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Every good calf manager strives to achieve optimal calf health and growth. It’s a fact of life, however, that some calves will get sick.
Therefore, managers also have plans for identifying and treating diseased calves. Ideally, if sick calves are identified promptly and treated appropriately, they will recover and go on to be healthy productive adults.
The death of an adult cow on a dairy is a bad event. For a cow to die on a dairy, something went terribly wrong for that individual animal. In addition, from a financial point of view, this is the worst way for a cow to be removed from production. There is no question: Every dairy producer would agree adult cow death losses should occur as infrequently as possible.
How well prepared are you for a health crisis on your farm or in the dairy industry at large? Are you doing things that help avert a crisis?
Do you incorporate processes in your management that minimize risks of introducing or spreading costly infectious diseases to your cows?
This fall I participated in a “dairy industry crisis drill” in Denver. The event was sponsored by DMI, NMPF, the U.S. Dairy Export Council, Milk PEP and IDFA.
Death rates of adult cows on U.S. dairies have risen steadily over the last couple of decades. When calculating death losses as a percent of rolling herd inventory on an annual basis, it is now typical for dairies to have 8 to 10 percent mortality.
If we look at literature from 30 to 40 years ago, it appears that 1 to 3 percent mortality losses were typical. Unfortunately, this feature of dairy animal performance has not been historically monitored as an important aspect of herd management, and there are no established benchmarks or targets.
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.
