Setting Transition Cows Up for Success [Video] ▶️

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Thank you for joining us today for this month’s University of Wisconsin Division of Extension, Badger Dairy Insight, a monthly webinar series offered the third Tuesday of each month.

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Badger Dairy Insight provides the latest research, dairy based information to improve animal welfare, breeding and genetic selection, automation and modernization, nutritional decisions for producers, dairy workers and managers, and agriculture professionals.

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My name is Aerica Bjurstrom, Extension Regional Dairy educator for Brown, Door, and Kewaunee counties, and I’ll be our moderator today.

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We hope to make this an informal discussion about today’s topic, Setting transition cows up for success.

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This webinar.

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This is a webinar format, so please feel free to submit any questions or comments using the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen.

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Today’s webinar is being recorded, and we’ll send you a link to the recording within a week.

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We also hope you’ll share it with others you work with who may find this information useful.

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Today’s speaker is Doctor Kate Creutzinger, who is an Assistant professor in the Department of Animal and Veterinary Sciences at the University of Vermont.

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She received her PhD from The Ohio State University and Master’s from the University of Saskatchewan before starting her current position at the University of Vermont where she is an assistant professor of dairy cattle welfare at UW.

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Before she was an assistant professor at UW- River Falls.

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The research in Kate’s lab uses the interdisciplinary approach to improve the quality of life for dairy cattle and producers through studying animal behavior, social science, and epidemiology.

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The transition period is one of the most challenging times for dairy cows in which they experience several physiological and behavioral stressors.

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These challenges can be detrimental to the cow success on the dairy and their welfare.

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In this webinar, Dr.

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Creutzinger will discuss current transition cow management in the Midwest and opportunities to reduce stress during this period.

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And with that, I’d like to welcome Doctor Creutzinger.

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Thanks so much for the introduction, Aerica.

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I’m really pleased to be here.

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I was really pleased to receive this information.

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As it was mentioned, I was an assistant professor at UW-River Falls for three years before moving to the University of Vermont.

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So it’s really nice to be back and hopefully a little bit of what I shared today is helpful to you.

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A lot of it is work that we did while I was in Wisconsin and is based on Wisconsin farms.

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So as mentioned by Aerica just now, probably because I wrote it, the transition period is really a very critical period for cows and for the farm.

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For all of you who work on farms, which I’m guess, or with farms, which I’m guessing is most of you, we know that this is a really important period for setting up the cows next lactation.

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So what happens during this period

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Will influence her milk yield, reproductive performance and health.

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And it’s also really important from a cow welfare perspective as she’ll face several stressors during this time, including dry off, calving, calf removal, the onset of lactation, and several management changes such as dietary changes and also pen movements.

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And so typically we think about the transition period as being the three weeks before to three weeks after calving.

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That’s sort of the accepted definition.

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But I’m really zooming out on the transition period and thinking about it all the way from the time of dry off, so approximately 60 days prior to calving all the way to 30 days after calving or 30 days in milk.

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And the reason being that there are so many changes and stressful experiences during this time that I think we really need to consider that full 60 days prior to calving as a preparation.

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For her next lactation and also those 30 days after calving to really get her set up.

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And so one of the things that has always been striking to me about the transition period in this, it’s really looking at those first 30 days in milk.

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There was a study done in that was published in 2019 by Carvahalo and it was a study that was done in the US and what they found was that 75% of all diseases on a dairy occur within the first 30 days in milk and that about 40% of cows will it have at least one disease within the first 30 days in milk.

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And so really, this isn’t just impacting, right her immediately, It is impacting her immediately because it affects that milk production.

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It affects how she feels and potentially some vet bills depending on how severe that disease is.

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But it also effects her potential milk production for the remainder of her lactation.

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And it can also potentially delay how good she is at getting bred back, which can influence culling as well.

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And so really we need to think about this period. And that’s all the background that I have because I think it really sets the stage for why we need to think about this period.

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And really manage it closely.

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And my talk today is going to be very formulaic, but also very high level.

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When I was at UW-River Falls, we did a transition cow survey on dairy producers in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and we asked a whole lot of questions about how cows were managed.

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And so, what I’m going to do today is use the data that we collected from the survey and then ask the question of what’s going well and what can be improved, and really try to highlight those areas where I think we have room for optimization on dairy farms.

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So this study was funded by the Dairy Innovation Hub Faculty Research Fellowship.

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So very grateful to the Dairy Innovation Hub and also to all the taxpayers and dairy producers who have contributed to this fund.

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And the reason that we wanted to do this was to understand what was going on locally on the farms that were close to us.

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So we looked specifically at, and I don’t know how familiar you are with River Falls, but it’s way over here.

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So really close to Minnesota.

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I was right on the border when we did this study.

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And together, Wisconsin and Minnesota make up almost 20% of the dairy cows in the US So we really wanted to know what was going on here.

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And also because practices vary so much regionally that if we have a nationwide look at what’s going on, that’s really great and it’s really helpful information.

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The cows are managed very differently in California, Texas, in the Northeast, where I am now.

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So we really wanted to know what was going on locally in Wisconsin and Minnesota to support those local dairy producers.

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We sent out the survey to about 1300 dairy producers in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

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So if you received one of these surveys and filled it out, thank you so much for completing the survey.

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We really value your time and your willingness to complete the survey and hopefully it feels good to see a little bit of that data that we collected.

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Now, within that survey, we asked questions specifically about dairy cow disease rates.

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So we didn’t ask about cows just about or we didn’t ask about calves, just about cows.

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We also asked questions about pen management, daily routines.

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We asked about when calves are separated from the cow.

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And these were all practices again from 60 days before to 30 days after calving to get a really high level view of what’s going on for that dry cow management and fresh cow management.

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When we looked at the results, the first thing that we looked at to see was who was filling out these surveys to understand if they were representative of the industry or not.

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And we were really lucky.

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We had a 31% response rate, which is actually quite high.

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So again, if you’re one of those producers, thank you.

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But the farms are pretty much what we expected to see.

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They were representative of dairy farms in the Midwest and specifically Wisconsin.

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So most farms milked cows twice a day.

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It was a high use of conventional parlors and not automatic milking systems.

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The herd size ranged from 2 to 12,000 cows.

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The average number of lactating cows was 220 cows per farm.

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I think the median was 70.

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So we’re getting a little bit of skewness from those high, really large farms, primarily Holstein dairy cows and then conventional production, conventional being not organic, biodynamic or a different alternative practice.

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So really we think that this is representative of the larger dairy industry in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

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And the first thing that I’m going to talk about is the reported transition cow diseases.

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One of the questions that we asked was how many cows have the list of diseases or disorders that you see below?

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And that’s because again, going back to that background slide that I showed, a majority of diseases are happening during the transition period.

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And so we wanted to see what was going on.

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And we found that reported transition diseases and disorders were really pretty low, which was great.

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This is a figure of the herd prevalence ranging from zero to 10% of animals per farm within a year.

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And then the lower limits on the box is 25% interval.

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So this is representative of starting of the 25th percent of farms.

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The black line here is the average and then the top line is the 75th percentile for each of these disorders.

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And so I think when we look at this, this is really great.

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We were, we were really pleasantly surprised by this data.

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So we saw that dystocia or difficult calvings were quite low, around 7% average retained placenta with somewhere around 6 1/2%, metritis around 6%, ketosis around 6%, displaced abomasum

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So we’re less than 3% of cows per farm, mastitis within 30 days in milk was somewhere around 5 1/2 percent of cows per farm and then culls within 60 days in milk was somewhere around 4% of cows per farm.

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So this is really great and it’s a lot better than what we were seeing 10 to 15 years ago in the industry.

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And So what this tells me when we look at this data is that we’ve made a lot of progress on transition cow diseases and probably that’s a lot to do with our understanding of nutrition and management and also the some of those disease risk factors.

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But I think that there are some things that we can look at like mastitis or maybe dystocia and retained placenta and kind of understand where some of these higher values are coming from and what we can sort of zoom in on and where we can improve those disorders.

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And then something else that we asked producers about specifically was how they felt about their transition cow performance.

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And so what I thought was really interesting was that about 90% of the responses were positive about transition cow health.

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So on our Y axis here we have the percent of surveys and on the X axis here we have how satisfied are you with your transition cow health.

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And so looking just at this somewhat satisfied, satisfied and very satisfied ranking is about 90% of the responses.

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And so I think these producers who are satisfied and very satisfied are probably doing really well.

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Somewhat satisfied is like, I interpret that as it’s saying like, yeah, it’s, it’s pretty good.

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Maybe it could be a little bit better, but surprisingly there wasn’t a lot of very dissatisfied.

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And so this I think tells us a lot too, which is that maybe transition cow, this transition cow health and management is going pretty well.

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And so with this low rate of transition cow diseases and also the relatively high or relatively positive reports on transition cow health, I think that this tells us that within the dairy industry with our nutritionist, Technical Support, veterinarians, we really have come a long way in a short amount of time on understanding nutrition and transition cow diseases.

13:05
And so a lot of that transition, cow management is feeding the right diets, making sure we’re getting cows well prepared for calving in their next lactation.

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But there are maybe some other things that we can focus in on, like what the best management practices are for the cow and how we can reduce some of the stressors that are going on there.

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So going back to our survey and really trying to focus on management, one of the reasons being that I am not a nutritionist and I tell my students who I teach intro to Dairy Science to all the time.

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If you ask me to balance a ration, it would not be a good day.

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So we’re really going to focus on management.

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For this webinar, one of the questions that we asked was specifically about dry cow housing, and we asked if there was designated dry cow housing.

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We provided a bunch of options on the left hand side.

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On our Y axis is the percent of surveys, and then on our X axis here is the type of dry cow housing that was used on each farm.

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And if you look at the math and think that the math isn’t mathing and that this adds up to more than 100%, you’re right.

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That’s because we allowed a select all options, so producers could have selected several things on here.

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So we see about 25% of farms were using a far dry pen, Far dry being specifically for cows between 60 to 30 or 60 to 21 days prior to calving.

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About 40% were using close up pens and close up pens is somewhere less than 30 days before prior before calving, before expected calving.

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Combined single dry would be a pen where we have just or we have all dry cows so far dry and close up cows.

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Anyone who’s within 60 days before calving, some farms were using pasture, about 20% of farms were using pasture to house dry cows.

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And then there was this undefined other box.

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Within this, we looked at some of the factors that influenced dry cow housing and we found that the use of both far dry and close up pens increased as herd size increases.

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And I think that this makes a lot of sense in terms of being able to manage multiple additional pens on a farm that’s larger.

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If you have larger farms, then you might have more space, more additional infrastructure to house animals for their specific nutritional and metabolic needs, but it also might mean that there is greater capacity to feed additional diets.

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And those different diets are really what we think are driving those different pen management tactics, right.

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And then we also looked at the type of lactating housing type on the farms and how that impacted our dry cow housing.

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And so we asked what type of lactating cow housing was used on the farm.

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Again, it was a select all option.

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So select as many types of dry cow or lactating cow housing that are used on the farm.

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And so these we categorized because there were a lot of types.

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So loose housing refers to anything that’s loose.

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So this could be free stall, bedded pack, compost bedded pack. Pasture is going to be any outdoor space, so it could be pasture.

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It could also just be a dry lot.

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And then tethered combines both stanchion and tie-stall housing.

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Since we had both tangent stanchions and tie-stalls represented in the lactating housing, we felt like those were similar enough to combine.

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And then these groupings are the different types of lactating cow housings that were used on each farm.

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So if farms had cows who were housed loosely and outdoors, if they used a combination of tethered loose and pasture, I think you get it.

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And then when we’re looking at the likelihood of using dry cow housing types, we compared it to farms that had just loose housing.

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So this would have been farms that kept lactating cows in indoors only and either always on a compost bedded pack, bedded pack or in free stalls.

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And what we did was we looked at the likelihood of using designated alternative dry cow housing.

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That’s not the lactating cow housing.

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And so when we look at the far dry housing, so this would be cows who are 60 to 30 days before expected housing.

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What we found was that any farms that were using a tethered system, so a stanchion and tie-stall in addition to loose housing and pasture or stanchion and tie-stall with pasture or just a stanchion and tie-stall, those farms were less likely to have both dry cow housing and close up housing.

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And I think that this makes a lot of sense for a couple of reasons, one being that our dry cow housing is mainly used for feeding the appropriate diets to cows before they get to calving.

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And so if you’re already in a tie-stall or sanchion, then you don’t need to move cows around, right?

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You can just move the diets around.

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So that makes a lot of sense.

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But also that specific dry cow housing would require additional facilities in addition to those tie-stalls or sanchions when you already have a designated space for that cow.

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So that was what we found farms were doing for managing or housing their dry cows.

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And I think when I think about the dry period, it’s really setting the stage for the next lactation.

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And so rather than thinking just about diets, things that we can really spend our time focusing on are going to be lameness recovery, heat stress abatement, as well as thinking about how we’re transitioning cows from the lactating to the non lactating period.

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And all of these things really tie into the dry cow.

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The dry period being that preparation and also a recovery period from her previous lactation before going into her next lactation.

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And so I’m going to give a really high level overview on each of these bullet points.

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And the first thing that I want to talk about is lameness.

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And this is a study that I think was really great.

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It was done on, I think the analysis was done on about 100,000 cows and they looked at lameness records of cows when they first presented lameness and then how much that affected their milk yield loss.

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And so this figure looks at the time that each cow was diagnosed with lameness first.

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And so we have the transition period or early lactation and this should be 21.

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I apologize for that typo.

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Mid lactation or late lactation and then it’s milk production loss for lactation in kilograms.

20:07
So I think that’s about 2.2 if we want to get it to pounds.

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And so if we’re looking at this lameness during the transition period, so during those first 21 days of milk, what we see is a really large milk loss for lactation and.

20:24
With milk prices, you know, not being the best right now, this means a lot.

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And so if cows are having lameness in that transition period when they’re first coming into milk, what this tells us is that cows were probably lame during the dry period.

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And so rather than allowing cows to come into their next lactation lame, we should really try to find solutions for them to recover and hopefully improve some of that hoof health before they calve in.

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And some of this can be done and by providing a soft standing surface and increase opportunities for cows to lie down on a soft area.

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You’re very lucky to have Nigel Cook at UW Madison, and he’s dedicated a lot of his time to understanding lameness.

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And what we really understand lameness is that a lot of it has to do with the lying surface and the amount of time spent standing.

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So really try, or I meant, I said lying surface, I meant standing surface, really trying to provide a soft surface.

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So whether that’s a bedded pack, whether that’s rubber or being outside can really be beneficial to that recovery of lameness.

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And also making sure that she can lay down as much as she needs to.

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So really trying not to overcrowd those dry pens.

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And this kind of ties into heat stress.

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Cows who are hot spend more time standing, but it’s more than that.

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And so again, you’re super lucky to have Doctor Jimena Laporta at UW Madison.

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And this is some of the work that she’s done, looking at the impacts of cooling during the dry period.

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And it might just be because it’s hot as heck outside here right now.

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And our cows are really hot, and we’re all really hot because we don’t have air conditioning.

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But we know based on Doctor Laporta’s work that cows who are cooled during the dry period make more milk in their next lactation.

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So this is a figure from a paper that she published not too long ago, but it’s looking at milk yield in kilograms and then weeks relative to calving.

22:27
And so there are a few different treatments here.

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The the squares, the open squares here are cows who are cooled during the entire dry period.

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And then we have this, the two triangles are cows who are cooled for part of the dry period.

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And then the open circles are cows who weren’t cooled at all.

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And So what we can see here is that cows who were cooled during the dry period, the entire dry period, made considerably more milk in their subsequent lactation.

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So even though dry cows sometimes get the back burner, it’s really important that we think about them and what their needs are.

23:09
And not only that, but again, this is more of Doctor Laporta’s work.

23:14
We know that cows who are cooled late in lactation have daughters that make more milk in their lactations as well.

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So these figures are showing milk yield from daughters of cows who were heat stressed or cooled during their late lactation.

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And this is for the daughters first, second and third lactation.

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And we can see that those daughters are making more milk than they’re heat stressed offspring counterparts in their first lactation and their second lactation.

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And then it’s really showing up a considerable difference in their third lactation here.

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So not only is it just impacting the cows who are heat stressed and cooled, but also their daughters.

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And not only is it impacting their daughters, but it impacts their granddaughters as well.

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So if cows who have a heifer calf, those heifers have a heifer calf and they stay in the herd as a granddaughter, what we see is that it goes all the way back to whether their grandmother was cooled or not.

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It impacts their milk yield, again, milk yield and weeks in milk where those granddaughters are making more milk in their first lactation.

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So really it’s it’s an issue for the cows who are coming into their next lactation, but we see multi generational effects as well that could potentially be influencing how much money you’re making by not, you know, doing a whole lot of anything, but just by cooling those dry cows.

24:43
And then I also want to talk a bit about gradual dry off.

24:48
And it could be because this is just top of mind for me, but I think that it’s something we don’t talk about enough.

24:54
Maybe we had a collaborative grant.

24:58
Again, it was funded by the Dairy Innovation Hub.

25:01
the it was the graduate student fellowship and it was a collaboration between myself, Jennifer Van Os at UW Madison and then Ryan Pralle at UW Platteville.

25:13
And what we wanted to see was if gradually drying cows off in an automatic milking system impacted them.

25:20
And we enrolled 30 Holstein dairy cows two weeks before the dry off, so 74 plus or minus three days relative to calving.

25:28
And then we either maintained daily milking frequency, kept everything the same for cows who were abruptly dried off or if they were to be gradually dried off.

25:38
What we did was a tailored step down using the Lely, it was Lely’s.

25:43
We used Lely software to tailor the step down to cows based on their milkings per day at enrollment.

25:49
And then we dried everyone off at 60 days prior to calving.

25:56
And so when we look at this, what we see is that cows who are gradually dried off, which are in this blue line here, produced less milk on the day prior to dry off than cows who were abruptly dried off.

26:09
So they are in those red dots in that red line here.

26:13
They kept making about the same amount of milk when they were dried off.

26:16
They were making around 28 kilograms of milk per day.

26:20
And the cows who were abruptly dried off were making about 17 kilograms of milk per day at the point of dry off.

26:26
And we assessed a lot of things.

26:30
But the thing that I really want to look at today is milk leakage.

26:36
And the reason that I want to look specifically at the milk leakage outcome is because cows who are high producing are more likely to leak milk when they’re dried off and that milk leakage increases the risk of mastitis during 30 days in milk.

26:52
And so we looked at milk leakage during the pre dry off period.

26:58
And we found that no cows in either treatment leaked milk.

27:01
We sort of thought the cows who are gradually dried off might leak some milk because we were reducing their milking allowances, but they didn’t.

27:09
And then when we looked at that post dry off.

27:11
So 0,1,3, and 5 days after dry off, we looked at the number of cows who leaked milk and remember there were 15 cows in each treatment.

27:20
On day one after dry off, 10 out of 15 cows in the abrupt treatment leaked milk compared to only four in the gradual treatment group.

27:30
On day three, we had 9 cows who were leaking milk compared to one in the gradual dry off treatment group.

27:37
And then five days after dry off, we still had about half of the cows who were leaking milk compared to two in that gradual dry off group.

27:46
So when we think back to that first slide of mastitis and how much mastitis was happening around within the first 30 days and milk, I think it was about 7% of cows.

27:58
Although we weren’t able to look at mastitis calving back in on this study because we didn’t have enough animals.

28:06
It is something to consider that if we’re drying cows off at a really high milk yield or a high milk yield that they might be more likely to get mastitis because they’re leaking milk more post dry off.

28:20
OK.

28:21
We are going to transition back to our survey, bit of a bit of a jump, but we’re transitioning back to our survey and now we are looking at calving area.

28:32
So we’ve talked about that dry period and now we’re talking about calving pens.

28:36
And one of the questions that we asked was what type of designated calving area are you using for your cows?

28:44
And this was done, it could be a multiple group.

28:47
Again, the math we have more than 100% because producers could select multiple options and the percent of surveys, so we see about 40% of producers were using an individual calving area, 40% were using a group calving area, Group is 2 or more animals at a time, about 25%.

29:06
We’re having cows calves on pasture and then we had about 10% of producers who were calving in a tie stall.

29:14
And so these are nice loose options for the cows.

29:20
About 1/3 of the producers selected multiple options, so multiple calving types.

29:26
But I wanted to specifically look at this tie-stall calving area.

29:31
And So what we found was that it was 17% of farms who said they used either tie-stalls or stanchions for their lactating housing also calved in tie-stalls.

29:42
And so this is something that I want to talk about a little bit from the cows perspective as well as the calves perspective and think about calving location and calving management in terms of the calf and the cow benefits.

29:59
We also asked about the timing of movement into the calving pen prior to calving.

30:05
And so if we look at our pie chart here, we had about 9% of producers removing cows in about 21 days prior to calving or more than 21 days prior to calving.

30:17
We had about 8.6%.

30:19
So they’re moving cows into the calving pen between 15 to 21 days in calving.

30:24
We had 13% of producers who are moving cows into the calving pen 7 to 14 days prior to calving, 21% or 22% moving them in between one to six days prior to calving and then 20%, nineteen percent moving them in a few hours to few minutes.

30:42
And I think that this is probably appropriate, pretty representative of just in time calving.

30:47
So it could be when we’re noticing signs of Labor.

30:50
It could also be when the calf’s feet are already out and calving is imminent, which we would call just in time calving.

30:57
And so based on both of our management as well as our timing into the calving pens, I think when we are considering calving pen management and what we can maybe really focus on are thinking about cow comfort and prioritizing some of those natural calving behaviors, how we can shorten labor length.

31:18
And then also why shortening labor length is important, calf hygiene at birth as well as calving pen cleanliness.

31:26
And then thinking about the timing of movement into the calving pen from both the cow’s and the calves’ perspectives.

31:33
So I’m going to talk through a few studies that highlight some of these points.

31:39
So this is from a study that I did a few years ago where we looked at cow locomotion leading up to calving and we didn’t have pedometers.

31:49
And so I watched a lot of videos where we looked to see how much cows walked around the pen and we split it up into about 10 by 10 foot squares.

32:00
And then I counted every time a cow crossed one of those grid lines.

32:03
So this is really a proxy for walking around to the pen.

32:07
And then this is in the 24 hours leading up to calving.

32:10
And so we had four treatments for the study.

32:13
We had high stocking density versus low stocking density, which was about 100 square feet per cow versus 200 square feet per cow.

32:21
And then we provided them with a blind calving, which you’ll see a picture of in a minute or just an open pen.

32:29
And so when we look at the amount of activity, what we can see is that that walking around is increasing for all of the treatment groups.

32:38
So we know that cows have more activity as they’re leading up to calving, probably because they are uncomfortable and also because they’re looking for a desirable place to calve.

32:49
So we see that that walking increases the most for our cows in a high stocking density without a blind.

32:55
We think that this was probably the least desirable pen.

32:58
So the interpretation here being that cows will continue to walk around to try to find a place that they want to give birth, same thing.

33:08
We see a lot of increase in that walking behavior in a low stocking density blind where they had more room but potentially could get away from other cows in the pen.

33:18
So this is just to show that cows are really ramping up that activity as they approach calving.

33:26
And then this is looking at the transitions between standing and lying in the four hours prior to calving where we saw a real uptick in those transitionary behaviors.

33:36
So lying bout links for cows typically last between 40 to 90 minutes before they’ll get up and readjust and lay back down.

33:46
And So what we’re seeing here where we looked at the number of lying bouts per hour at around 4 hours before calving, they were having 1 to 1 1/2 lying bouts per hour.

33:56
This might be kind of consistent with those typical lying times where we’re looking at 40 to 60 minutes per lying bout.

34:04
But then by the time we get to this one hour before calving, we’re seeing that that increases for both high and low stocking density treatment groups to about two to 2 1/2 lying bouts per hour.

34:15
And the reason that I bring this up is because if we’re thinking about it specifically from a cow comfort perspective, I think the question is, depending on how she’s managed, whether that is in a group pen, an individual pen or a tie-stall, are we giving her the opportunity to perform those behaviors when she is uncomfortable having contractions and giving birth?

34:38
Does she have the opportunity to perform both this increased walking behavior, this increased activity, and also the ability to stand up and lie down comfortably and change between those postures as she’s calving?

34:54
And then the other thing that we know from a few years of research is that when cows are given the opportunity, they like to hide behind a calving blind and separate from other cows at calving.

35:08
These two pictures on the left were looking at cows who are housed individually at calving.

35:13
And the authors of these studies found that in one study, 80% of cows calved in a hidden area, the hidden area being behind this wall that separated them from a group calving pen or a group pen.

35:27
They calved on this side rather than this open side where they could see other cows.

35:31
In another study, they looked at the number of cows who calved inside this really large blind, so they could have calved out here or over here in this open area.

35:43
62% of cows calved inside this area rather than out.

35:49
And then in this study, which was the same study that I was just showing, we looked to see if cows preferred to give birth next to this.

35:57
It’s a road barrier.

35:58
So if you’ve seen it, you’ve probably seen it for construction.

36:01
But we look to see if cows calved right against it, like where this cow is laying or on any of the outside areas.

36:08
And we found that 37% of cows calved on either immediately on either side of this blind.

36:15
Oops.

36:16
Compared to 14% in the same type of pen.

36:20
So right in the center of the pen.

36:22
But they’re being no blind.

36:24
And what this tells us is that they didn’t just like being in the middle of the pen, but they liked calving next to the blind when they had the opportunity to do so.

36:33
And the reason that I keep saying the opportunity to do so is because it’s important that we have an adequate number of resources per animal.

36:41
And so this is pretty easy in an individual calving pen, you give them a blind, they can choose to use it or not use it.

36:47
But in that same study that was done where they looked at the individual use of this blind, what they found was that it dropped from 62% to 34% of cows calving in the blind when they were housed in pairs.

37:01
And then in another study where they looked at a group calving pen and the use of several blinds where they had a 2 to one ratio for cows to blinds, only 10% of cows calved inside a blind.

37:14
And so it’s really great if cows have access to the resources and they want to use it and they can use it.

37:21
But if we are overstocking or not giving cows adequate access to the resources, I think it can probably actually cause more stress if there’s competition for use or if they’re looking for something but unable to use it during calving.

37:37
And then something else when we think about calving and that progression of labor is that it’s actually pretty important.

37:45
The environment is pretty important.

37:47
And so this is looping back to that dystocia which I think was reported to be about 9% of cows in the survey.

37:55
So dystocia being a difficult calving and what we see is when we look at the environment.

38:02
So the environment being high stocking density, 100 square feet per cow, low stocking density, 200 square feet per cow.

38:10
And with a blind or without a blind.

38:12
So with a blind being these dashed lines and without a blind being the solid lines, what we see is that cows who were housed in a pen with a blind gave birth more quickly.

38:25
They gave birth more quickly by about 20 to 30 minutes.

38:31
And so this can be important from the cows perspective and a little bit on inflammation, which I’ll hit on later, but also thinking about having to pull calves and what your protocol is.

38:44
So if we are looking for calves and looking for difficult calvings and trying to make that decision about when it’s time to pull a calf or not.

38:52
It might be that if we could give her a better environment that’s more suitable for calving that she’ll give birth more quickly.

38:59
And then we need to intervene with fewer calvings, which I don’t think it’s anyone’s favorite job to pull calves.

39:05
And I think it certainly isn’t a cow’s favorite experience to have a calf pulled if it can be avoided.

39:10
So we can maybe modulate some of that by changing the environment.

39:16
And then the other thing to think about is looking at the usable pen space.

39:22
So in this study specifically, when we looked at wet and high traffic areas, so being next to the waterer and right next to this gate where cows could come and go, what we found was that no calvings occurred specifically in this area.

39:37
So cows avoided being in the way of other cows, but they also avoided laying in wet environments.

39:44
And so again, this is for any pen type, this is for individual group.

39:49
Tie-stall trying to provide a clean and dry space is going to be nice for the cows, especially as they are trying to select where to give birth or if they don’t have a choice, making sure that it’s a nice environment for her.

40:06
And not only is it important for cows, but it is important for calves and cow health as well.

40:14
And so this is a group of several studies who looked at pen cleanliness, how frequently pens were cleaned, and also either cow or calf health indicators.

40:26
And so from this study, they looked at if pens were cleaned always or sometimes between calving and what they found was that cleaning the pens after every calving reduced clinical mastitis.

40:41
This study looked at the removal of soiled beddings between calvings, either between every calving or infrequent cleaning.

40:50
And they found that calves were healthier, they have lower diarrhea and respiratory disease and pens that were always cleaned.

40:59
This group looked at individual versus group calving pens on the impact of calf health, but it was always, it was either cleaned after every calving and individual pens or not cleaned between every calving and group pens.

41:12
And what they found was that calf health, so diarrhea and respiratory disease were lower in individual pens because they were likely cleaned more frequently.

41:21
In this study looking at group versus individual pens, they looked at cleaning at the same intervals and found that the pen type didn’t influence calf health, but because they were cleaned more frequently in Group settings.

41:36
And then in the study where we were looking at the effect of stocking density, we found that cows were cleaner in the low stocking density pens.

41:45
And this potentially as we’re looking at udders, we know that are dirty udders is a risk factor for mastitis.

41:51
This could potentially influence mastitis within those 30 days and milk also for calves, as we’re thinking about their first exposure to life, their first environment where they don’t have colostrum yet and they have a naive immune system.

42:06
Making sure that they’re born into as clean and dry of an environment is going to be really important to their health outcomes during that pre weaning.

42:17
And then just taking a look at a couple more studies on calving pen management.

42:23
This is a study that looked at and I talked about labor length and group maternity pens.

42:30
And what this study found was they looked at the duration of labor depending on when cows were moved into an individual calving pen, either before signs of labor, during early stage 1, so before abdominal contractions start, or during late stage 1, so after contractions had already started.

42:49
And they found that their length of stage 2 labor, so the time spent in active contractions was highest when cows were already having contractions if they were moved during this time.

43:00
And it could have been because they spent the least amount of time lying down.

43:04
And so if we’re thinking about the familiarity of an environment, so when we’re moving cows, if we’re doing either just in time moving when we can see a contraction starting or moving her earlier, it’s something to consider that if it’s an unfamiliar environment or if she’s isolated, she might spend less time lying and trying to get acclimated to her environment rather than laying down and calving.

43:27
So something to consider when deciding when to move cows prior to labor is really where is she and is this a familiar environment and is she going to be trying to get acclimated to her surroundings?

43:42
And the reason that this is important and that I bring this up is because another study that has looked at haptoglobin found that cows who have longer labor have more inflammation during the first week after calving compared to cows who have shorter labor.

43:58
This is important.

43:59
We know that inflammation is really important to modulation of the immune system and could potentially have negative effects on reproduction.

44:08
It could potentially have negative effects for milk yield.

44:12
And so really trying to manage the length of labor can be important in terms of a cow’s success once she gets into her lactation.

44:26
All right, So we’ve talked about our calving pen.

44:28
I want to jump into fresh pen use.

44:31
And so we asked specifically, again, we’re back to our survey.

44:35
We asked specifically about if designated fresh areas were used.

44:40
And we found that 35% of producers indicated they use a designated fresh pen.

44:45
And we asked about length and I’m not going to or length of time spending the fresh pen.

44:49
And it was pretty variable, but it seems like it was really dependent on cow needs, which makes sense.

44:55
But then we also asked about cows being housed, fresh cows being housed with sick cows.

45:01
And I know that this is fairly common.

45:04
We did it at the not to call anybody out.

45:06
We did it at the UW River Falls Dairy.

45:10
We also do it at the University of Vermont Dairy.

45:13
So by no means am I calling anyone out, but seeing that about 49% of responses show that fresh cows are housed with sick cows is not really ideal.

45:23
And I think that we all know that depending on the type of disease, specifically if it’s an infectious disease like mastitis, contagious mastitis, we really don’t want that to be passed to fresh cows if we can avoid it.

45:40
We want to make sure the cows are being set up appropriately for that fresh period.

45:43
And so if we’re introducing some type of disease to them, that can have potentially really negative effects for the duration of their lactation.

45:51
So again, we’ve done it at the two farms where I’ve, you know, been at a university.

45:56
And so it does happen.

45:57
But if we can try to reduce it or if we can try to find an alternative, that’s really ideal.

46:05
The other thing that we asked about was fresh pen stocking density in the lying areas as well as in the feed bunk.

46:12
And I have lying area here because it could have been bedded pack, compost bedded pack or free stall.

46:19
And so those are also separate from the feed bunk stocking density.

46:23
And so again, on the Y axis here we have the percent of surveys and on the X axis here we have stocking density increments.

46:34
What was really great about this was that we found that 71% of producers had stocking density up to 100% in the lying areas and up to 70 and 76% of producers had stocking density up to 100% in the feed bunk area.

46:55
What’s really kind of interesting about this fresh pen stocking density is that there isn’t a whole lot of data on here to support that Under stocking fresh pens in both lying spaces and at the feed bunk has very clear benefits.

47:10
But I think anecdotally, you know from being on a lot of farms and maybe for a lot of you who have played with this, cows who are under stocked in that fresh period.

47:19
Really do better.

47:20
And the reason being that they’re not competing for access to feed when we really need them to ramp up their feed intake.

47:26
And also because they’re not competing for access to a lying space when we need them to really lay down and rest and recover and ramp up that milk yield as well.

47:34
And so I have a couple studies that’ll show that are sort of adjacent to this, but not exact.

47:41
The other thing that we looked at was the number of moves into new pens between 60 days before to 30 days after calving.

47:50
And we found that cows were moved into new pens between zero.

47:54
So zero being cows who stayed in tie-stalls throughout their entire dry and transition period all the way up to six moves.

48:03
And I think this isn’t a good or bad thing.

48:06
I think that it can be both because the more pen moves we have, potentially that means the more individualized care cows are getting.

48:16
But if we have a lot of moves and that’s a lot of adjustments for cows to make and potentially a lot of regrouping stress and needs for them to adapt.

48:26
And so when we’re thinking about this fresh cow management, I think two things to think about are really minimizing disruptions for cows, so allowing her to adjust to lactation and then also providing sufficient feeding and resting space, which it seems like most people are doing a really good job of.

48:45
This is a study that was done several years ago now that looked at regrouping cows and they looked at the amount of displacements at the feed bunk and then the time spent ruminating.

48:57
And so this is the day before, this is a baseline day of and day after, and then again baseline day of and the two days after regrouping.

49:07
And So what this study found was that there were more displacements at the Feedbunk on the day of and the day after regrouping.

49:15
So we’re seeing a little bit of social disruption, but also this group of cows who I have a legend on the next slide, but not this one.

49:25
This group of cows who has moved into a new pen, specifically who are in the black lines compared to the cows who stayed in the pen but had new cows entered into their pens in the white line or in the white diamonds.

49:37
Is that rumination drops for these cows compared to baseline on the day of and the day after regrouping and then starts to come back close to baseline 2 days after regrouping.

49:49
And this is that same study.

49:51
And what they found was that looking compared to baseline for the cows who are removed, dry matter intake drops on day zero.

49:58
So the day of regrouping and the day after regrouping.

50:02
And then for cows who remained in the pen, we’re seeing that their feed intake kind of starts to go down, which is not really not what we’re looking for, for dry cows or for fresh cows.

50:14
This day of regrouping dry matter intake dropped by 10% for cows who are moved into a new pen.

50:22
So really not what we want for those fresh cows.

50:24
We want them to have ample opportunity to eat as much food as they want to eat and ideally not being competing.

50:32
So those displacements competing for access to the feed bunk, this was another study that looked at overstocking at the feedbunk for transition cows.

50:42
So specifically in the week prior to calving and the two weeks after calving and they either had two cows per feedbunk in this Gray line or one cow or 100% stocking density.

50:54
So a one to one ratio.

50:56
And what we can see here is that during the week before calving and the week after calving that cows who were overstocked at the feed bunk had less dry matter intake than cows at that 100% stocking density.

51:08
So we’re seeing negative effects on dry matter intake for overstocking that feed bunk.

51:15
And not only that, but overstocking the feed bunk also increased idle standing.

51:21
So in these white bars, we have 100% stocking density at the feed bunk, but not in lying areas.

51:27
Lying areas we’re stocked at 100% or at 200% stocking density.

51:32
So this is just again at the feed bunk.

51:35
What we see is that these cows were spending more time just standing around in the alley waiting to get access to feed in the week prior to and the week after calving.

51:46
So not only do we see increases in dry matter intake, but that increase in idle standing time, it means that cows likely aren’t ruminating, they aren’t laying down recovering.

51:58
And not only this, but it can potentially negatively affect that lameness as well.

52:02
So bringing it all the way back to the start, we want to make sure that fresh cows, dry cows and fresh cows have ample opportunity to eat and to lay down and be comfortable, hopefully recovering from calving and also ramping up that milk yield as they are coming into their lactation.

52:19
So that was a lot of information all at once, but I think that the major takeaways are really thinking about treating the dry period as preparation for calving, preparation for the next lactation, and thinking about how we can allow cows opportunities to recover from her previous before her next lactation.

52:41
Allowing cows the opportunity to hide or have comfortable calving environment allows them to perform some of those motivated calving behaviors.

52:50
It could potentially also shorten calving, which might reduce dystocia, assisted calvings as well as that inflammation after calving.

53:00
And then not only that, but the fresh period.

53:03
Is stressful enough for cows with the onset of lactation and all of the changes in management.

53:07
And so if we can reduce some of that stocking density, provide them a comfortable space to lay down as well as ample opportunity to eat, we need to try to relieve some of that pressure where we can because things like physiological stress we really can’t reduce.

53:22
So just a couple of acknowledgments.

53:24
One, a huge thank you to the participating dairy producers who filled out the survey and some who worked on this research.

53:31
We are absolutely indebted and very grateful for you also to the funders of this research.

53:38
So Dairy Innovation Hub funded a couple of the studies that I mentioned here, as well as USDA.

53:43
NIFA funded some of the calving behavior research that I talked about.

53:48
Shawna Sigl was a master’s student who ran the survey, and Elizabeth McGuire was a master’s student who ran the gradual dry off study that I talked about.

53:58
And then, of course, a huge shout out to our collaborators.

54:01
So Jennifer Van OS and Shaheer Burney were collaborators on the survey, and then Jennifer Van OS, Ryan Pralle Jimena Laporta, and Joao Dorea were collaborators on the gradual dry off project that I talked about.

54:15
And then Katie, Heather, Pete and Greg, we’re all collaborators on the calving behavior research.

54:21
So it’s a team effort and I’m very grateful to them.

54:26
So I think we have about 6 minutes left.

54:30
Thanks for listening.

54:31
This is my contact information if you’d like to reach out to me.

54:34
And otherwise, I would be happy to take any questions.

54:41
All right, thanks, Kate.

54:42
We don’t have any questions at the moment, but I do have a couple.

54:47
Just kind of thinking while you were talking here, how soon after calving can you tell if this transition program is working or not working?

54:58
I guess, I guess you can probably tell pretty quickly when it’s not working.

55:02
How do you know when it’s actually kind of clicking for you?

55:07
Yeah, that’s a great question.

55:08
I think for multiparous cows, one of the things that we can do is look at that cow’s lactation data from previous lactations to see if she’s sort of taking off on the similar trajectory.

55:22
And the same thing for primiparous cows.

55:24
I think we can look at the data from other primiparous cows in the herd and see if she’s taking off the way her counterparts have as well.

55:32
And then of course, transition cow diseases.

55:35
If we have some transition cow diseases, then that’s probably a sign that we have some challenges that we can address.

55:42
All right.

55:44
And, and what is the most common misconception you think you hear about managing transition cows?

55:53
The most common misconception, I think that not necessarily a misconception, but not considering how important the dry period is where we really can influence her subsequent lactation and then obviously that’s a trickle down effect where it’ll affect lactations after that.

56:12
So really trying to think about making that as comfortable and low stress of a time as possible to allow her the opportunity to really recoup.

56:22
I think we don’t spend maybe as much time thinking about and spend a little bit more time thinking about diets, which are hugely important.

56:29
But we have a lot of good information and I think that we can potentially optimize that even more.

56:37
OK, We have a question from an attendee.

56:39
When do you recommend putting cows in a dry pen for optimal transition?

56:45
So in the dry pen, I think whenever they’re dried off.

56:50
So if we want to manage them as well as possible right after dry off, I would suggest moving them into the transition pen, waiting much longer than that.

57:00
If they continue to eat a lactating cow diet, then we can see them potentially put on maybe a little bit too much weight, which is not beneficial to them in the long run.

57:10
OK, Well, I I think that might wrap us up here, unless anybody else has any other questions.

57:22
I don’t see any.

57:24
Doctor Creutzinger’s information is available here.

57:28
If anybody would like to contact her, I’m sure she’s happy to answer any questions post webinar here today.

57:37
So with that, thank you very, very much for this very informational session today.

57:44
It’s always really very interesting to learn about where cows prefer to calve and where they don’t like to calve.

57:53
And I hope you enjoyed today’s webinar focusing on setting transition cows up for success.

57:57
And please join us next month, September 15th, where our topic will be Real Farm Experiences with Technology and Dairy Production, which will feature a panel of farmers discussing their experiences with on farm technology.

58:10
Register now to secure your spot at go.wisc.edu/BDI and for additional information or unbiased university based dairy resources, please visit extensiondairyprogram@dairy.extension.wisc.edu or find us on Facebook at Wisconsin Extension Agriculture.

58:33
So with that, have a great afternoon and thanks for joining us today.