Explore the Ultimate Maintenance Receipt Format for Animal Science

Maintenance receipt format for Animal science

welcome back to the real science exchange the pubcast we're leading scientists and industry professionals meet over a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal nutrition hi i'm scott sorell your host at the pub this evening tonight's conversation will focus on developing a healthy digestive tract and it takes a deeper look into our real science lecture series talk from dr brian aldridge from the university of illinois brian welcome to the real science exchange to get us started tell us a bit about what's in your glass first and then as a veterinarian who's worked with animals around the world what do you see is the biggest digestive health issues facing the livestock producers today well good uh good afternoon scott good to be here as well um i meant it's sort of tea time for me so uh i'm a tea drinker so the pubs now have diversified right so they're they're social meeting places as well as um drinking places as well so uh cuppa tea is the answer to all life's problems over in the uk so i'm drinking a cup of tea since any milk in the tea milk of course milk and sugar yeah and you have to you have to make it on the boil it has to be boiling when you make the tea that's the trick i want i want america to know if that's the trick you have to boiling water the biggest problem yeah the biggest problem i see um probably scott is is this idea that we think when we see intestinal problems we think of bugs rather than thinking about the animals themselves so we we're we're a little bit more we're pathogen centric rather than host-centric so we worry about disease being related to um something has invaded my farm or something has invaded my herd or this particular individual this individual has caught a disease whereas really in the real world that's not that's not actually true so i think i would love i think that's sort of challenging us if we only think of poor health in terms of pathogens then we miss the big picture i think pathogens very often are the the the manifestation of poor health rather than the cause of poor health yeah thank you for that very interesting uh this is going to be a lively uh conversation tonight since we've also invited another veterinarian to join us here at the pub dr ken sanderson is currently the senior director of business development at balcam ken earned his dvm from the ontario veterinary college in guelph ontario ken i believe you have the distinction of being the first canadian to join us here at the exchange so with that in mind is that a canadian beverage in your glass there tonight well scott i'm glad you asked thanks for inviting me tonight i don't know you guys can see this but this is the true canadian beverage molson canadian so no no canadian would be complete without one of those in his hand that's awesome i i had a canadian neighbor one time ken and he had a dog named molson so yeah right home with that yeah uh ken if you wouldn't mind um please share something a little bit personal about yourself that gives the listeners a glimpse of the man behind the degrees well scott um i i wouldn't know where to start but i guess when i do have a few minutes of off time i enjoy piloting my own aircraft and so for the last almost four decades i've been a private pilot and flowing a variety of different aircraft and i can never quite get enough time to go flying well ken i've known you 10 or 11 years and i didn't even know that so that thank you for sharing that i appreciate it uh and always we have dr clay zimmerman joining us here tonight at the exchange and i'm going to assume he's still got the hard cider with him yes there you go cheers not letting us down clay you're a good man so scott what are you drinking tonight well i'm glad you asked actually um tonight i've got a redemption rye um i'm not typically a rye drinker but i found that i typically like bourbons with a high rye bill and so i thought ah what the heck i'm gonna i'm gonna give this a try and uh it's actually pretty good i you know for for uh undiscerning palette like mine it tastes a whole lot like bourbon so i'm fine with that so cheers to everyone thank you for joining us tonight here at the pub cheers cheers it's yours uh brian before we get started um i'd like to congratulate you on taking a very complex topic during the webinar and making it very easy you know using you've got some very unique concepts uh unique ways for us to mentally visualize the immune system and and use some pretty dynamic graphics in your your uh presentation which i really really uh enjoyed and so you know i would invite our audience if you've not seen the webinar yet look it up at balcomanh.com slash real science and then look it up and you can watch it right from there you can even download the presentation and even if you have seen it i would encourage you to go back and watch it again which i've done on a couple occasions so it's just very enlightening takes a very complex issue and makes it easy to understand so with that brian back in january you introduced the idea of the healthy phenotype and talked about a resistant phenotype could you explain that again yeah i think probably the easiest way to think about it um again scott when we think about disease we think about um the individuals that succumb to a particular challenge so let's say we have a pathogen coming in so it's easy to think about in in in terms of the infectious disease um if we if there were 20 of us sitting in a room and influenza virus came into that room right one of the individuals was shedding large amounts of influenza virus as we sat around there you would see people might call the manifestations of that bug um uh inhabiting those people infecting those individuals uh as as flu right we often call the the manifestations by the name of the bug which is interesting but actually when you look within that population um different people would respond really differently so you might have uh two or three individuals or that would um end up in bed probably the men within that room right we get man flu we'd be we'd have fever we'd be sweating we'd be in bed for a few days um there'd be another number of people maybe five or six that would get you know um uh runny nose and a cough and sneeze for a few days but then be fine but probably 70 percent of them on that same exposure everyone's been exposed to the same bug the same amount of bug but they'd be fine so so it's really to think about influenza even influenza itself there's different manifestations of it it's not simply bug host hero that here's the clinical manifestation within within that group there's all these different manifestations of it and some some individuals would not even bat an eyelid right they wouldn't even know they've been exposed so that happens to most of us most days is we're exposed to potentially pathogen pathogenic organisms and we're fine and that's the healthy phenotype right you want your animals to be um of the the stature and status where they can be exposed to um a challenge and a health challenge and our health challenge just doesn't just come in the form of pathogens it comes in the form of weather and the form of um nutritional changes the whole transport right there's a whole set of health challenges that uh an animal will face why do some do really well in the face of that and some do poorly so i would call that that the healthy phenotype is the animal that is either robust in the face of a challenge resilient in the face of a challenge or when a challenge occurs they adapt so that there's not even a hitch in their step right they they don't lose any weight or stop their weight gain they don't drop in milk production so and there's no there's no observable clinical signs of it so to me that's the healthy phenotype and in every population scott we're going to have animals across that whole spectrum so i think it's really important for us to recognize that you know our herds have all of individuals that are healthy that are diseased and are somewhere in between as well so we have to manage all of those individuals we're never going to have a perfect herd right or a perfect flock or a perfect population so now while we're on the subject of phenotype i recall that you were talking about phenotype is genetics times the environment times time i believe and forgive me if i've gotten that wrong can you kind of maybe expound on that just a bit yeah and i think that's kind of the classic formula that people learn in genetics right that you certainly have um you have genetics you you can have two particular um individuals that have exactly the same genetics um as we if they get put into different environments if they get fed differently that's that's an environment uh effect then they will grow they will look differently or they will grow differently within that plants right good gardeners can t you can have two plants you can give me a plant right and let's uh let's say uh you know ken might be a really good gardener give kent ken you're a good gardener ken are you a good con pretty good not even remotely clay maybe one of us is a good guy here my wife is the gardener she does it okay let's say we get a plant i keep well let's say we give one to ken and one to his wife the same plant the same genetics how they do is determined to what what takes what the environment that we put in it so i don't just mean environment by temperature and and moisture and stuff but what ken does and what can ken's wife do to that plant is their environment and they will develop differently so that's genetics times environment and and t is easy right because over time a calf turns into a cow right and a young cow and a heifer and an older cow or a piglet turns into a pig so t changes our phenotype as we're all we're all strapping middle-aged i don't know what age would put us in but right we look we look different than we did when we were 21 right so time has had its um and environment has had its toll on each of us right in some way and that can be good and that can be uh damaging as well i think so and what's interesting i think um in addition to that scott is that the environment where do we encompass where do we encounter the environment to a greatest degree as animals it's at their mucosal surfaces so the direct right us everything is made in us to protect our us against the environment our skin now we see the environment we taste it we hear it but your intestinal tract is in direct um communication with the environment your respiratory tract is in direct communication with the environment so where our phenotype our health phenotype gets programmed is it our mucosal surfaces what we feed is determining actually our ultimate phenotype right so the g times e is occurring at the parts in our body which have the greatest surface area what do they say like our lung fields i think a long field for for a human our size would be something like a football two two or three tennis courts in size so for a cow it might be like a football field or something like that that's a massive intimate encounter between the animal and the depths of the animal with its environment microbiologically chemically um and toxically it encounters the environment in different ways so g times e times t for our animals occurs largely at the respiratory and the gi in the gi tract how does stocking density impact the uh the resistant phenotype yeah i think that there'd be there'd be two or three ways um and i think that the challenge is um to the phenotype into the healthy phenotype plate they would be they'd probably be in sort of four four big areas for me and stocking density would probably affect all of those things so microbiologically and we're getting to know and understand the microbiome and its role in programming health and development we're understanding that rapidly escala it's a rapidly escalating area of knowledge for all of us to understand that microbiome um so um the microbiome is involved in that programming um and that development stocking density you would have individuals in a different stocking density would have a different microbial challenge that they would have the microbes in the aerosol would be very different when you have high stocking densities uh particular and in the bedding as well so you stocking density would affect uh microbial challenges metabolically um the that programming's taking place as well there's more competition for food probably it's harder to manage a group of 100 then it is a group of three right so intensification we can do intensification but it needs really careful management doesn't it so therefore you kind of have metabolic challenges that are taking place so there's microbial challenges there's metabolic challenges and there's mental challenges and that seems strange to to when we talk about animals but it's their neuroendocrinological so there's different hierarchies um there's some bullying that takes place there's tail biting in pigs that occurs with stocking density um more competition at bunk space less lying and rest maybe less play time so for our young animals this mental neuroendocrine might be a more scientific way um to say those things as well so they're kind of there are these multiple challenges that take place um and then mucosal challenges i always think of mucosal challenges so poor air quality more toxins in the air um and therefore more urea more self more hydrogen sulfide and so that's potentially more damaged mucosa so in stocking density all of those things change and therefore um that is a big management factor that's affecting our we've got to get that right all of those four aspects i think play do you think brian there's um any hierarchy to those challenges you mentioned you know in the human literature i think you and i might have even talked about this at one of our previous encounters but there was a uh a russian author in the late 70s who wrote about uh salutogenesis and he was a medical sociologist and he talked a lot about stressors and he talked about this concept you put in the webinar the continuum of health and um most of his work was focused on stressors more psychological and how they impacted the health and in our world in animal agriculture although we are certainly paying more attention than we were when i first went through veterinary school to these issues we don't seem to have a very effective way to scale these i don't know what the right word is psychological stressors on the animals and how much impact they really have on tipping these animals over the edge into a layer of dysfunction that we classically call disease so how would you rank those i'll call them neural stressors yeah i think that's a great i think that's a great uh example i know um in the feedlot world world uh ken if you've looked at tom noffsinger's work but uh um tom is a dvm and goes to feedlots and trains um the stewards at a particular feedlot right the cowboys and the um the animal caretakers to to develop relationships with these animals a trust with these relationships so one of the the word he uses more than anything is confidence that the animals are confident in their handlers so this kind of prey predator relationship and um so here you have these group of calves getting off at feedlot they've they've come from a small group now they're in a big group they've been transported they arrive at their feedlot so he actually um helps them acclimate to their new environment he teaches them where the feed is and which is this is these are kindergarteners right in some way teaches them where the feed is teaches them where to lie down because you and he's got these great videos of these animals running around and they're sort of where am i kind of thing and we just leave them there so what he does is he he he spends time with them as an as a person right they go they're looking for leadership and they're looking for guidance they're looking for something to be confident in and you are the people the manager the handlers the cowboys are the are the easiest um the most trainable um leader for them otherwise they're gonna look for a leader in their own group right which might be a high stress car or something like that they're not gonna pick the calm calf they're gonna pick the one that's oh come run over here with me or run over there so he actually trains them to to acclimate he acclimates them to their new environment so what he does he manages change and we find that we i think how we manage change tells us how good a manager we are right uh in some way that's true with students students at a university the high stress times are when they first come in as freshmen around exam time when they're changing groups right so change is really important and the neuroendocrine effects as you say if we can manage change i think we've gone a long way to ensuring health i always uh feel that one of our challenges and maybe again my classical veterinary education in my way here in my thinking but you know we're always looking for the kpi so what can we measure or feel like index on how we're doing in these areas of management and that particular area of acclimating or reducing those stresses seems difficult to measure you can measure maybe more the failure yeah because it manifests in the ultimate negative outcome of disease but but being more preemptive than that any idea how we should be thinking about those kpis and yeah and and i think i think we know i think we'd all say that um the farms that we've been involved in the production systems that we've all been involved in that we've seen um what's the secret source for the best managers it's the best people that you have there right so we we always joke about diseases having names and their name is bill and fred and like it's it's the people that cause the negative outcomes but i think that's true too that it's people that cause the positive outcomes as well and um and and tom tom would say which i think is really useful if confidence is a measure of of this area of psychological mental well-being which again it's a bit hard to talk about in animals like to actually say it but behavior is a manifestation of physiology isn't it right so what's going on inside of us is expressed in behavior and we see that in our children but how much more in animals so so so that that change in the group from uh to behaviors which um are in the parasympathetic world and not the sympathetic world so sympathetic we think of fight or flight parasympathetic we think of as resting playing um and he talks about animals volunteering to do something so his measure which is a a holistic measure a global measure but he's saying it reflects all kinds of things it reflects uh mucosal health and neuroendocrine health and um a good immune system right so you know and endocrinologically they're stable he would say when they volunteered to do things they're looking for leadership because they heard animals usually we we normally have group animals um so a group of sheep that's running around compared to a group that's lying down and so some of the kpis i think neuroendocrinologically a confidence and their their willingness to volunteer so so he leads animals from in front and not from behind more like a shepherd than a sheepdog kind of thing so it's really so so can you get can can you lead animals to they'll go where you want them to and i think i think i think you could say like um uh noise levels in a building i mean i think we would say i love going into those cow barns where it's really quiet because what's that mean they're resting they're not running around they're not looking for food again that's different at different times of the day but when you go into a quiet pig barn or anything a quiet uni you go there's something good about here the workers aren't clashing and clanging around the animals are resting and sleeping so and people are looking at noise monitors actually sound monitors as a measure of well-being which i think is a really interesting again we're in that psychological world right we're not looking at you know um health in other ways but neuroendocrinologically it's a huge influence on our animals so sound i i think the noise that's in a particular unit uh in any one time i i'd know i go into some dairies right and you you go into some and some of the cows are being milked and it's quiet as anything and there's others depending on the worker and they're kicking and it's clanky and animals are shifting a noisy parlor compared to a quiet parlor with just the sound of the milking machine and the animals you know moving that's a lovely sound but we know that that's actually a global measure i think so things like that would be quite instead of taking blood samples or what's the holistic manifestation of that whole pen or that whole unit is what i was thinking what do you guys think i mean you guys have seen lots of animals at different times would that be i think we'd love to see a calm quiet group of animals we think they're well and well looked after we mean that's kind of thing i think is that what you guys think how does that work for you it's one thing that i was kind of reminded of i met a gentleman a couple years ago his name is david hunt and he he was involved in uh developing this fate uh facial recognition uh system for cattle and uh we were in the uk at the time and we we had gone to uh to a farm to see how this was working and he had this theory about um cattle being being [Music] you know evolutionary being able to identify uh predators and they see us with our eyes in front as predators and he said that when we walked through that barn it took them two days to get back to their normal rhythms as measured by this facial recognition software and i just i'm just uh wondering we've really got to have a better understanding of animal psychology and behavior and uh how that how we might be able to utilize that to you know reduce uh health problems just it's just kind of curious yeah you know and i i think you know the world of sensors is a big project going on in illinois with different sensors and and looking at you have some of these big units now which there's an economy of scale but sometimes you you might have our animals just looked at once a day right in a big pig barn and maybe that group was looked at and the individual wasn't looked at so so that that can be a sort of time inventory thing and uh um a skill base right what's the you know for skilled maybe some of our experienced farmers and producers are going out and so that we have less skilled labor that have the skills to to evaluate behavior as well that you say so i i think it's really interesting thinking about video sound monitoring not to replace our caretakers but actually to inform them and direct them to the right place hey something's going on over here the the indicators of health and failure of health occur several days before when we pick it up so what are the measures of this kind of pre-disease state um and that's true for me when when i feel sick don't wait for the day when i have to stay in bed it's two days before when i'm not feeling quite right isn't it so we want to pick our animals up the two days before it's manifest in its fullest form i think so so that idea of different sensors i think i think videos are really interesting and they could do 24-hour collections um and the problem at the moment is is the mass of data that comes out of that i think is is handling that massive amount of data but we got ai technologies to assess it because some of it needs to be processed at the animal can't go out to the office and back again right i mean you just you have all these cameras everywhere so so it needs to be you know it's more instantaneous i think i think there's a lot of technology to be developed but we have to understand the behavior so that we can make the right interpretations make intelligent observations it seems it seems always a challenge to try and measure what hasn't happened right so in essence this is what we're focused on in this approach to the pre-disease state and finding the right way to understand and preempt the progression is the issue and and we've obviously in the veterinary world we've relied on far more name the drug name the bug approach which is so far down the pathology path that usually the damages created economic implications that are difficult to reverse but in our world in terms of the feed additive side we're always looking for bioactive substances things to support this preemptive state if you like maintaining homeostasis but my question to you would be you know one of our challenges is is actually designing the right uh protocols to look at bioactives so that we haven't disturbed so much of the system of the animal that we've got this ripple effect going on but rather a more constrained element of disruption that the bioactive might actually be positively supporting so that it didn't happen and uh and i think we're always challenged with finding the right model so challenge models being the classic ones but they're so disruptive in terms of the systems they don't just involve what you're trying to support they involve many others any ideas how we should be looking forward to evaluating supportive i'll call it nutrient inputs like this to evaluate how we're supporting the homeostatic state of health i think when you look if these mucosal sites are really important which i think we are in sort of this programming idea this idea that the the place where the animal encounters the environment and we talked about the social aspect that psychology right that's an external thing that's eyes and ears and so we sort of setting that side apart these mucosal sites are the site because of their large surface area because of their important and their large surface area because of what they've got to do the lungs have to absorb oxygen right so that has to be a large surface area the gut has to absorb nutrients so it's a large surface area but that means huge amount of exposure to microbes and toxins and and so i think if you if you break it down to this those elements at those sites okay and i would i'd be thinking about how can those elements the nutrient additives affect the microbiome effect the microbes at those sites affect the um epithelium of those sites so we think of the epithelium as as a barrier certainly right and it's got mucus on the top and there's different elements to that it's barrier function but they're very metabolically they're very active they're all they're part of the immune system the epithelial cells themselves they're really a remarkable population and they can regenerate really quickly so i think about these nutrients what are they doing to the microbes what are they doing to the epithelial wall as its barrier function but also the physiological things that it does and then thirdly um what's it doing to the status of the the workers at that place right the immune system i don't want to call just defenders but this idea that the immune system is actually a homeostatic system it's it's also fixing holes in the road right it's not just responding to pathogens it's the end result of an immune response is healing not getting rid of the bug right so if we scrape our knee we need the immune system to rebuild the knee right so so if we have a chemical challenge to the intestine the immune system is who's going to respond and fix that to some degree right so so i i think um i i think with all of our systems understanding that mucosal system microbiome epithelium and the diff the um the workers the immune system at that state and how they interact is going to be really important and i think you're in a great place because as i said earlier our knowledge of the mucosal site has exploded for many years we've thought about the immune system in terms of what's in the bloodstream so we give a vaccine and we measure the bloodstream response i think over the last few years we're realizing no we need to put vaccines at the the cell surface we need we need the the pathogen-specific response at the cell surface at the mucosal surfaces so i think we having an explosion of understanding of that it's a new world it's like the undersea world what is taking place at the mucosa but it's hard to study too because right you've got room i mean particularly ruminants to get to a lot of those meat coastal surfaces there's the room in the room it's fantastic and i think we probably understand the room and almost better than some of the other bits because we can't get to the other bits to study them very well but i know there's people who are now looking at um you know um pills with that can sample different environments along the way and actually can um can you know so tracking kind of the um the the the smart pill if that makes sense so cameras sensors i can take microbes from the abba meser and from the duodenum as it moves down and i can track i know where it is because of the ph so i think i think we're in this because of the microbiome the massive explosion in sequencing technologies in the microbiome i think over the next five or ten years our understanding of the mucosal world will be like the first submarines uh in some way so i think you guys have probably have tools uh and some but we don't know exactly how they work i mean i think there's probably a right there's some people here i i we know up we give our product and it has a good effect but we have no idea how it works you've heard that probably in the in the nutrition world so and i think that's true you go we don't know the mechanism by which it works but we can't refine them ken till we do know how it works right so we've unraveled those mechanisms so we do that for treatments right i've given this and hey they look they look better and so i think understanding the mechanisms of those three things epithelium microbiome and um um the the immune response at those sites is going to be really important there's a lady actually um who i'm working with a really smart scientist up at university british columbia so she has developed technology for looking at um a breath prince so what we exhale and what does that tell us about um the not just the bugs that are there but the health of that particular site as well so imagine that that you could take an inhaled sample and she's done it particularly in human in primate uh respiratory disease so she can detect the changes related to tuberculosis for instance um and again coronavirus i know that there's a group in europe who've just um used dogs to positively detect coronavirus right so they're sniffing sniffing dogs that's amazing like what are they detecting right there must be these volatile organic compounds that can be picked up by a dog with all faction and the dog can say it's this or not this so wouldn't that be great technologies if we can if we can um weaponize that or we can instrument that so that we can we can look at something coming out of the animal and tell something about the microbiome something about the epithelium something about the immune response at that site because there has to be a signal that comes from that right so um yeah no it's a very intriguing area yeah she called hers breath prince hers is called breath prince what's this individual's breath print and i think that's a good you know what's this cow's breath but no now again there's a lot of technology before we can again instrument that practically for are we going to go around to every cow and put a mask on it right i mean but but but the engineers are pretty clever at coming up with quick solutions for sampling things aren't they so but if we know that that's what we need i think the engineers could come up with how do we uh maybe it's in a pen maybe it's maybe it's the breath print over a group of animals that has is an early indicator that there's inflammation there and again this this host centric response as you mentioned scott not just the pathogen and i want to detect the pathogen but actually the pathogen might be there i want to know how the animals are responding to the challenge of their face whether it's cold or poor nutrition or hot you know and something is wrong the cow breathalyzer test it's a great that's a good result right so that's very interesting so so from a dietary standpoint what what can we do to support uh this resistant phenotype then yeah i think um i think if i was you i would be working on change and how do we how do i help an animal get through those really turbulent time we know that weaning is really difficult we know that transport we know the management stress points right so how do we and until we change the system those stress points are going to be there's other drivers by which those management systems have to play out right and uh um you know until we you know animals are going to be transported because our our grass is over here and our feedlots are there right so so i think if you can if if you can find products that can help in that change period then i think that so understanding what's happening at mucosal level during change i think would be great and and how can i um make that smoother it still change but instead of a stormy water it's a calm water or a relatively calm water um because there's going to be some animals who thrive who can still get through that by themselves i mean who are the losses in i think that's an interesting question question right clay and there was some work looking at a group of pigs um jim lowe here did it he looked at metaphylaxis so giving antibiotics to groups of pigs when they come into a particular unit and then he worked out where was it so all of the animals got antibiotics and then he worked out who who did they benefit it benefited the lower quartile the lower 25 percent in weight there were no the benefits in the top 25 percent and the middle 50 weren't were negligible all of the economic benefits and the health benefits were in the lower quartile now if we now that was just on weight now what did that these were animals that were probably the pre-disease phenotype right just weight was the measure they used to identify them they were they were the ones most susceptible to the change and antibiotics helped them but the top 25 didn't need antibiotics if that makes sense but we we couldn't we could we couldn't cater we couldn't categorize those into weight would be as an oversimplification that was just the measure that jim used um but all the economic benefits all the ultimate production benefits were in that lower quartile so if we had better measures to say who is where then i think that's a simple way right maybe that maybe not every animal needs a nutritional you know it might be just a subgroup of animals that need your nutrition and would benefit from your nutritional supplements you could be looking at so many animals you go oh it doesn't benefit those and therefore it's not very beneficial you could make an error but actually it would benefit this group if we could find out who it was who are the ones who whatever the nutritional supplement would be and they're the ones we need to care for so i think i think identifying these animals that um have an unhealthy phenotype if you were in this pre-disease state would be great i think and i don't know what those markers are exactly but i think they're coming i think they're coming in some way okay so i think giving the right things to the right animals would need it but identifying that group of animals that need it would be important who when flu comes in who's going to be knocked out right the people who are fine don't need their zinc vitamin c the people who are going to be knocked out need their zinc and vitamin c to prevent them from you know that common you know the war green supplement that you can buy right that people use for cold early colds probably not everybody use it we had some questions come in during the webinar that we weren't uh able to get to and i'm just gonna maybe transition to a few of those real quick if you don't mind so we had a gentleman named paul he's asking how do you design a strategy or a calf weaning strategy vaccination strategy etc to help them um the most of a resistant phenotype to make the most of a resistant phenotype yeah yeah it's funny uh it's funny scott a lot of our vet students they want us to give them a vaccination protocol that as soon as they go out and they can put it into action or they want their weaning give me the uh the five steps of kind of weaning strategy again and you guys i know when you're out in the field what you have to do is sort of talk to the particular producer and see what are you trying to achieve do you know what i mean so what are the constraints on your system um and the less constraints you have the more flexibility you have so for instance for for weaning if you're not pushing your breeding age and pushing your first lactation age if you're not trying to achieve 24 months um but you're open to 26 or 27 months right then you would have a different system you push your carbs differently than you would for a 24-month system so some of it depends on the goals and the constraints and i think again the error we make is we try and make every system the same and i don't think you can really do that right we have these the kpis that uh ken mentioned are great but my farm might not be able to achieve those those things in some way i might not have the genetics i might not have the right i i haven't been able to i have a poorer quality milk replacer therefore i might need a bit longer for them to transition into their to to get to their growth so i i think um i would design it around the animals themselves uh in some way so i would i would i would look for markers that the animals are ready to be weaned right in some way so i would have a system so so let's say if i bring four to individualize the system a little bit scott and this is hard right in our when we have large numbers and high stocking densities if i have 20 we work with a big farm that has 90 carbs a day right so probably on that day they're not going to sort of wean one one day and one the other day they're probably going to be a whole batch is going to be you know weaned now some are going to be ready and some aren't going to be ready so they're going to have some difficulty following that because they've treated every single calf as uh in the bell curve right they've sort of said okay we're going to treat everything like the mean cut the calf that's in the middle um so i would i i would think about i would talk to that individual and say what are your constraints what are you where's your where are you pushing where do you have to push these animals is your milk replacer so expensive you want an earlier weaning date or do you are you using your home milk for instance i'm thinking of dairy cards right or if you're using your own milk then actually that's not such a huge cost issue for you so actually you could i might take a bit longer if i'm producing my own milk it's not extra cost i might i might wean them beyond eight or nine or ten weeks kind of things but what i i love i love farms that um are researchers as well right scott that they know they're they've got enough data from their animals that they know then you have to have record systems for this right i know most of my calves are eating um you know 0.9 kilos of grain you know two pounds of grain i know they're all eating them by nine weeks i know ninety-five cents are eating by now it's brilliant then nine weeks is your weaning time no i know they're all eating it by seven and a half weeks great seven and a half weeks is your weaning time so let the animals you have these outcomes one one of which that for weaning that they're eating enough concentrate right that they're eating enough grain uh to take over their growth curve from the milk so i don't want to lose any weight from that transition from milk to grain i don't want them to drop off in their in their weight gain so we know that's about 0.9 kilos of grain so i've got to know when they're eating nine kilos of grain that tells me their room is ready to be weaned so i would encourage that that owner to um that client to gather data on his in his current system as to where he is um um what are the animals showing you when are they ready and then design a system around that right in some way rather than me trying to fit somebody else's system and where am i in that kind of normal curve of everything i think a lot of people don't manage weaning well so i think that's kind of an important thing as far as vaccination um we also we tailor-make vaccination around the risks of those particular particular farm my dad's a good example my dad um think about the dog right you tend to go to the vets and the vets give the dogs the same everybody every dog gets the same vaccination my dog lives our dog lives on the farm right doesn't meet any of the city dogs so there's some diseases that our dog's never going to be exposed to so i think sort of some risk evaluation to say here's your risks and let's taylor make what you need for your particular animals with vaccines people have tended to go oh it's cheap anyway let's just give it to them right but but i i think knowing what your risks are and having the data that supports that is really important i think so i i don't have this standard weaning protocol or the standard vaccination protocol i like to sit down with the owners and go okay tell me your risks and show me the data about your farm that can help us design one that's specifically for you i fight with doctors all the time about what our kids should be vaccinated with i like vaccines but in the healthcare system right they're like they all need this vaccination i'm like what my kid's not going to be exposed to that why does it need that particular vaccine i'm okay it's evident evidence-based but again i'm not i'm a pro-vaccine i'm not an anti-vaxxer but i think we should be sensible we should handle that uh carefully as well you know so many of the answers so much of the discussion we've had tonight center around diagnostics or data or you know understanding where is that individual right now one of the questions we've got is kind of related to that so we've kind of skirted around it just a little bit but jay's asking you know what are what are some of the tests that's being developed so that we can uh better understand when that animal's in the pre-disease state yeah and this goes back a little bit to what ken was talking about i think um i watched the mucosa and so what what are the signs um if the mucosa is healthy the animal is probably going to be healthy i think we'd say the same about ourselves wouldn't we you know when your gut's working well you're in you're you're in good shape and when our guts not you know just our intestine are just day to day we're more aware of our intestine than kind of anything else in some way but also your respiratory system you know when you've started to get a bit of a burning sensation at the back of your throat or your nose so some of those signs would be i think like runny noses um and we don't look at these things runny eyes and i'm not talking about i'm talking about pre-reinfection in some way that your your mucosa is telling you something uh that something is a myth either the microbiome the inflammation or the epithelium so so nasal discharge i i when i go in i always sort of i look around at the animals and i coat how many have got runny noses and what's it look like in some way so i i would you know i and that's pretty easy right i have 50 animals with runny nose i have two with runny nose and again i'm talking i'm not talking about pus coming out i'm just talking about serous nasal discharge because that's to us evidence of what's happening in the mucosa and and for us we'd be blowing our nose a lot right we'd be sniffing a little bit we'd have a little bit of a cough but so what would that like in an animal right maybe there's some early coughing that's going on or some but just looking at then there's a discharge the other thing that we i think which is interesting so i'm looking at two big mucosal sites that would be my observational metric for respiratory mucosa and not complete but at least something you can see so yeah the gi tract as well right i think for gi tract we allow a huge range of fecal consistency that we probably shouldn't that would be what's abnormal it's a cow it's got runny runny runny feces why's he got runny thesis like that you know so i don't think so i think we just ignore it all the time we just see we just see it doesn't matter what we only notice it when it's really squirting out but i think if we could sort of say hey no this for me for my cows on this diet this is what they've got and if i see any change in that i know something else is taking place again gi i'm not saying it's infectious disease but there's something that's going on pre-disease so i think the simplest fecal consistency nasal secretions ocular secretions would be at least two measures that you apart from the global ones of growth and things like that too now you've got to have records for that it's got you've got someone's going to be measuring it and monitoring it and counting that and so that takes time but i think if we could if you could pick up those animals earlier you're going to save a lot of money later on i would suggest so if you picked them out brian what would you do that's a good question that's a good question that's where you guys might that's what i want for me when i i take some little zinc and vitamin c supplements right that says something i do to look after me i would go back to what we think of those four stresses there was kind of just a recent study looking at uh transported cattle coming right off the transport into a feedlot some animals getting metaphylactic antimicrobials others getting high quality oat hay and water and electrolytes and acclimation so this was kind of tom lofsinger's group acclimation there was no difference in how well they did so i would get them into the parasympathetic world you know this would be simple nursing care in some way um i think keep them eating and maybe there's a nutritional change that they need i don't know um you know again not a major one but maybe there's something extra that they would need um i don't know about that can i be open to kind of what that looks like i think but i would certainly think about now i can observe them better and see which way they're going um i've taken away some of the those four m's that we talked about that um clay mentioned you know what about stocking density you've taken them out of some of the stresses that come with that it's like going to bed in some way right go like just just rest rest a couple days or something like that now there's constraints what people can do with those things you know it's hard i know i know at feedlots they're really interesting when they come off the trailer instead of all treating the same which are the high-risk cattle and which are the low-risk cattle right we they've only got two big categories but if we could make five categories of risk and we treat those five sub-categories differently uh again there's labor that goes into that so i understand there's practical constraints so i think at the moment optimizing their phenotype by um by reducing those stressors would be important so our last audience questions comes from joanna she's uh saying that since an animal's early life often dictates how they're going to turn out as as adult animals should those animals that get sick during that early life be discarded from the herd i mean it depends a little bit on your system i think doesn't it i i think if you have the bandwidth i think if you have the labor that i think if you get them early you can recover for us prognosis meaning the outcome from a disease is determined by the extent and duration of the pathology so if i have a pneumonia that has i've lost two thirds of the lung that's very different animal than an animal that's lost one eighth of the lung right but the difference would be did i catch it early in some way so stop in the progression i think there are some animals in which this animal is probably not going to recover um and the cost would out do the benefit but i i think for mild and moderate disease i think they're recoverable it's it's amazing what these guys can do right uh as far as recovery so i know i don't think i don't think an ill young animal um has been is doomed to the end of their productive life you might have to accept a little bit less production right and so you might have to do this through the mathematics to see if that's acceptable we might talk about this a little bit but they're ultrasounding calf lungs now right so very common to now ultrasound calf lungs so animals calves with respiratory disease that you can't see outwardly but an ultrasound can detect like a small abscess they found out that those animals in first lactation can have 500 kilos less of milk right i mean an incredible amount less of milk in their first lactation so and that's a non-detectable lesion picking them up early you can treat them early and then you've broken the you break that uh cycle of poor production later on last call who needs another round well gentlemen as we've all just heard stephanie has called last call some final thoughts from a nutritionist's perspective what's two one or two take-home messages that you could give a nutritionist and then one or two messages take home messages for producers what would you have if a nutritionist i would i would say and maybe this is already taking place i apologize if in advance if this is already in prime consideration but how is nutrition impacting mucosal health and um the immune system so not just the production parameter but how is it affecting the microbiome how is it affecting the inflammatory response and how is it affecting epithelial integrity right so i think i would think about the nutrition and its local environment what's it doing in that locally right if we can get if we can get new new nutritional um developments innovations that can optimize that i think that would be brilliant and i think you're going to get production effects as a result of that so i'd love to see us working together and working out what that looks like um for the producer i think about two things i think about managing change think about the points in which there's there's a huge amount of change that could be weather change that could be moving animals different stocking densities different social hierarchy how do i manage that well i think the evidence is growing that the acclimation so weaning shouldn't just happen by itself that maybe there's some training for weaning you train the animals to be weaned you train the animals you start to separate them from their moms before you separate them from their moms don't think let's say i'm talking about beef animals some people are taking the cars away for a little while and bringing them back right putting them onto trailers transporting them short distances and bringing them back right so you're training them to so that this change isn't suddenly so acclimation right we do that in sports like we don't suddenly go to the sports field right we we have a training period so i think of training your animals and managing change well and that process that every stage is going to affect the next one so what you're doing to those babies is going to affect their future life so you're programming health and you're programming poor health as well so there's no life stage which should be neglected as well dr aldridge this has been a real treat and i've enjoyed having you here at the exchange tonight and and you can join us here anytime you want all right thank you thank goodness yeah it's been great and and ken thank you for joining us all the way from canada we appreciate it and you'll have to come visit again as well i'd also like to offer our sincere appreciation for our loyal listeners for stopping by to spend some time with us once again tonight here at the exchange if you like what you've heard please remember to drop us a five-star rating on your way out also hit the subscribe button to get alerts for future podcasts and leave us a glowing review if you're so inclined our scientific conversations continue on the real science lecture series of webinars visit balcomanh.com real science to see upcoming events and past topics we hope to see you next time 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