For spring calving cows, the month of July is one of great anticipation, and sometimes trepidation.
The spring is almost upon us, and I hope that by now you are well prepared with a cleaned out, sanitised and freshly bedded calf shed, your plan is in place for colostrum collection and feeding, and your farm crew are hopefully feeling refreshed and ready to attack the busy period ahead.
July is also a really important time because now is when you must begin to implement a lead feeding strategy that will hopefully set up the spring calving cows for a trouble-free, successful lactation.
If you have a great transition plan in place, you will have already considered the logistics of both feed procurement, storage and delivery.
Too often I see herds struggle at transition because they have either not secured quality low-potassium forages or implemented a lead feeding strategy. Feeding grain in the two to three weeks pre-calving will help to adapt the rumen for the lactating cow diet.
Using various strategies to reduce the risk of milk fever like anionic salts or calcium and phosphorous binders can significantly reduce the risk of both clinical milk fever and sub-clinical hypocalcaemia.
Sub-clinical hypocalcaemia is often an invisible syndrome that may occur even in herds with quite low incidence of clinical milk fever. It is a ‘gateway disease’ that will predispose cows to many other clinical problems that occur at or around calving, and it can have some longer-term implications on reproduction and lactation performance.
When I visit farms to set up their herd health protocols, I always discuss the importance of the transition period and why the incidence of certain diseases of transition are so important to monitor and identify.
Obviously, individual cows need to be detected with the specific diseases so that they can be treated early, according to the appropriate protocol, to ensure that they recover and enter the herd in a productive way.
The diseases of transition include milk fever, retained membranes, ‘dirty’ cows with metritis, ketosis and left displacement of the abomasum (LDA).
They provide us with a real time measure of the success (or otherwise) of the transition program because whenever the incidence of these important diseases is higher than targets, it indicates that there is a problem somewhere in the transition process.
Higher than normal incidence of retained membranes (sometimes called RFM) is a strong indicator of immune system compromise.
For many years as a young veterinarian, I would go out to ‘clean’ these cows, attempting to pull the membranes out and over the years I have seen many and varied techniques used by farmers in an attempt to coax retained membranes out.
I now know that the process of a cow expelling her afterbirth is a process that actively involves the immune system, and that failure to ‘clean’ is actually a failure of the immune system.
So an increase in the incidence of RFM to above about three to four per cent of births could indicate a serious issue with the herd’s resilience and immune response, which could in turn indicate a greater risk of other diseases occurring like mastitis.
I now recommend cutting the hanging membranes about one handspan below the vulva to prevent the afterbith from hanging in the dirt and manure, acting like a ‘wick’ and I provide the cow with a fresh cow drench with something like freshstart and propylene glycol to give her the supportive care that she needs.
I recommend that you monitor the cow for infection and treat her with antibiotics and anti-inflammatories only if she becomes unwell. I do NOT recommend trying to remove the membranes unless they can come away with a gentle twist after five days or so.
I think it is fair to say that any time you put your hands inside a cow’s reproductive tract you can be pretty certain that you will be introducing infection to the tract and potentially complicating the cow’s own host responses, so consider the need to do so.
Fresh cow and sick cow drenching is in my mind one of the greatest tools we have for providing supportive care to a fresh dairy cow who has developed a transition disease.
Most fresh cow drenches are made up with calcium propionate and propylene glycol along with various other ingredients designed to provide essential minerals, rumen modifiers and energy precursors.
I prefer using a McGrath flexible rumen pumping tube as it is very simple to introduce and with a tiny bit of instruction can be used to safely pump 25 to 30 litres of fluid into a sick fresh cow in just a couple of minutes.
I would encourage all farmers to consider getting one of these and having your local ProDairy vet give you a quick lesson in its safe use. It will completely revolutionise your sick cow treatment repertoire and also allow you to provide proactive care for cows at high risk of failing to transition well.
Dr Robert Bonanno is a ProDairy regional lead for Apiam Animal Health.