Often, when I visit a farm to troubleshoot an incident of poor transition cow performance, I hear the comment, “Things had been going so well until now. What might have changed with my anionic supplement?”

Hypocalcemia impacts cows on all types of dairies. Historically, dairy producers have focused on clinical hypocalcemia, often called milk fever, because without treatment these cows don’t recover.

“My dad taught me that if we take care of the cows, they take care of us,” says Chris Heins, sixth-generation dairy farmer in Lafayette County, Missouri.

If you already do a good job with feeding management and monitoring pre-fresh cows, then implementing a moderate negative dietary cation-anion difference (DCAD) diet is just adding some minerals. Cows on a moderate DCAD diet are mildly metabolically acidified with a urine pH of 6 to 7, which gives you a little safety measure if DCAD drift occurs.

Ask any producer who consistently feeds close-up dry cows a negative-DCAD diet if it makes a difference for transition cows, and the answer will be yes. Producers routinely report that when cows are metabolically acidified, they have strong labor and calve quickly with fewer problems.

When close-up cows are fed a negative dietary cation-anion difference (DCAD) diet, it induces a metabolic acidosis, which acidifies the urine.