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Mortality rates in the dairy industry are much higher than those in the cow/calf or feedlot industries. Death losses have not been studied very intensively in the dairy industry. Estimates of these death losses are quite variable.
Unless they are focused on monitoring cow deaths, dairy producers may underestimate the amount of adult cow death loss on their operations.
Texas A&M's Ralph Bruno explained the causes and symptoms of the metabolic disease ketosis in this 2011 article. to jump to the article.
Because this Herd Health article has been so popular, we asked Bruno a follow-up question:
Q: What is the most often overlooked way of preventing or reducing the risk of ketosis?
Ketosis is a metabolic disease very often observed in high producing herds. It is associated with poor management of the transition period resulting in decreased dry matter intake and increased BCS loss (fat mobilization) therefore, increasing blood circulating levels of ketone bodies.
There is much in the news today about unrest and revolution in the world. The “common man” rising up and asking: “Why do we live like this, when we have seen how others live?” The connectivity of our communication systems brings every corner of the world to our computer screens, our BlackBerrys, and our social media.
Even though the number of antibiotic residue violations in meat is very small, market dairy animals represent the bulk of violations among all classes of cattle.
Responsible therapeutic use of antibiotics in dairy replacement heifers is a top priority for avoiding drug residues in market cattle and ensuring consumer confidence in food safety.
Americans may have noticed a new social media trend this past year: more Facebook posts from the farm, more tweets from the tractor and more blogs from the back forty.
The timing of this social media "stampede" couldn’t be better, says Jeff Fowle, president of the AgChat Foundation. Celebrating its one-year anniversary today, the AgChat Foundation is a 100-percent volunteer organization formed to empower farmers and ranchers to effectively tell their stories using social media.
At their recent meeting, the Holstein Association USA board of directors voted to declare Brachyspina as an undesirable recessive trait in the Holstein breed, and approved the recording of testing results on Holstein Association USA pedigrees and other performance products. Brachyspina is expressed when an animal is homozygous for the undesirable allele, meaning that two carrier animals have been mated. Holsteins that are known carriers will be labeled with the code BY, and tested non-carriers will be labeled TY.
Merial’s Best in Class Dairy website, www.BestInClassDairies.com, features a training module, which is part of a new comprehensive educational initiative. The new website and training module provide dairies access to valuable information and educational tools to help ensure healthy cows, the highest standard of milk and profitable operations. The web-based audiovisual training module, which addresses pre- and post-milking procedures, is the first in a series of training modules that will be offered to dairy operation workers through this site.
A new Genex Cooperative, Inc. program can determine the best mating option for a cow or heifer based on the animal’s genomic PTAs (GPTAs) rather than phenotypic scores, performance, parent averages or pedigree indexes. This genomic mating program, G-MAP, is the newest technology available in the genomic revolution.
Dairy herdspersons, cow-care specialists and herd owners hungry for information and skills that can help them address dairy cow lameness are encouraged to attend one of two hoof care training workshops offered by the Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin.
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