Transcription
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At Balchem Animal Nutrition and Health, we strive every day to deliver results you can see in your animal's productivity and your bottom line. From a smooth transition into the milking string for your fresh cows to a happy welcome home from your furry friend, from a strong start in your poultry flock to consistent weight gains for your finishing hogs, we expect to earn your business and your trust with our people, our products, and our science.
Our people have an intense passion for your animals and your success. You can count on us for honest, candid advice and practical solutions for your toughest challenges. As the global leader in choline production, chelation, and encapsulation technology, we take our obligation to you and to the environment seriously. Our products are backed by the most extensive and thorough research portfolio, while our business is committed to advancing environmental sustainability and animal welfare.
In the end, it all comes down to results. Balchem delivers real results you can count on—results that exceed your expectations and results that bring true value to your bottom line. Leading the charge to meet the nutritional needs of ruminants, monogastrics, and companion animals, Balchem offers a growing portfolio of nutritional products and a dedication to innovation and industry sustainability. Balchem is here to solve today and shape tomorrow.
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Every expectant mother knows that what she eats impacts her baby, and now research shows that this is also true for our cows. Maternal consumption of Reassure during late gestation had a positive effect on the in utero calf, setting her up for better health and potentially even higher milk production once she joins the milking string. Learn more at BalchemANH.com. Launch and launch your herd for life.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Real Science Lecture Series. My name is Scott Sorel, Director of Global Marketing for Balchem. We're so excited to start 2022 with a bang, and today we get to take a look at the foundation of the herd—your heifers—in today's Real Science webinar titled "Why Heifer Maturity Matters."
Dr. Gavin Staley will take us through the factors that affect heifer productivity in the first lactation and why monitoring growth is so important. Dr. Staley is a graduate of the University of Pretoria in South Africa, where he spent five years as a senior faculty lecturer in reproduction, during which time he completed a specialist degree in the discipline.
He then took his talents to the field, where he spent five years in the largest private dairy practice in South Africa. Then, in 1998, he and his family moved to the United States, where he continued his growth as a large animal practitioner and found the time to earn the advanced status as a certified diplomat in the American College of Theriogenologists in 2001. Shortly after, he transitioned to industry as a technical service specialist in California with Monsanto, and then in 2007, he joined Pfizer Animal Health as a senior dairy production specialist. In 2012, he joined Diamond V as a technical dairy technical service specialist.
Dr. Staley, the floor is now yours.
Super! Can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear. Good morning to everyone. I know some of you are from different parts of the world. It's still dark here in California. I'm happy to be on this program today, and I want to thank Scott for the opportunity to speak. I've been very impressed with the series that you put together and learned a great deal, so I regard it as a privilege to be on the same program here.
So, I'm just going to move this out of the way. You see me okay still? I've moved screens.
Yes, everything's just fine still.
Okay, lovely. All right, the title of my presentation this morning is "Why Heifer Maturity Matters." I've subtitled it "The Peter Pan Problem," alluding, of course, to the children's character who never grows up, and that's obviously for a reason as we go through.
Now, heifer maturity—what exactly is it? I'm going to use the following definition, which you can see coming up right now. A maturity definition that I'm using is the phenotypic characteristics, the frame and body weight that allow full expression of genetic potential—for example, milk production—over the animal's lifetime.
Now, in recent years, there's been a tendency, a trend, to breed heifers earlier, and there are some very good reasons for this—some economic incentives to do this. We begin with, of course, milk production. So, animals that calve earlier produce milk earlier, and that, of course, is value.
Secondly, we can reduce heifer inventory, and this is becoming increasingly important with environmental impacts and, of course, just the cost of feed. Then thirdly, as I mentioned, we can lower feed costs. So, there are some very, very good reasons to breed heifers earlier, but the question really is: what is the impact of this management decision?
Now, if we look at this very nice table put together by Dr. Batch Helder, you can see quite nicely that the heifers needed to maintain herd size at different culling rates and age at freshening changed quite a bit. So, age at first calving— we can see here, I'm going to use my little laser pointer—we can see that age at first calving is 24, 23, 22 months of age with different culling rates: three different culling rates—40, 35, and 30—and then the impact on the total number of heifers needed for 500 cows.
So, you can see quite nicely at the 40% culling rate at 24 months age at first calving, 88 down to 77, and then at the 30% culling rate, 67 to 58. So, very clearly, there's evidence that there are fewer mouths to feed.
Now, we've known for a long time what these heifer growth guidelines are and should be. Penn State Extension put this out a long time ago. We've got the percent of mature size on the y-axis and age in months on the x. The green line there is the body weight up to the point of calving, and the blue line is the height. You can see that at the point of calving, it's roughly 95%, and straight after calving, 85%. So, this is a well-established recommendation: 85% mature body weight immediately post-calving, and then the close-up springers should be about 95% of your body weight.
Now, the two factors that play a role here—this paper from Curran back in 2013, looking at 70-odd thousand animals, their records showed milk production in pounds on the y-axis and then age at first calving. We can see very nicely this trend of increasing milk production with age.
So, age at calving impacts maturity. Well, it's not just age; it's weight as well, right? So, this is a paper put out by Mike Von Amberg back in '98, and with, I think, 270-odd animals, he looked at the milk production calculation—residual milk is what he called it—and then on the x-axis, we have these four different weights. You can see very clearly that at this point, 1200 to 1320, it was the maximum milk.
So, we have age, and we have weight. Now, if you have an amount and you have a time factor, you can calculate a rate, and that rate is average daily gain. So, let's use these animals right here: body weight of 1200 to 1300, assuming 85% mature body weight. That would mean the close-up springer body weight should be 1340 to 1450, 95%, and that would also presuppose a mature body weight of 14 to 15, 30-odd.
So, let's do a few numbers. So, there we are—there's our 15, 20 mature body weight. The close-up springer would be 1444. We just use a single number, not an interval, assuming a birth weight of 85 pounds. This means we need 13, 59, 13, 60 pounds of gain.
So, if we bring these animals in to calve at 640 days, i.e., 21 months, we need a 2-pound, 2.05 ADG. Similarly, for 22 months, 670 days, 1.98, 19181, and 175 for these different days at calving: 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 months.
But what's happening out in the field? Well, these are the numbers that we're getting: 1.8 and 175s from birth to calving. So, with that in mind, looking at an average herd out there—and there are lots of them with a similar pattern—this is a histogram of the number of animals that calved at different time frames.
So, you can see in this herd, most of them calved at 21 months, 22, and so forth. Here is 24 and 25 right here. So, the real question of the day is the following: should we grow Holstein heifers to achieve maturity at 24 months and manage them to calve at 21 months? Remember, the ADGs that are currently out there on many dairies, if not most of the dairies, is 1.8 and 1.7, which is a 24-month mature body weight situation.
So, that's the question: what happens if we, in fact, manage them differently to their maturity?
So, this question came home to me personally back in January, about this time of the year, 2016. I was sitting in this little office right here on Derriere, I'm calling it here in California, and we were having a management meeting. The nutritionist said, "You know what? I don't think Puzzie, like this, was the surge, was supplementing with Posilac," which obviously has gone away now, but back then, supplementing with Posilac, he said, "I don't think it's working because this herd here, Dairy B, which he also fed, was getting the same amount of milk, and they weren't supplementing."
So, we had a roundabout on that, you know, days of milk, repro demographics, and it really became a big question: why this difference of eight to ten pounds between these two dairies? Now, the herd that was supplementing with BST was actually a very nice modern herd. Free stalls are beautiful, lots of water, reasonable transition. Just this herd was 92 pounds, doing pretty well.
Here it is: lactation group one, two, and three, and you can see the positive bump over here. The blue line goes up in the green and so forth—92 pounds, right? 92-pound third 3X positive. The other dairy was a much older dairy, all California-style free stalls, was in the lee side of a hill, so it was actually quite a hot dairy and very mediocre transition facilities.
And here were the lactation curves for Dairy B. So, there's the 92 pounds, lactation one, two, and three. So, I thought to myself, "Well, let me just—cows don't tell lies, right? Let's just compare these two herds and see where the difference is."
So, Derriere, the one that was using Posilac, 85 pounds at the peak of lactation one. Dairy B, 92 pounds, and then lactation two and lactation group three. So, the difference between lactation one A and B was seven pounds—there's a big difference—and then smaller, four for Dairy B.
So, it occurred to me there's got to be something different about these lactation weights. So, I went back and looked at the breeding of the virgin heifers. So, here we have each dot for those of you not familiar with Dairy Comp is a breeding—first breeding of the virgin heifers, 400 days is when they started. Blue line, very clear, nice compliance.
There was a situation at Dairy B, and most of the animals were calving in at 22 months—very different at Derriere, the herd using Posilac. There's the 400-day line, and the animals that contributed to that lactation curve that I showed you with these breakdowns at 340 days, 350, right down here.
This group, you'll notice too what I call zebra stripes—zebra stripes. These lines here, that was synchronized breeding because it was very difficult to get these animals to get reasonable results. It seemed these young breeding, so actually there was synchronized breeding, and these animals were coming in at 20 months, 21 months, and then summer 22, so about six weeks earlier.
So, I looked at this and thought, "Man, if this is true that a six-week delay in breeding heifers is equivalent to Posilac supplementation of a whole herd, this is a big deal," knowing the cost of Posilac and knowing that it's an eight to ten-pound response according to the label back then.
So, what followed is I have a lot of records—hundreds of herds in my data bank there—and so I went and started looking and said, "Is this true?" So, this led to a number of observations—four of them.
The first observation that came out was week 10 lactation when milk approximates the herd average milk. You remember that one herd who would be 92 pounds? The lactation ones are right on that. So, I thought, "I wonder if this was true."
So, I looked at that, and sure enough, it is. So, if you do econ backslash ID and look at the whole year test their milk for the herd, and then you compare it to this week 10 milk, you'll find that it's, if not dead on, it's one or two pounds out.
So, that seems to be a very strong relationship, and as I said, I put a lot of cows into this—174 herds, actually. It took quite a while—half a million cows. I then went a step further and I said, "Okay, let me take out all the BST herds." So, that left me with 149 herds, 400,000 cows, and then I looked at the relationship between lactation one week 10 milk on the x and average annual milk on the y, and the R squared was 0.91—a very strong relationship—and that slope was one.
In other words, for every one pound that we went up with lactation one milk, the average annual milk went up. If you substitute in 80 pounds into the equation, it would predict average annual herd milk of 80.8. This was based—in case some of you are thinking or wondering—on 38 L1 on average.
Dr. Todd Berkley, a colleague of mine, has worked on this as well, and what he did in this graph here is he looked at the same animals—the lactation one, two, and three M305, same cows versus their lactation one M305—showed a very nice strong correlation, and that slope is three, which fits with what I just said. For every one pound that the L1s go up, the rest of the herd goes up—in this case, three lactations, three pounds—and it's borne out too in the field.
So, this was the herd I was asked to help evaluate with Dr. David Magnoni from Cal Poly, Colorado herd, and here are the lactation curves—while the milk production by age at freshness for lactation one, two, and three, same cows.
So, there we are. You can see that quite nicely based on our definition of maturity. That is where the mature animal or the mature animals calve at 24 months. You can see the highest milk production and pales off after that.
But what was going on on this dairy? Well, this is what was going on. The animals were coming in at 19, 20, 21. So, 19, 20, 21 is down here, and the complaint of the dairyman was, "I can't get milk out of these cows."
Well, it's not surprising, really, is it? The Peter Pan problem, right? They just never grew up.
Now, what are the implications of this observation? Well, it's really kind of nice because you can predict the average annual milk for the entire herd from one single value and vice versa. So, the lactation one milk production really sets the ceiling for the whole herd. You cannot outperform, outrun whatever the lactation one animals set the herd up at.
So, a herd of 75-pound peaks will not be capable of reaching an 85-pound herd average. You can't feed them to get there; you can't tell them to get there without being incredibly radical. You cannot, under normal rational management, overcome what the heifers have set up.
The second observation is that the difference in milk between lactation one and two animals at five weeks is 30 pounds for Holsteins—different for Jerseys; we'll stick to Holsteins right now—and this isn't a stable herd. When I say stable herd, herds that tended to have the same heifer-raising system didn't make any major changes to that. Obviously, the changes from day to day, year to year, but these were as close to stable as you could find.
In this particular herd, 85 pounds L1, 115 L2—30 pounds. And I've tested this over many herds, and it's just so interesting—13.6 kgs, 30 pounds around the world, doesn't matter, 2X, 3X, doesn't matter; it's 30 pounds.
You might ask, "Well, why five weeks?" You were talking about 10 weeks just now at the peak, or less, and now you're saying five weeks. Well, I chose five weeks to make sure that I was on the right side of the peak for all the lactation groups. So, I couldn't go 10 weeks because I would have been post-peak, so I just chose that. It just happened to be that relationship happened to be there.
Now, it's important because it shows that these lactation groups are very tightly linked to L1. They're kind of in sync. So, as I said, between one and two, it's 30 pounds, and a little bit more flexibility, it seemed to me, between two and three, and I think that's where culling and rearing and the rest of it starts playing a role—disease too, possibly.
So, really, the one and two is what I focus on because that's also where you see the impact of making a change to the heifers. As I said, this difference appears to be independent of the level of production of milking frequency, unless, of course, you milk different parities, different frequencies. They all need to be not the same way, and this fixed relationship is really very useful because you can also use percentages.
But percentages aren't very helpful if you make changes to one group, lactation one, for example, and you move from like an 80 to an 85. Well, the next year, those L1 become L2, so your denominator changes, and now you go down, and the next you would go down again. So, unless you're constantly making changes, percentages will be misleading, but 30 pounds is useful; you can predict the future.
So, the idea behind this is a rising tide lifts all boats. Push the L1s up, L2s, L3s go up in due course.
The third observation—and this has been addressed by quite a few researchers over the years—age at freshening impacts lactation one milk production. So, here is about a 94-pound 3X herd, and I could have picked any number of herds—the same pattern. In fact, if any of you are sitting at your computers right now, you can go and pull up a Dairy Comp, and you'll see the same thing on many, many herds.
So, this is lactation one. The dark green is the animals that calved at 23 months; the purple is animals at 24; and the lime green is 25 months. So, you can see a nice temporal change, and it's about three to four pounds here and about two pounds there.
Now, you might ask, "Could we perhaps have created this pattern through culling? Is this just biological, or did we perhaps do something different?" Well, you'll notice that it spreads out right from the very beginning, so we don't really cull L1 heavily back here anyway, and then we don't cull lactation ones based on their birth date either.
And you'd have to do that to create this very intentional graph. The most reasonable explanation is biological. These animals grew.
So, to that point, let's have a look at the age at breeding in this herd. So, these are first readings for all the animals at 23 months, more or less, 430 to 450 days. So, here they are, and they were bred more or less at 14 months.
Now, the purple and the lime green animals were mainly the blues, and then the green and blues mostly, and you can see what happened here. The animals that didn't get pregnant at 23 months or at 14 months came back at 15 months—the blues—and then at 16 months, the greens—fewer and fewer, obviously, but they were still in the same breeding pen, same nutrition.
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No, this was not a genomically tested herd, so the best explanation for this is that these animals just grew. They grew about 60 pounds a month, had a delayed conception, and their increase in production was due, frankly, just to increased size.
And in this herd, if you think about it, back to observation one, which is 10-week milk becomes your future. 60 pounds heavier equated to about 3 to 4 pounds more milk for the whole herd—not a bad investment.
Now, what if you breed heifers on size? So, this herd was breeding on time, but what about size? So, here's a herd where a substantial number bred at 1 year, 13 months, 14 months. So, what happens then?
Well, you can get this kind of a picture. So, by age at freshening, these lines are right on top of each other. So, you might say, "Well, there's no evidence of immaturity then, is there?" But that's not true because all we've done is we've hidden it by being able to reasonably choose in the breeding pen which animals are bigger than the other standing next to each other.
We've been able to mitigate this, so there's a great deal of consistency, but we are consistently underperforming, potentially, if we have not reached the goal that we should have reached.
So, size—always be careful before you make a decision about whether or not there's maturity based on the outcomes.
The fourth point: age at freshening impacts lactation two milk. So, this is where it gets interesting. So, a number of people have shown a difference in research with lactation one age at freshening, but you won't find this very easy.
This is lactation two. Now, again, Dairy Comp records—these are different animals to these. So, these lactation two obviously came through the system, but they are different animals, and you'll notice again the clear change by age at freshening.
So, production: 20, 23, 24, 25, and the pink two years and ten months, eleven, three years, and three years in one month—and quite a big spread there too.
Now, if the average lactation in many herds is 2.1 or 2.2, this page here is really, really important, isn't it? The dairy is going to live or die by what these animals, one and two, do. For example, in this herd of 2800, 44 were L1, 26 twos—70% of the producing animals would have been one and two.
So, whatever happens here has a dramatic impact on the bottom line. A couple more comments: all the pink animals, the animals that come in two years and ten months, the year before were dark green just because of length of gestation, one's waiting period.
Most of the pink and gray—because not everybody got pregnant—but green. So, those two bottom curves, lactation two, pink and gray—immature, underperforming.
Now, what happens if you have immaturity and strong reproduction? In other words, we are getting these animals down here pregnant really quickly. Well, it's kind of a toxic mix, isn't it? Because what happens then is we lock them in over here, and they're performing. It would almost be better if we had mediocre reproduction because then we might get out to here.
So, immaturity and strong reproduction—and we do have strong reproduction out there these days—can be very toxic.
And then what happened with immaturity and sex? Now, this is largely past because of all the beef that's gone in, but, you know, if we just have immature animals and then we have a lot of them, these youngsters, of course, it stands to reason that they'll be underperforming.
Now, it gets interesting on some herds. I just pulled this up because here what happened—the most mature, the teal lactation one actually overtook the youngest lactation two. So, you can see that at that point, overtook.
Now, wow, just think about the economics of that. Now, if a herd breeds on size, you can get this very nice curve—high producing herd, 95 pounds—but there's still an element of immaturity.
So, you can kind of mitigate it by breeding on size, but you can't hide it completely because you don't breed L2s based on size, so you can still see this. It's important to always look at both.
So, there they are—first, the four observations: week 10 milk approximates the herd average milk; the difference in milk between L1 and L2 at week five is 30 pounds; and the age at freshening impacts L1 and L2.
You might be wondering, "Well, if we get those animals in earlier, maybe we get more milk out of them over time." So, maybe we get them in early, and the productive life is longer.
So, productive life—days from first calving to culling—and Dr. Albert Dufresne put this information together. So, here's the days of calving along the x, days of productive life for a large database—quarter of a million cows, New York State, 2009.
And the best fit graph over here shows that we're kind of in the sweet spot for that group somewhere up here, but these animals here, the early ones, left early. So, no, there are no free lunches. These animals did not have a longer life.
And if we look at culling and metritis in another herd—this was about 1900 animals—and the animals were weighed 1 to 12 hours post-calving. So, 85% mature body weight, which was this weight here and above, the number of animals that were culled was 13, but the lighter animals all had higher culling.
Also, if you look at disease, there was higher metritis, and we all know that animals that have disease are more likely to leave. So, just a nice little field demo.
Also, there have been some interesting corroborating articles that came out of New Zealand recently. The body weight of dairy heifers is positively associated with reproduction and stability—that's the New Zealand way of saying productive life, I guess.
Positive relationships between body weight and their first, second, and accumulated lactation production—similar to what Dr. Berkley showed. So, there's interest in this area out there.
Now, let's just talk about what's going on and why we see this. So, if we look at glucose as a nutrient, the cow has a hierarchy of how she's going to use it: maintenance, bone, muscle, repro, and then lactation.
So, if she hasn't grown bone and muscle, it's going to take their fair share. He also said, "Reality: if an animal does not reach the required level of maturity before calving, she will certainly do it during calving at the expense of production."
So, what we can't put here goes in there—costs us. And here's an example. So, if we use the Dairy Calf and Heifer Association gold standards—three different animals, mature body weight 1000, 14, 18.
Got the target weights over here; you can see that 85 just post-calving, 85% of that. There's the ADGs from one stage to the next, and the ADG post-calving is 0.3—so considerably less than the ADG at the breeding heifer phase.
Also, if we look at the energetic cost of growth—2.3 mega cals per pound of growth, 0.3 mega cal per pound of milk with the Holsteins, 0.4 Jerseys—that's an eight-to-one ratio.
In other words, for every pound of growth that we need to add back to the animal, it's going to cost us eight pounds of milk. And also, there's a time factor. So, if we are under 100 pounds under and we're only growing at 0.3, it can take a whole lactation and beyond under normal maturity conditions to make it up.
So, pre-calving maturity deficit will be paid back in lactation. That animal does keep growing, but she does it at a cost. So, every pound will cost you eight pounds. I call it here for shrink, right? You just never see it, but those animals, as you could see from the graphs, are taking their share.
And, of course, it's much slower because it's at this rate of 0.3 or 0.4 versus 2 or 2.4. A recent graph that Dr. Berkley shared with me, I think, also helps discussion.
So, this is the difference in 305 for lactation one at different percentages of mature body weight post-calving compared to animals that were at the top end—91 to even over 121. Anyway, high over here, you could have also, of course, brought it down to 86 to 90.
But the point is this: the animals that were at lower percentages of mature body weight had the highest deviation—the highest negative—four thousand pounds compared to this group.
Well, if you wanted to use the 86, take 500 off—3500 pounds. So, significantly less milk produced in these three herds—between four and five thousand calories in these herds.
Also bought a scale. Well, let's go out and see what's happening. So, I bought a scale from Cattle Master, True Test, and went out into the field. We started weighing animals to see if this was true.
So, this case, post-calving lactation one weights—yeah, they are—and they were the week eight milks—71, 79, 80. See, they just went up with increasing weight.
Another example—this was close-up weights on this particular dairy, and again, as it went up, you could see the milk was going up, but there seemed to be a sweet spot somewhere over here.
If you look at the ADGs from 1.7 onwards on this particular dairy, it was considerably better than 1.5s and 1.6s. Jerseys in this table, I looked at the age at freshening between 19 and 21 months, 21 and 22, two and three—you get the picture.
There's a number of animals—that's the percentage of them. Most of them were here at 21 to 22, and here's the first 305, color-coded for simplicity. So, they produced at 16,000, and their more mature animals, 17-7, second lactation, third lactation—there's the sun.
And here's the interesting thing: the deviation from the average is two and a half thousand pounds—minus 11, plus 13. That's a lot of milk for Jerseys, right?
So, that's a nice field example as well. Another example from a different part of the country—this is looking at weights. So, this particular dairy, 2000 animals, lactation one, four different weight groups, and you can see very nicely as those weight groups, which we just coded 10, 11, 12, and 13, as they went up—look at the knot difference: 73, 10-week milk, 79, 80.
That's a massive difference—14 pounds. If you just corrected the maturity in this particular herd, the spectacular response.
Now, that's lactation one. Well, it didn't go away. This is lactation two—the same animals, 10, 11, 12, 13. Like I showed you earlier, it's really dramatic.
So, the milk here is 90 to 99 from there to there. So, certainly, it gets one's attention.
Now, you might be wondering, "So, what happened to our Dairy A?" So, we were sitting in that office back then in January 2016, and the dairyman said, "You know, I think you're right. I'm going to give this a shot."
So, he delayed the age at first breeding over here, around about February-March. The first thing he noticed was that the reproduction improved. I told you that we had zebra stripes from synchronized breeding.
Well, he noticed that it went up—actually about 20 percentage points, up to 60 from 40 to 60. There was the most dramatic light switch heat scene that was just basically a maturity story.
Reproductive maturity started using sex semen from here on and tailed off a little bit. Well, production-wise, the age of first breeding heifers began calving around here.
We had a very bad winter in '17, so we kind of had a bit of an underperformance. The year-over-year is a seven-pound increase, so it's kind of the missing Posilac response right there.
So, he went up to here with that response, and he's subsequently gone higher.
Now, don't you think everything's all about just delaying age at first breeding and so forth? There's so much more to these heifer performances. You know, this is growth and management, is what we've just been talking about, but there's respiratory disease and the genetic selection and seasonality.
You know, here's another example of what goes on. This is three years of 45th month age weights—average body weights of these cohorts, California herd, coming back to the dairy.
And you can see the difference in ADGs—0.48 ADG on season. So, there's really a lot of opportunity to do things differently just from the management point of view to try and make up for some of these challenges these heifers face.
So, the question then is—we had a question at the beginning: can we manage animals to calve at 21 and feed them to be mature at 24?
So, has calving immature heifers been successful? And looking at many records, I'd say a resounding no. And so, why not? Well, we cared these heifers earlier, but we didn't really change the management.
So, it was like just this good news idea: you can save money calving earlier. It was the email that went out, but there was a second email that went out that, "Hang on, you need to do things differently."
We got to change some things around, you know, like ADG. Well, that email never kind of reached the end user; it went into spam. So, we just had a bunch of heifers calving earlier.
The third important point is immaturity affects the entire productive life, not just L1. It affects the whole herd for absolute years, and if you do choose to go early, it's going to take you three to four years to dig out of the hole. It's that significant.
And lactation one don't catch up. It's not like there's some compensatory growth, like, "Okay, we will kind of short you immaturity at lactation one, but by the end of lactation one, you will catch up, compensatory growth, and you'll be fine in lactation two."
You saw for yourself it doesn't happen. There's no reset to factory settings; it just lingers on.
Part of the problem too is we focus on heifer health, in particular mortality, not so much on growth. So, a dairyman will tell you what his wet calf mortality is and maybe some pneumonia and scar treatments, but not so much on ADGs during the two-year growth period.
And we also focus on raising heifers cheaply, right, with very little regard to growth. The idea is, "Well, we'll just raise them cheap, and they'll kind of sort themselves out, their reset thing I was talking about."
And then we do some other things, like overcrowd them, which makes it worse, frankly. There's no or little actionable objective monitoring weights and heights during that two-year period, and if there are any, it's usually at the beginning and not through.
So, breeding weights are really pretty critical. That's your one time to set a different trajectory.
So, what happened, in my opinion, is that there was a profound disconnect between the growth rate and the age of freshening on many, many dairies. And I'd love for those of you on the call to put me to the test—go and look at the records of dairies that you know, and I'm pretty sure you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
So, what's the solution? It's not good just saying what's the problem. So, the solution is the following, and I'll put a caveat right at the beginning: this is about frame, not just weight.
Anybody can make fat butterball heifers. Our rations lend themselves to that. Frame—this is about structure; this is about muscle and skeleton.
So, the first thing you need is you need to know what the mature body weight is. You cannot do any of this in these calculations without mature body weight. It's not a guess, and it's not your color cows.
It's actually lactation three, four, and beyond—somewhere around 80 to 120 days of milk, and that's your denominator.
Then the next step is you need to weigh some springers—days care and calf graded in 216. You can make a little calculation based on two pounds a day to see what they'd be real close to calving or fresh cows—85.
And I've said you may need to do this several times because there's some seasonality. Then you can calculate the weight difference between desired based on the mature body weight and actual weights.
Then you can calculate the ADG that the heifer system actually is delivering. Now you have a choice: you either change the ADG or you change the age at first breeding to achieve maturity—either way, maybe a combination of both.
And then you need to monitor it. So, you need to set your heifer health and growth goals for all stages—not just beginning, but you can also lose on the back nine holes, so to speak, from calving, from breeding to calving.
The goal is to calve mature heifers first as early as possible. This is not a story about, "Oh, delay age at first breeding." If that's the only option you have, certainly, because it's worth it.
But the real secret to have your cake and eat it is to get mature heifers and get them there earlier, and then manage and monitor for maturity.
So, maturity, maturity, maturity—very, very important.
And with that, I think we can go over the questions. So, thank you so far.
Oh, thank you, Gavin. Before we get started answering questions, we'd like to share a brief video, and then we'll be right back to answer the questions submitted during today's presentation.
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As a reminder, you can still submit questions through the questions pane in the attendee control panel.
Dr. Staley, you were talking there at the end about the importance of knowing first what the mature weight of the cattle should be. What impact does heifer size or maturity at the time of their first calving have on the mature body weight or size of the lactating animals?
So, what we do know is these animals are programmed by the genes, right? So, from what the evidence would suggest is that these animals will continue growing to maturity at three or four, so that doesn't change. Even if they come in at a lower body weight, they will ultimately reach their genetic potential. It's just costly.
All right, very well. First question is from Isan. There's some data from another university showing that heifers can have when they are 75% of their mature body weight, while most of the data says that heifers have to be 85% of their mature body weight. Isan's curious which one's most accurate in your opinion?
Yes, I'm familiar with that paper. There's probably two points. The first is that it's economic, right? So, if an animal comes in at 75 versus 85, that means 10% less—150 pounds extra that you're basically going to have to put on to that animal on the lactating ration. So, why on earth would one try and grow heifers on the lactating ration? Just not economic.
And then the second point is, as I read that study, the heavier animals lost the most body condition score, and up to 50% of them left the herd. So, you ask yourself, why would the largest, the heaviest—and perhaps there lies the secret—they weren't necessarily the largest frame, but why did the heaviest animals lose the most body condition score and leave?
And as a veterinarian, I'm afraid to say that makes me think of over-conditioned heifers. Most dairymen will tell you they love large-framed animals; they tend to stay around. And certainly, the research that I've shown and read would suggest that that is true. So, I would not recommend 75% at all.
All right, thank you for that. Next question comes in from Matt. If hoping to benchmark one's own springers against mature cows, how much emphasis should be placed on body weight versus withers height? You had mentioned that fat heifers are not productive heifers, so should more emphasis be put on frame size?
Yeah, that's a great question. I get asked that quite a bit. I always say the caveat: you know, these animals better be at the right body condition score. Whether this is hard to do practically on a large area, anybody on the school probably say, you know, you only do it once before you get kicked, you know, going in there with a tape measure.
And it's also quite hard because it's only like a couple of centimeters growth per month at that time frame, so you're trying to pick up pretty small changes. So, that's why I like the weights. You're looking at 60 pounds over a month. So, to my mind, that's the practical one, but they've got to have the frame.
So, smaller herds can probably pull it off, excuse me, can probably pull it off doing withers heights or other forms of heights, which—so I hope that answers the question—practical, right? It's just logistics.
Yeah.
Next question comes in from Glenn. Increasing average daily gain could lead to fat being deposited in the mammary and result in decreased milk production. So, are there body condition score targets as the heifers move through the growth phase?
Yeah, there are. And I mean, this is the big challenge always—is pushing it beyond, you know. So, if you want a three body condition score, who's going to monitor that? Because very easy, you can drift into a problematic, which is why we need to have eyes on this and weights as we go through.
And the eyes are the eyes already—the part that addresses the body condition score. There's no real way practically to assess that currently, like breeding heifers. Okay, the biggest watch out is this butterball. You know, we do not want butterballs, and that's why I say it again and again—it's about protein, really, and it's about quality protein, and that's the challenge, right?
We know what protein costs, and you can balance the ration, but what percentage is actually utilizable?
All right, next question comes in from Brittany. Many farms do not have scales. I understand weight tapes are another option. What is the best option for a farm without scales?
Exactly that—do the girth use. You can use the weight tape.
Okay, got another question from Isan. So, the height effect on milk production is less than body weight at calving—that's a question.
So, if you remember the Penn State graphs, the height actually starts to plateau much sooner than the weight. And although there's different time frames when they grow quicker, height is so much harder to show a difference. In fact, I would challenge people to even do that because you're looking literally at like a fraction of an inch.
So, I don't know how you would usually do that. You should see something, but it'll be really hard to show.
Right.
All right, Kerry would like to know, how do I know if my cows are mature?
So, anything over lactation three—so three, four, five—and you know, with productive life, we should have some fives and sixes in there. I usually say three and four, no less. Sometimes guys will throw in twos—that's not mature body weight; they're still growing.
And so, there have been genetic changes on dairies. You know, there's a tendency to go for animals perhaps that are smaller, more feed-efficient components, and so forth. So, the question is, "Oh, well, aren't my cows going to change with time?" Yes, they do, but these shifts turn slowly.
So, I don't think one can use that as an excuse. Well, my cows are like this, and my heifers are really like this. I think you can probably glide into that with time.
Next question comes from Taven. Does average daily gain above 2.2 pounds lead to fat being deposited in the mammary and result in decreased milk production?
So, this is—they're better qualified people to talk about that, but I think there's some truth in that. It seems that we can overdo it, and personally, my persuasion is that we should go for probably average ADGs, especially during that time frame that is at risk, like he was talking about, and tend towards probably more like a 22, 23-month age at first calving than a 20 or 21.
I think it's very hard. I think it's very hard to get the ADGs and the maturity, repro maturity, to allow those animals to express themselves properly.
Next question comes from Murga. My apologies if I mispronounce that, but I would like to know, does colostrum quality affect heifer maturity, and how?
I think it does. You know, the more we look at what's going on in that colostrum—all those factors that only we begin to figure out now—and the long-term effects on cell-mediated immunity and so forth, I'm convinced we start from day one.
In fact, we probably start before they even calve. Look at those transgenerational effects. You know, I think it's been under-recognized. So, day one, and maybe even day minus 60, we should be starting to build the heifer.
All right, the next question comes in from Mark. What is the best way to help dairymen understand the opportunities of monitoring, especially when heifer-raising costs cheap are important for the bottom line?
That's a good question, and it's one I actually really like dealing with. I live in the world of Dairy Comp, and my favorite thing to do is to pull up those lactation graphs by age of freshness.
And, you know, there's nothing like seeing it for yourself on your dairy with your records. It's not some research someplace; it's your cows. And especially if you show that relationship between average herd milk and the week 10 milk—once that penny drops, it's not a difficult step to see what happens with those age at freshening graphs.
I've had dairymen call their breeders in the office and say, "Delay." And I was like, "Hang on, not so quickly. You got to stagger this thing out." But they get the message so strongly that they instantly want to make a change—delay the breeding.
That's the best way—show it very well.
The next question is, you mentioned metritis, I believe, as being higher in smaller heifers. Is this true for other metabolic or infectious diseases?
No, metritis is probably the highest. I mean, we get more of the other metabolics—ketosis and so forth—in older cows, but metritis, and I think also there was a paper by Etienne and Josie Santos some time back that showed a similar thing with DOAs.
And I think metritis, but no, I'd say it's mostly a two-year-olds—that's probably their number one thing. You could throw in some mastitis too because they don't get a tube, right? So, mastitis and metritis, but the other stuff is all the cows, mostly.
Right.
Taven has a follow-up question: what are the commands in Dairy Comp that you would recommend using?
Oh, okay. So, that was the question about how to prove it to the dairyman, right? So, it's a very simple one. I think it's in the PDF. If he doesn't find it there, please contact me. It's very simple.
It's, yeah, and they should always do lactation one and two—always one and two. So, the command is there, and I'm happy to share it if you can't find it in the PDF. It should be there.
All right, very well.
Dr. Staley, I see that we're just past the top of the hour, and that's a signal that we need to start shutting it down here. I'm going to give you one last question: if you're a dairy producer, consulting nutritionist, veterinarian, what's one or two or three key takeaways that they should take home with them today?
So, the future is going to need more efficiency on every level. And, you know, we've got fantastic animals; the genetics are just tremendous, and yet we are clearly underperforming just through management decisions.
And so, going forward, dairymen need to have mature body weights, need to have a plan on how to get those animals to maturity as heifers to their goals as heifers, and that includes the scale. On many dairies, a scale—on many dairies, if there's a thousand or two thousand cows, there should be a scale.
Excellent. Well, Dr. Staley, thank you for your time this morning. It's been very enlightening.
I also want to thank everybody for attending today's webinar. If you have additional questions, please submit them to nh.marketing@balchem.com.
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