Calf Data, Dairy Nutrition and High-Oleic Soybeans: Conversations From World Dairy Expo

Let's start with a conversation about calf health, which can have a lasting impact on a dairy farm from disease costs to the future value of each replacement.

Our full session, Improving Calf Health, What the Data Shows and How New Traits Can Be Used, is this morning at 1130.

But this conversation gives us a look at some of the main topics.

We're talking with Robert Fourdraine, Assistant Director of Product Development at DRMS, and Katie Schmitt, Industry Relations Manager for the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding.

about what the data shows and how nutrients can help producers make decisions around calf health and breeding.

Hi Michelle, and I'll give you a little background on me.

I've been in the dairy industry for over 30 years.

I joined DRMS about five years ago, and as you mentioned, I manage the product development team, but I also spend a lot of time analyzing data.

And when you have a database with over 8,000 farms' data, there's a lot of trends you can look at.

So one of the things I recently looked at was calf health.

And we know with the emphasis on breeding dairy cows to beef, it's really important that you still have enough replacement animals in the future.

So an aspect of replacement animals is looking at your breeding program, that you breed enough of your animals to dairy, but also looking at your calves.

And one of the things that dairy farmers don't always know is how many of the calves that are born alive end up milking in your herd.

So to get a better answer to that question, I looked at our data, and I looked at about 4,500 Holstein herds over a six-year period, and the average calf loss is about 14%.

So what that means is that from all 100 calves born alive, excluding stillbirths, about 14 of those never make it into the milking herd.

And that's excluding animals that dairy producers may sell to another dairy farm.

So those are the animals that either die or have a problem that prevents them from entering the milking herd.

But 14% is an average.

And when you look at the data, there's a lot of variability.

We see farms with numbers as small as 5%, but we also see farms with numbers as high as 30%.

So there's a big spread.

And, you know, when you lose that many calves, you have to account for that in your replacement rates.

And maybe that will influence your culling rates in your herd as well, especially today when so many animals are being bred to beef.

Where are those losses taking place? So when we look at, you know, the reported culling reasons, we see that in those first six to seven months, the majority of calves that leave there are due to diarrhea or respiratory disease or, you know, when people talk about pneumonia.

So from that 14%, 6% of that is lost in those first six to seven months of life.