Inflammation is not limited to obvious clinical cases; it’s a normal biological process that takes place every day in a cow. We should recognize it as part of the cow’s constant physiologic balancing act, and one that becomes especially delicate during the transition period.

Here’s the catch. IOFC only tells us the economics of what’s going into the tank, not what’s going into the cow for good health and reproduction, and impacting the farm’s true profitability. It measures how well we are converting feed dollars into milk dollars. IOFC values today’s milk but ignores tomorrow’s pregnancies.

For the rest of us that don’t have that technology on hand, there are still plenty of ways to monitor early lactation performance to help us better understand the impact of the specific fatty acids we are feeding – specifically, body condition scoring from pre-fresh to fresh, monitoring NEFAs or BHBAs and tracking first butterfat trends in your herd management software to detect any significant changes in fat mobilization.

Let’s walk through the main fatty acids found in dairy diets and talk specifically about the signals they are sending beyond being utilized for energy. While they may seem complex, the stakes are high in understanding their roles as there is a rare function of the cow that is not impacted by fatty acids. 

If there’s one set of research that has prompted me to think differently about how we manage dry cows, it’s the work done by Dr. Geoffrey Dahl and team at the University of Florida on the effects of heat stress on dry cows.