Colostrum cow management

How do you manage your colostrum herd?

For how long has the measure of a good colostrum period been that the cow has had her 8 milkings and looks okay? She ticks the box and she’s on her way to the main milking herd. There she will need to compete, hold her weight, get in calf and produce milk for the whole season in order to hit the farm target. However, are we setting this cow up for success, or are there ways we can better monitor and manage this transition cow?

We have been gleaning some very interesting information on colostrum cow management through our work with the Allflex Livestock Intelligence collars. We can look at the cow’s rumination and monitor how she is tracking, both before and after calving. On the day a cow calves, we expect her rumination to drop from around a third of the day, around 500 minutes, to somewhere typically between 200-350 minutes. We then expect her to gradually improve over the next 5-7 days, as calving stresses lessen and her appetite increases.

Studies have shown that a cow that is not gradually improving over that first week after calving is likely to be heading for a post-partum problem. In this way conditions such as ketosis, retained foetal membranes, metritis and displaced abomasum can be identified earlier. Close and accurate monitoring during those initial days not only helps prevent or detect those early post-partum issues but it also sets the cow up for the whole season, impacting positively on milk production, reducing sub-par lactations and improving reproductive results. Cows that struggle with illness between calving and mating typically are at risk of poorer mating results.

Just because a cow has had her 8 milkings, does that mean she is ready and healthy enough to compete in the main herd? Farmers are now looking at colostrum transitioning differently!

Some of our early-adopting clients of the Allflex collars soon learnt that if a cow’s rumination wasn’t recovering, it was just a matter of time before they found her not quite keeping up in the main milking herd and had to intervene. Looking further into the data provided by the system, our clients were able to see that the individual cow which fell through the cracks was identifiable right back to three or four days after calving. With this system farmers can now achieve accurate, early intervention before illnesses progress.

Not only are these farmers able to analyse the cows in the colostrum herd, they can also improve farm systems for transitioning colostrum cows. A number of clients will now identify any colostrum cows which haven’t reached 80% of expected rumination on day four. These cows are then held back and monitored and/or treated until they have reached that level. This treatment may not be pharmaceutical drugs, it may just be some more time, non-antibiotic treatments, or other options like starter drenches.

When we were in Israel a couple of years ago, a farmer told us, “We know the cow is sick before she does”. While it sounds like a bit of a hard statement to qualify, we now have New Zealand farmers telling us, “She’s getting better before we would have even known she was sick”. With collars that identify exceptions to the norm, the farmer’s focus can be on the cows that need attention, rather than on the process of trying to identify those cows

“Once we treat, we check the graphs the next morning to see if a cow is coming up or going down. If rumination is going up, then we know the treatment is working – we don’t have to guess.”

Using the Allflex Heatime and SenseTime systems, farmers can accurately monitor a cow’s recovery by observing how her rumination recovers. They do not have to wait for obvious clinical signs in order to identify an issue, nor do they have to rely on eyes to determine a “recovery”. Instead they have evidence of illness from the data and then evidence of effectiveness of treatment protocol. They can ensure it is working from the start, rather than realising it has not worked a week or two later, once the cow has lost body condition.

Post calving management is just one other way to ensure that ‘EveryCow’ counts in your herd. If you want more information on this article or to have it explained in person, feel free to get in touch.