got like oodles of studies on, on fiber length and, and then even right in the last five to 10 years on, on the digestibility of that fiber, both digestible and undigestible right. And, and, and the impact that that has, then the application is, is often the difficult part because it's often context specific. And so you can, you can, you can do a study where you show that yeah, you change the U N DF of the corn silage or something, and it changes the behavior of the cows, but then you go into real life and, and there's probably some other intervening variable or, or, or, or con confound there that's gonna impact what result we see from feeding that diet.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:22:44):
Right. And so I think that's, that's our challenge there, right? In terms of adding some of those pieces into, our models. But yeah, like we have lots of good data on, on, in recent times too, particularly on the fiber side of things, in terms of the impact that has on sorting, like we're talking about trying to, yeah. In some cases, like Tom was mentioning the shred where we're trying to like, maybe get a little bit longer cut, right? And get a bit more different type of cut on the, on, on that corn silage. But at the same time, we see more sorting, although, what happens in that case, cows just don't end up eating that fiber. So that's, that's, that's a bit of the challenge there. And we've come a long way that way, realizing that cows don't necessarily, need fiber and they need effective fiber, but they don't need super long fiber. Right. That's and, and that's why most, yeah. Most people, when they look at a diet now, if it's, if it's longer than an injury or, or so like they those materials are just gonna get sorted by cows and they're not gonna get consumed as a kind of predicted. And so a lot of the kind of studies in the last couple years, or five years, I'd say, have really kind of pushed that. Right.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:24:00):
Well, and, and I think to go along with that, it would be some people might not like this answer. But I, I, and I are not even going to apologize for it because it's a reality too many times we make recommendations on forage quality or forage particle size or anything like that is, that is very generalized. And all of these recommendations need to be like specific, you know, what I make recommendations for in, in for example, to Nire grazing herd versus a California dairy or a, or a China, Chinese dairy, that's importing all their, all their, the majority of their forages. They're gonna be very different. And, and, and our, our goals and our objectives will vary. And, and I think that that's one thing that as an industry, we need to spend more time up here comes my extensive background. The first thing, I do when I go on a farm is to try and figure out what is the mission, and vision goals of the farm, and how are we gonna meet that. Because then we can get into this whole forest discussion we can get into, into allocation. There are so many ways, that we can handle these things, but we all have to start on the same page,
Scott Sorrell (00:25:32):
Kinda changing direction. Just a little bit. I was kind of curious if there are many animal differences in determining dry matter intake things like I'm thinking of breed age those kinds of things. What can you tell us about that, Trevor?
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:25:53):
And that, yeah. And interestingly again, that's I think like, so the breed one is one where we have very little, yeah, I guess, knowledge, so to speak, right? In terms of differences, we, you go on a farm or Jersey farm, for example, and the cows react differently. They, you see them at the bunk, eat differently. But if you look in the literature, there's no quantification of that. And we don't have any yeah, clear kind of insight into, again, they're gonna have different requirements. And so our models will tell us that they have different intake requirements. And, and Tom can probably maybe speak a bit more to that, but on the behavior side of things, I don't think we have any kind of clear data to, tell us yeah, what impact that might have.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:26:50):
Like we see a lot more oral activity, with jerseys. Have you ever walked under Jersey farm, you seen them all tongue rolling and right? And, and again, that is, in a, in a whole team, if you see that it typically means that those animals have been feed restricted at some point. And, and, and that's induced that behavior where it's, it's a, it's a behavior that gets kind of elicited by that, that type of feed restriction, but in a, in a Jersey, you just in almost innately see it. And so again, we don't even know why that might be the case and do they have a higher kind of so-called foraging requirement, right? And, and that could be the case, but, but we don't necessarily have the data to, to, to back that up.
Scott Sorrell (00:27:38):
Okay.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:27:39):
Well let me add to if we look at all the intake equations, except for the new ones that Nathan did, that Mike Allen pulled together that include some things related, to fiber, their body weight in fat corrected milk, and it's, it's weighted about equal for lactating cows, and the biggest challenge that we have. And, and this is a challenge I'm going to throw to, I don't care if you're a nutritionist, an academic, a dairy producer, how much do our cows weigh? So I'll tell you what our cows have grown tremendously. Cornell went back and looked at the mature weight of the Cornell herd from 96, 93, and 96 versus 2016. And the mature weight on that, of that herd, has increased by 1% a year. So anyone that's still guessing that, that, that mature whole scenes are gonna be, you know, 600 kilos, 13, 13, 50, we're way wrong.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:28:47):
We're talking about the number of 1800-plus-pound mature cows. I see everywhere in the world that Holsteins is shocking. And when we take that into account and why we see these high intakes are like that, it's, it explains a lot of the variability. We see get body weights. Folks, not only that, not only does it impact this whole intake issue, but let's start talking about barn design. The number of barns I still see built with 48 installs is criminal. And, the lenders need to be educated on this. Because suddenly if I say, I want 52 installs, I gotta build a bigger barn and they don't wanna pay for it. We have, we have lots of challenges on this.
Scott Sorrell (00:29:34):
Mm. You know, speaking of challenges, Pete, you've been a practicing veterinarian, for several years before going into the industry. I, I'd be curious to understand your perspective on what kinds of challenges relative to this, have you seen on a dairy farm or some of the bigger, well, no,
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:29:52):
Thanks, Scott. There's no question. There's a, a lot of challenges in, in going back to, the stall design for those larger cows. You know, we have cow comfort issues that can in, that can impair intakes. We can have bunk space issues, whether it, in terms of just adequate bunk space or you know, the way the bunk is designed. So these cows can get at feed. One thing that I notice as much as anything is just variability in the management skills and or goals on the, on the dairy, whether it be the accuracy of feeding or frequency of pushups, and, you know, whether that can be con done consistently, excuse me, or if there's protocol drift. So I think there's a lot of things like that from a farm perspective that can be, you know you know, really a big deal.
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:30:48):
I was gonna follow up you know, we talked about particle length earlier. How often do we think that we should be testing particle length? I know a lot of nutritionists, you know, are out and shaking out rations. But is that something that should be done weekly, or monthly, or is it once we kind of get where we get our feel? We feel a little comfortable with longer intervals between testing particle length.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:31:11):
You're not gonna talk about it all right, I'll take that. Okay.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:32:20):
And I asked, what are you using? How are you using that data? They don't have an answer we're doing it because someone said it was a good idea if we're going to do a mixer analysis. Awesome. And that could be, I don't care. Do it monthly, do it quarterly. How what's the management of the overall system? I do, I only will do it if I'm conducting a TMR if I'm doing a TTR on it. And between times on that, well, I'm hoping the feeder's doing their job. If I have a question about it. Yeah. I may go screen it. I may do whatever, but it's. We have to have these conversations with the theater management, make sure that we have buy-in and that they understand the importance of what they're doing, and they should have the power that the theaters should have the power to come back and say, you know what? I think that we have something wrong here. We need to put a new nugget in the mixer, or we need to do something. it's collecting the data other than that is just data, data collection with, with no clear objective,
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:33:38):
You know, talking about data. I just wanna pivot a little bit. What are your guys' thoughts about the available rumination monitors that it's used for herd management? Are there possibilities around research or could we titrate some of our management practices, whether it be feed times or pushup times around some of this data that comes from the rumination monitoring systems?
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:34:04):
Yeah, no, I'm happy to jump in on that. I, again, I, we've been using those systems extensively, both in our controlled kind of studies that we do at our research station, but also in field trials. Those systems, again, were developed primarily as well. The original thought came out of having activity monitoring primarily for reproductive management and, and still is, and, and, and plays a significant role there. And I think we're, we're starting to see more and more uptake, especially as the systems get better. We see more and more uptake on the repro side of things, some big farms are even able to achieve very similar reproductive numbers with activity systems ah, with shot programs. And so there's, there's some really pluses on that side, but then yeah, the idea of using that data for health management, that was kind of the next big thing in terms of using it for identifying cow level health events and deviations, picking up cows early we've, we've been part of, kind of contributing some of that data to that real and helping us.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:35:21):
Yeah. particularly in our transition cows, find those cows early replacing again, fresh cow monitoring programs on, on many farms. But then beyond that, I think what you kind of alluded to there too, we, we have the opportunity with some of this data in terms of herd level management. So right. Looking for deviations again, comparing numbers from the herd to herd, is quite difficult in a lot of cases, but within the herd, looking at deviations over time as it relates to say, feed change as relates to pen dynamic changes, stocking density, changes, temperature changes, right? Seasonal changes, all these kinds of things. That's probably the least explored, but probably potentially one of the most valuable uses of those systems. And, and again, just the things like you mentioned, rumination, that's one aspect, but a lot of the systems we that are out there now are, are providing more than that, too.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:36:25):
Right? So not just the chewing time of the cows, but time at the bunk, if we can get other measures of activity, even standing line behavior, location of cows, putting all that together we can complete or complete a much better picture of the behavior of that animal and, and use that data. And I think that's kind of the future from those that monitor standpoint and whether that's through wearable devices, whether that's computer vision type systems that can track animals and other management events in, in barn. I see a huge kind of opportunity there. The technology's there it's, it's just a matter of refinement and, and making it work on the farm.
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:37:14):
I think the potential with the artificial intelligence and our machine learning to use maybe multiple data points I could foresee a, you know, a rumination monitor being a real internal control or a, you know, a, a very effective at looking at data points for, you know, day by day management to ensure you know, protocols are being followed and whatnot.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:37:40):
Yeah. Some of the problems that we, that have right now though, is the different systems do things slightly differently. So, we can't, so if we're gonna make recommendations, we've, we've gotta be making recommendations within a brand. And unfortunately, we don't, we don't know much about that yet that this is we're generating so much raw data and, and we don't know how to use it yet. Yeah. So that'll come, that'll come. It's exciting. It's really exciting.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:38:13):
Yeah. And that's, we
Scott Sorrell (00:38:13):
Have rules of thumb, I'm just kind of curious, right? There are 24 hours a day. Do we have enough data to know, you know, what percent of the time ought to be spent feeding what percent ruminate, ruminating, what percent sleeping, all those things do we, do we have guardrails?
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:38:31):
I think we do with some of that, but, but it depends. Okay. So if we look, at the studies that have been done, okay. So if we look at the minor data, what are we talking about? 10, 12 hours of resting time. Okay. but if we start looking at the data coming from these automated systems, again, it's kind of brand specific as to how they determine some of these and, you know, if we were to, so I don't know enough of the difference between brands to be able to say, brand X brand Y brand Z that needs to happen.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:39:14):
Yeah. Yeah. And, and some of that's, but even witha in brand, RI?ht. You'll have a system that you have on one farm, and let's say it's monitoring rumination time. And it's telling us that the cows are ruminating for 500 minutes, a better per day. Right. The farm, next door might be doing almost thing identically. And even their diets are very similar and their cows are Mon ruminating for 550 minutes per day.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:39:40):
Really
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:39:42):
You'll see some of that. Right. And, again, you don't know what's driving those differences, right? So the technology is consistent in itself, but when you put it and, and that's a good thing, right? But then when you go to the farm, because of some, like, even these small differences in management or right. A diet that we might not even be able to detect, you'll see that kind of difference. And so often when we look at the data, we have to again, look at it within the herd and we have to be looking at the kind of, if we're looking at a cow level, looking at deviations from their herd mates again, within similar kind of days and mill parody, et cetera. And then if we're looking at a herd level, again, you're looking at over time, how things might change it, it can be very difficult to say, well, this, this herds rumination time is too low or something like that.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:40:35):
It, might not be right for that specific herd. And so that becomes some of the challenge there in terms of having kind of just general numbers that we can put so to speak. And, and as Tom mentioned too, right, they, the, one of the big challenges is the fact that we do have yeah. Various systems are out there and they all measure a little bit differently. They have different mathematical models or algorithms that are predicting the right, behavior. Again, whether that's from, a sensor that the cow is wearing or a video or, or whatever it might be, again, the competition's always good. But at the same time, it does, it does result, in variability, in terms of different systems that producers have available to them. And, and, and not as much probably consistency between systems as we, we would. So people like myself, researchers, consultants, and, advisors, who are looking at the data sometimes,
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:41:35):
And what's worse is all of those systems are proprietary. So we don't know what those algorithms are. And that's a challenge.
Scott Sorrell (00:41:45):
Tom, you're a technology guy. We've talked a little bit about technology here. If you're looking into the future, let's say 20 years, and you're able to design a facility to optimize you know, feeding time, rumination time, and then be able to measure that. What, what does that facility look like? What kind of, technology's gonna be employed
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:42:09):
Doing? Some of the things that we're working on are the use of AI and neural networking are going to grow exponentially. And we will get this center thing, these differences in companies, and like that figured out it, it's really, it's really exciting because, and, and it's starting to be driven pretty fast now with, with, and this is a global issue, labor availability of the amount of, of technology. Then, the level of technology adoption is growing quickly. We're starting to see where some groups are starting to, to be willing to communicate with other groups, to be able to start to do some of this. You know, I've been involved. I've, and they're one of our client's really large dairy and chili that is all robotic now. And some of the challenges that they've had, some of the opportunities that they've had with, with all of this data is massive, but what it's done to their labor efficiency is unbelievable. You know, when we start talking one person for 500 cows versus one person per hundred cows, we're talking real progress here, and we're gonna see more of that as labor challenges. Continue.
Scott Sorrell (00:43:29):
Yeah, go ahead Trevor.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:43:30):
Oh yeah. I know. I, I was gonna add, I think that's like we, we're already seeing that. Well, we are seeing that that'll continue to go. Just, I was having a conversation last night with someone too who sells automated feeding systems, and they're taking calls left-right. And center right now. So they sell robots for milking. And, and again, that market in Canada has exploded and continues to, grow, starting to see that in us very strong both small farms, as well as large farms moving towards that. And, and again, feeding off some of our research, going back to the common earlier about consistency and making sure what we're getting accuracy and precision and our feeding, some of that, or, or the lack thereof is because we have humans involved. And, and so the more we can automate that, then, that we take that human variability out and we see, we see better outcomes.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:44:28):
And, and, and well, from my perspective, I'd like to see that driving the reason why we do it, but at this current time, it's the labor availability. That's driving some of this forward. And we're seeing more and more interest in terms of automated mixing systems and, automated fee delivery systems. Companies are trying to scale those up for large farms currently as well. Again, a lot of them were developed more for small farm kinds of situations, but we're starting to see more interest, in large-scale operations. And in terms of that, and, and the beauty is that when we when technology is developed properly and, and implemented properly, you see both that benefit, right? In terms of the consistency of application. And so that trickles right down to the diet and, and, and the eating behavior then, and the behavior of the cows. But then also the labor side of that is, is huge in terms of what savings are there could be.
Scott Sorrell (00:45:32):
So how do, how do sorry, Tom, I was just gonna ask real quick. How do robotic feeders change feeding behaviors, right? We're no longer having a TMR, we're getting grain in, in the milking machine, we're getting a PMR instead of a TMR. Has there been a lot of research on that and how does that change the dynamics of room and health, all those things.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:45:57):
Yeah. I, again, I, I can talk about that. We, we just did a there's opportunities and challenges there, I guess there's, there are two things there, right? So as we move to robots for milking, it does change the way we feed cows to some degree. And so, we do have also opportunities within TMR systems to automate that too. So that's, that's a different subject altogether, but on the robot side, like we just did a symposium at the DSA meeting last week on kind of challenges and opportunities with robotic milking in, in terms of nutritional management. And one of the things that come out of that, or, or came clear is that, yeah, we, we do have opportunities, but we also have there are challenges there. And one of the challenges, and it kind of relates to this discussion.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:46:43):
And, I highlighted that in the presentation I gave that we're also dealing with the behavior of the cows, right? So we can say, we want this cow to visit that robot so many times per day. And, and in that robot, she's gonna get a feed that's maybe tailored to her needs in terms of amount and even composition, but then if the cow doesn't go, she doesn't get it. So we need to think about the other factors that influence the behavior of the cows, the behavior individuality of the cows, not every cow is the same, right? Just we know that. And so we're still scratching the surface in a lot of that as well in terms of trying to figure that out. And again, we have opportunities, but I think more work needs to be done. And the industry is gonna yeah. Benefit from that, as we move forward.
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:47:39):
do you see great potential for maybe increasing the longevity of cows or productive life? Just because of maybe more room stable room and pH levels, or just an approved production and or reproduction based on the ability to, just as tighter management where we can manage, you know, a much higher level.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:48:07):
I don't know, Tom, you wanna
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:48:13):
All right. Longevity, let, let me begin by this because there are people who will argue this with me till the cows come home. Huh. But if we go through the literature, the most profitable number of lactations for a cow is in her fourth, lactation second, most profitable, depending on depreciation levels is either the fifth or the third. So the question is, where do we fail? What are all the insults? And, and I think as this is where technology can help us, as, as we start looking at how we feed cows better, cool cows, better, whatever metric we want, anything we can do to improve longevity is going to improve the overall profitability of the business. And, that's what we should be thinking about instead of just purely cash flow. So, but that also comes with this caveat of, and, and this is where I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding when I do trainings and like that I don't anywhere. I have a slide that, that I use that I call cows the Uber athlete, because if you calculate the energy requirements or what, that cow is metabolizing per pound of body weight, and we compare that to any of us sitting here.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:49:50):
It is shocking. Okay. We are, we're about 25 K CALS per kilo of body weight. If we take a marathon runner while they're running, they're probably around 40. If we look at a professional soccer player, or football player, depending on where we are in the world, they put data loggers on those guys. And while they are out there on the field, they're metabolizing about 60 K CALS per kilo body of weight. And they are considered national heroes and are treated like, oh my God, we'll do anything for you. And then they take three weeks off.
Scott Sorrell (00:50:35):
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:50:35):
We take a cow, given 35, 40 kilos of milk, they're metabolizing a hundred K healths per kilo of body weight. So four times or kilo body weight, is what we do. And we expect them to do that every day. Okay. So, and in a full leather coat, it's how we house them, how we manage them, how we feed them, all of these things that we talk about with intake, animal welfare folks. We have to understand these things. There, isn't an athlete in the world that even comes close to what our cows do. Every day. We have to treat 'em that way. They're amazing animals, and we can improve longevity. We can improve profitability. We can do many, many things if we keep that in mind,
Scott Sorrell (00:51:43):
Trevor, maybe a two-pronged question here, but it's obvious, you know, during our discussions here, there's, there's, we're really at the beginning of some of this research, right? There's a lot yet to know about technology's changing, which is gonna change the direction of our research. As you look forward, as you look into your career what is it you're looking to pursue in terms of the next research or, or if you'd rather, you know, what is the research that you think needs to be done, whether you're gonna do it or not? Can you give us some insiginto ht that
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:52:15):
With, or without budget constraints, or budget constraints? Yeah. Start here
Scott Sorrell (00:52:19):
If money's not an issue. All
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:52:21):
Right.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:52:24):
Yeah, no, I, I think it comes back to keeping up actually. So that's some of our challenges right now is keeping up with some of these technological developments and making sure that yeah, we, we, we match our, our, the data to, to that in terms of some of the hesitation in terms of technology adoption comes with yeah. The unknown, right? In terms of what benefits it provides and, and how do we, how do we maximize its use of that? Right. So that we are doing these things with what Tom just mentioned, right? In terms of maximizing the comfort of the cows and, and management and welfare of the animals, so that we get the longevity of the animal and we, we get the most profitability, well, the technologies can do that, but we, we still don't know in a lot of cases, how best to do, to kind of achieve that through those technologies.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:53:27):
And so, and, and, and whether or not we can be more precise on an individual animal basis. I think that's kind of that's one of the areas that we've been working in more recently, right? Like, again, we've got these big herds of cows and, and, and we, we, for practical reasons, we treat them all the same, but they're not all the same, even, even in a group of cows that are the similar stage of lactation, similar parody, similar dry matter intake, you see variable responses from those animals and, and similar genetic question is, yeah, yeah. The genetics are streamlined like crazy, but we still see variable responses between animals. And so explaining some of that variability, whether that's the behavior of the animals, whether that's physiological variation between animals and, and, and then can we use technology? And I think that's where I get excited is can we use technology to meet the individual's needs?
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:54:26):
Right. like, and, and again, if you're milking 40 cows in a tie stall, right, you have a pretty intimate knowledge of all those cows and their individual needs. If you're milking a thousand cows or 10,000 cows and free stall can we use technology to do the same thing Right? And, and, and, and, and make sure that every individual's kind of needs are met, whether those are behavioral needs, whether those are right. Physiological needs and, and, and they might all be different. Right. And so that's, that's what makes dairy different than other production animals. It goes back to, right, like, even though the genetics are similar, it's not the same as say, like, you got a boiler barn with 10,000 or 20,000 birds, and you can expect identical results. You have two boiler bars next door to each other, you're gonna have identical results.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (00:55:23):
It goes back to what I was saying before, you got two dairy barns that are next door to each other, even with very similar genetics, same diets, same housing systems, and a little bit of management difference. You're gonna get end up with two different outcomes on those farms. And so some of our challenges trying to figure some of that out too, right? As we, yeah. In all things, we, we, we become more cognizant of efficiency, labor efficiency, nutrient efficiency, and environmental impacts of farms. Right. All these things, it comes back to at a herd level, but even more so down to that cow level, trying to maximize kind of the, yeah, I guess you could say the efficiency of that animal. Right. So I think that's, that's, that's what kind of excites me. And I think that's, those are the areas that we're gonna continue to push in towards.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:56:16):
Let, let me jump in there. I'm a, I'm a systems person. I look at a farm as a series, of boxes and try and figure out how they all work together. As part of my Ph.D., one of the things I did was collect the daily milk weights from a group of high cows on a very well managed at the time, 600 cow dairy for six months, and ran all that data through. I did variance components analysis. I gave the data to Bob ever. He ran it through the test day model, and here's the scary thing. One standard deviation on residual milk. So after we take into account the genetic environment, and all these things, one standard deviation was over four kilos of milk. Okay. And that's normal. And, and if we look at the day-to-day variability in the, in these cows as to where they're on milk, statistically, it's, it's low probability will happen, but it is statistically possible where every cow decided in this group, there were gonna be minus three standard deviations on milk. How would you like to be that nutritionist who got the phone call that the whole Flipp herd dropped 12 kilos today? What the hell did you do?
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:57:43):
And it's normal. It's how do we understand that? How do we manage that? That gets exciting. And that's where this technology, where all these technology things can come in to help us understand more of that's really from a tech junkie. It's a really exciting time to be in this industry.
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:58:04):
Well, you can become, you know, instead of averaging, you know, managing around an average, if you're just looking at daily milk intake, suddenly we're managing the variance and that's really where the quality comes in. Right?
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:58:15):
Absolutely.
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:58:16):
But at the same time, we need to talk
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:58:21):
I'm working on
Dr. Peter Morrow (00:58:23):
At the same time as, as our, you know, genetic ability increases and our, in our average daily averages go up, it naturally wants to increase the variance. So that's the real, the real fight. Right?
Dr. Tom Tylutki (00:58:37):
I don't know about that so much as I, I had a lot of discussions about this with Bob ever people that didn't know Bob Everett, who don't know who Bob Everett is, he was an animal breeder at Cornell. And he, so they, like the Northeast sire summaries that were published twice a year was calculated by Bob. And, he was an amazing statistician. And I would love to have several conversations with him now, unfortunately, he passed away. I forget how many years ago now from lung cancer and through some very challenging ideas out there. And there are these levels of variance. Here's where I was going with that as a great example, herd I've worked with since 9 I, I have a chart of daily milk production shipped per cow per day, since January 1st, 2000. And I can show you all the management changes that were made, during that time. And, as we improve management, as we address some of the underlying issues, the variance goes down, and I can clearly show that. So it's, we need to, we need to do variance component analysis on these farms, determine where the greatest variable aspect is, address that, and then move on to the next one this is this whole concept of continuous improvement. We can make huge progress.
Scott Sorrell (01:00:22):
we're getting close to the end of our time here. Wanna make sure that there are no big topics that we've left uncovered that we need need to talk about hitting most of the treetops. Did we, Trevor?
Dr. Tom Tylutki (01:00:40):
I think so. Yeah.
Scott Sorrell (01:00:42):
All right. Very well.
Dr. Tom Tylutki (01:00:43):
I'll say moon. Shine's great.
Scott Sorrell (01:00:45):
it's not gone yet, which yeah,
Dr. Tom Tylutki (01:00:47):
I was gonna say you haven't, you haven't finished that yet. I water. I, I, I diluted it down with, with, with seltzer water
Scott Sorrell (01:01:01):
So with that, we're gonna call the last call and would like to have each of you the three of you to kind of give us, you know, 1, 2, 3 key takeaways for the practicing nutritionist, veterinarian, or even dairy producer out there that they can take away from our conversation today and, and, and put it into practice. And Peter, I'm gonna start with you, dude.
Dr. Peter Morrow (01:01:25):
Well, thank you. I, I think if you took my key takeaway would be that day-to-day management makes a huge difference. Stocking density bunk space, cow comfort, lying times, and the ability to do that and give these cows what they need consistently is probably, the most difficult thing to achieve on dairies. And, we need to strive for it every day. And I think that that's where we can have the greatest impact on, on longevity, on production, on health. And I, I think our industry needs that because, you know, we're in an ever you know, shrinking profitability world in terms of less margin per cow, but we also need it from the standpoint of our consumer is demanding that our cows live longer and that they're housed better. And I think that it is a real, a pop, you know, opportunity for the industry to do better and, and have these cows get in more, many, many more cows in herds reach their fourth and fifth lactations and be healthy the entire time. So I guess I'm, I'm very optimistic about what the future holds for the dairy industry and its potential to achieve these you know, greater production at the same time with achieving greater longevity.
Scott Sorrell (01:02:46):
Yeah. Thank you for that. Peter. Tom, what final thoughts do you have for the audience?
Dr. Tom Tylutki (01:02:54):
If I could have everyone get somebody 8-cent cows because that allows us to do formulation better. I don't care what formulation system that we talk about. Body weight is the single most important input. And not only from a formulation standpoint but from a veterinary standpoint, how do we give drugs milligrams per kilo of body weight? If you don't know body weight, you're either gonna be undertreating or overtreating. Come on. This is either we build resistance or we waste money. Other than that, technology's exciting. There's, we're gonna see some cool things, regardless of all that people go watch your cows, cows don't lie, read your cows, they'll guide you down the right direction.
Scott Sorrell (01:03:45):
Well said Dr. Dre, final thoughts from you.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (01:03:50):
Yeah. And I'd concur with yeah, both the other guests here and their final thoughts. And just to add to Tom's there too, like the body weight and then actually tracking the dry matter intake right? Again, a lot of farms do it. A lot of farms don't do it. And the ones even that say they do it, are they tracking true dry matter intake by measuring refusals daily, correcting their dry matter intakes for these? Because again, we can hone in our diets a lot better if we have true estimates of dry matter intake. And again, we can model that if we have body weights and we can do a better job in terms of our models that way, but we can refine those models too. If we know what those cows are consuming. And I think we can work towards efficiency that way.
Dr. Trevor DeVries (01:04:37):
And I think, yeah, just overall my, my take home is always, and, and again, just the behavior of the cows the eating behavior specifically is probably just as important as the diet itself and, and that's gonna be influenced by all these kind of external things, including the diet itself, but management housing environment. And, and to pay attention to that, as Tom said, watch the cows, what they do. We have exciting technologies that are gonna help us do that now. And, and we're gonna see more of that coming into the industry. And I think that's, that's hugely exciting. And then, and then automation of management is playing a key role in terms of the kind of feeding into that as well. And I, again, that's, that's, for me, that's the future is, is trying to improve that and, and, and see more of that come into the industry. Cuz I think with more of that, we're gonna see continuous improvement and we're gonna see yeah. Some of those things, that was mentioned earlier in terms of yeah. Getting better health, and welfare longevity out of cows moving forward.
Scott Sorrell (01:05:41):
Yeah. Yeah. Well said, gentlemen, thank you for the lively discussion tonight and for sharing your insights into the future. We're excited to see how the cow and the way we feed her adapt to the industry and make her more efficient and positively impact the environment and our ability to meet the planet's growing food needs. As always a big thank you to our loyal listeners. We hope you learn something. We hope you had some fun. We hope to see you next time here. Real science exchange, where it's always a happy hour and you're always among friends.
Speaker 5 (01:06:13):
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