There's some newer work on inflammation as well, isn't

there? Yeah, the latest thinking is that actually hypercalcemia or milk fever isn't necessarily a deficiency of calcium, but an effect of or the occurrence of an activated immune system that thus requires calcium so you get into this self-perpetuating cycle that we've got inflammation in the cow which requires calcium which causes this calcium the cow to go into hypercalcium which then causes a more inflamed immune system which then requires you know and it goes round and round and round and we get into this vicious circle but We're not quite at a stage that we really understand why that calcium is needed for the immune system.

We know that it blocks the activity of that parathyroid hormone, so it's going to then almost prevent the benefits that we see from those DCAD diets, which is where I think...

Where we move to and where we need to start considering it as part of our dry cow strategies is how we handle information in that key stressful period.

Because in all dairy systems, we're going to put cows through stressors that we can't avoid.

Carving.

drying off, if we look at calves, weaning, dehorning, they're all unavoidable stressors that these animals go through that we need a way to manage inflammation in order to make sure that when that cow does have inflammation, that doesn't become systemic.

And sir, for how frequently would you recommend people running around with urine strips?