In this episode we discuss the hidden costs of binders in dairy cow rations with Caroline Knoblock, Director of Nutrition. We explore how binders, while effective against Aflatoxin, can inadvertently bind essential nutrients like amino acids and vitamins—costing an additional 4-6 cents per cow per day. Discover why some experts believe this cost could be even higher.
With a Bachelor’s in Animal Science from Michigan State and a Master’s in Dairy Science from the University of Alberta, Caroline brings a wealth of knowledge, particularly in transition dairy cow management and nutrition. Her experience spans roles in nutrition consulting, regional business management, and working with premix suppliers, all grounded in her practical upbringing in the dairy industry.
Tune in as we explore when to use binders, their limitations, and a biological solution for mycotoxin mitigation that preserves nutrient integrity.
🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!
Scott Zehr
All right. Welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And, today we have none other than our Director of Nutrition, Miss Caroline Knobloch with us today. Caroline, thanks for joining Ruminate This.
I had a chance a couple of weeks ago, Caroline, to talk to Dr. Larry Roth, Our Vice President of Nutrition here at Agrarian. And we, we spent some time discussing a couple of research studies that were done by Cajal et al. group out of Spain. And, one was published in 2022, which was a binder efficiency study. And another one was published in 2020.
And that one was looking at, I’m going to say binders. So like types of ingredients that are in, some of these toxin mitigation products and so on. And what they’re doing to bind up, and I’ll say micronutrients and I’ll let you explain a little bit further detail of that. So Caroline has done some work analyzing that data and saying, Hey, you know, there’s probably an economic impact here, right?
To binding up the good stuff. And, we have these products like clay or yeast cell wall. That, in my mind, Caroline, I have to think of it like a magnet. And if I dropped a magnet into a bucket of metal pieces, it’s going to grab anything. It touches pretty much indiscriminately, right?
Maybe if you have some metals in that bucket that aren’t pure steel, they have some different ingredients in them. Maybe the polarity isn’t going to be as strong. So therefore it’s not going to grab that one first. That’s how I have to, and tell me if I’m wrong, but that’s how I’m kind of imagining how binders work in my brain.
And I think you’re going to kind of give us a little more insight on that. So, caroline as we look through the binder study and, both of them actually, what did we actually learn out of the Cajal et al work, we’ll start with the binder efficiency study. Just kind of review some of that and, and what your takeaway with that was.
Caroline Knoblock
Well, I think you have a good view of it. My brain always, I mean, I don’t think it’s even needs to be as specific as a magnet in a bucket of stuff. It’s just, it’s chemistry. It’s not seeking anything out. These products that have plus minus, they make plus minus bonds with other things. It’s chemistry.
They’re not going after anything specific. If a substrate fits, it fits and they are bound. And kind of what these studies are seeking to understand is, you know, how effective are they at finding mycotoxins versus anything else? And because it’s not specific, they’re just kind of some products find a little bit of everything.
Some products bind a little bit of nothing. And what the kind of the binder efficiency study found is, well, so we need to start off to with that these studies were done in vitro. So what that means is it’s done in a lab. So there are no cows involved in this study. Sometimes in vitro work it’ll use rumen fluid or use feeds or other things.
The way they did this is they had a test tube and they had one binder substrate. So, for example, a yeast cell wall and one mycotoxin. There are certain other, liquids in there and at certain pHs to try their best to simulate, you know, the ruined pH and then washing out and rebinding in the digestive tract.
And these are important, this is an important way to test products to know, you know, to start out. Well, do we think this might have efficacy in a cow or does it not? Should we then continue on with some other studies with rumen fluid or should we do some cow studies or should we scrap this product and just leave it alone?
And you know, in these studies when we had one binder and one mycotoxin, we bind maybe half of our zearalenone. And even, if you’re hoping that’s going to happen in the rumen we hope obviously that we could bind half this balance. I mean, the cow is a system. There’s millions of things going on.
She’s a biological system. There’s not one thing going on. There’s not one binder that’s in there and says, okay, I got to go find this zearalenone and that’s my job. The binder is in there and it says, oh, I have a plus bond. There’s a minus bond looks perfect to me. So that’s what it’s doing.
Well, and these studies have also found that we’re not even binding in vitro a quarter of the DON. So there’s going to be varying efficacies depending on the binder used. So whether it’s a yeast cell wall or just varying types of clays, they are different, but they’re fairly similar because it’s just chemistry. And they’re all going to have similar chemistry because they’re binders.
Scott Zehr
Now, what about activated carbon? Caroline.
Caroline Knoblock
Activated carbon sucks up anything it touches, but…
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Caroline Knoblock
We don’t use tons of that in the U.S. Not as big as a thing to worry about. But I mean, it sucks up the mycotoxins, which is really nice.
Scott Zehr
It does.
Caroline Knoblock
But, it sucks up all the nutrients too, that it touches.
Scott Zehr
Everything.
Caroline Knoblock
So we can’t tell the activated carbon, Hey, can you go take care of this DON problem for me? It’s just first thing it touches.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. So, okay. So on the mycotoxin side, obviously there’s limitations with this approach of chemical binding. But there’s also micronutrients, vitamin B, vitamin E, amino acids that are going to have negative and positive bonds too. Right?
Caroline Knoblock
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
So I’m assuming that binders are going to bind up anything with the positive bond?
Caroline Knoblock
Yeah, they have different, depending on the B vitamin or the amino acid in question, they bind them at different rates, but they do bind them. They all seem to bind thiamin B1 really well. They bind some niacin, not too much, but also a decent amount of riboflavin.
And these are things, you know, they don’t, cows don’t need them in huge quantities. But so we’re not giving them to cows in huge quantities. So a little bit of it is stolen by the binders. And same with amino acids. They did a really nice job of, they incubated the amino acids with the binders separately. So a binder and methionine, a binder and lysine, a binder and threonine, and then also a mix of all three of those amino acids.
Scott Zehr
And what did they find, as far as binding capacity when they expose them to amino acids?
Caroline Knoblock
So for amino acids it varies from 14 to 30 percent of amino acids. So this is again in vitro in a test tube.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Caroline Knoblock
We do need to be conservative when we talk about applying it to the cow. But so in vitro, it, it does have binding capacity. It’s not like it’s going to, you know…
Scott Zehr
Take everything, right.
Caroline Knoblock
It’s there. And these are expensive. Methionine and lysine cost money to supplement. They’re expensive nutrients at some, sometimes, and they’re very important to the cow. But I know we’re not feeding extra to cows of these amino acids, we’re not accounting for what’s getting bound up here. So it’s money that’s kind of getting bound and just not used.
Scott Zehr
Okay, so you mentioned accounting, right? So, like, what kind of, I’m going to say, hidden costs are involved with utilizing maybe a binder strategy to mitigate mycotoxins? And obviously we’re talking the difference between in vitro and actually in a real life cow that is a living organism, and has another, you know, umpteen hundred million billion living organisms in its stomach.
How much could we expect in a, and I, I would challenge you to be conservative with it. But in a real world application, like this is likely happening, right? So what’s the maybe hidden cost of tying up a certain percentage of amino acids that the cow never gets to utilize or a certain percentage of B vitamins or vitamin E that a cow never gets to utilize?
Caroline Knoblock
So I did kind of a simple economic analysis. And like you said, to be conservative, I just chose to, to assume we can make in a cow finding maximum 25 percent of what happened in the test tube. Right, wrong, or indifferent, you know, we got to start somewhere. And this is theoretical. We kind of have to understand what could be happening. And I mean, if it’s fine and on the other side too, if it’s binding these things, it’s not binding mycotoxins. So…
Scott Zehr
That’s a good point.
Caroline Knoblock
Yeah. If it’s binding nutrients, it’s not binding mycotoxins, but kind of can’t account for that. So… So I just did 25%. So that gets us to binding 9 percent of the vitamin E, 5 percent of the amino acids and 12 percent of the vitamins.
It then, that doesn’t sound like a lot when you look at it on the surface, but then you think, “Oh, we’re feeding 40, 50 cents of some of these nutrients.” We’re easily putting in 50 cents of amino acids. Vitamin E is, I mean, it varies and depends on the stage of lactation and the diet. But I mean, we’re going to put, put in 5 cents to 15 cents.
And so it matters and kind of what I came up with as a starting number is, you know, probably would be happening in our fresh cow, high cow diets where we are supplementing a good amount of nutrients is we could be binding 9 cents of these. Like I said, it’s going to vary, but I mean, if you’re feeding five cents of a binder, as insurance, so it’s costing you five cents, but for the nutrients, it’s also finding, might be costing you 14 cents.
Scott Zehr
With the nutrients is dying off. Yeah.
Caroline Knoblock
Yeah. So it needs to bind those.
Scott Zehr
I want to go back to some, you said, you know, so assuming it’s only going to bind 25 percent of what it did in in vitro. I just want the listeners to kind of get why she said that. And, we’re not saying that the binding ability in the cow has been reduced by 25%, once you, right?
It’s the idea that, okay, in a perfect environment, and I’d like, I’m going to ask you to describe that perfect in vitro environment, versus an environment in a cow where you’re not necessarily going to have perfect binding capabilities. I would say that it’s relatively safe to assume we’re not going to get maximum binding once we get inside the cow as we would in the in vitro tube. I think that’s fair?
Caroline Knoblock
Right. And that’s what I’m trying to simulate here. I’m not trying to adjust other folks’s numbers. Just trying to understand, what could be happening. And, you know, in a cow, we’re never at constant pH. You know, we try to think of over the course of a day, we want her pH to be above, well above 5.8.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Caroline Knoblock
Or, you know, around or above 5.8 for good fiber, digesting abilities. But depending on how much she eats at a time, you know, how many times a day she eats, it’s going to be up and down. So that affects the binding ability of binders. And then that just affects the bacteria in her ruminant, what they’re producing and what substrates they’re producing.
Another thing is sorting. So our cow is going in for those yummy corn bits that also has all your vitamins and all your amino acids in there. So maybe there’s more of that coming in in the morning when they’re when they’re sorting through and kind of slugging for that nice yummy stuff and then, the evenings overnight, they’re eating some more of the fiber because that’s what’s left of the bunk.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Caroline Knoblock
It’s never a perfect world. I mean, the perfect world is a static, steady state that doesn’t happen in nature. And that, we hope she’s eating that diet we put in front of her. But we know she’s probably not.
Scott Zehr
How many times have we heard Dr. Ross say there’s, what, at least four diets on a farm? There’s the one we put on paper.
Caroline Knoblock
On the paper, the diet that gets mixed and the diet that cow eats. And you can put in, you know, the diet that actually gets fed in the bunk. Exactly.
Scott Zehr
That’s the one I, that’s the one I usually throw in. Yeah. Yeah. Every, every nutritionist’s worst nightmare.
Caroline Knoblock
Yeah.
No, that’s really interesting. Going back to the, the 9 cents. And I would say, the thing I think is a reasonable, why I think it’s a reasonable starting place, right? Is because if you were to run those numbers out of what they actually did in vitro, it probably, it’s gonna be extremely inflated, right? Yeah.
Caroline Knoblock
Yes. And yeah, I don’t wanna be unfair. I want it, I want to start from a believable scenario so we can just think of this. I mean, it’s more of a thought exercise. We’re not running around saying you’re buying 9 cents of your nutrients. We’re saying this does happen. Here’s a starting point to start a discussion of meal. What is going on in the rumen and in the digestive tract.
Scott Zehr
I want to do share with the audience too, because I’ve said this before: Hey, I will tell you, I believe, some of these ingredients like, like clay, like yeast cell wall, they have their place in the cow’s diet, right? There’s times where I think we need those products. Allah and aflatoxin issue.
Hey, your go to should be clay for aflatoxin. But I, I would also just challenge people to think a little differently when you’re reaching for these types of ingredients. Or, you know, products that are predominantly made up of these types of ingredients. When you’re going to be feeding them at a high enough feeding rate to attack a DON challenge, for example, or the zearalenone, T2, fumonisin.
Part of that issue, Caroline, is that we have to feed such a high level of these binders that there’s the ability, there’s plenty of binder there to bind up this other stuff, the good stuff, right?
Caroline Knoblock
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
And I, I think another reason I kind of like your, your 9 cent number and your 25 percent number is you can even just make the argument, okay, let’s say it’s actually only half of that, right?
So it’s, doing better than what you’re predicting at 25% of what it’s doing in in vitro. It’s actually, you know, 12 and a half. Well, it’s still four and a half cents per cow per day. And sometimes you would say, okay, well, you know, I’m feeding a, clay based binder at 5 cents and we’re still talking, it’s costing me double that and potentially a lot more than that.
Caroline Knoblock
Yeah. And also not, probably not binding as much of the mycotoxins as you’re hoping because we’re binding these nutrients.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, we kind of, we touched on that a little bit, but that’s a great point. Like once that binds one molecule of vitamin E or it’s some of the B vitamins or the amino acids, that’s it. Like, we’re not going to go keep picking up other stuff. So, Caroline, I find this to be a really, interesting conversation, like, I like the way you worded that. You know, it’s thinking about this from all directions, thinking about it, challenging the thought a little bit. I think in my conversations with Dr. Roth over the last couple of years, these types of ingredients, there’s a place for them.
But, I joke, I shouldn’t even say I joke anymore because it is, in my humble opinion, it is the truth. I mean, DTX, I believe is the best kept secret in the feed additive world, right? So, we don’t bind up the good stuff. And to share a Dr. Roth story, he likes to tell in, in a previous life from a company he worked at that, when you and him worked together, he had an opportunity to do some of this in vitro work for that company. You know, and they’d hear about this DTX product and what it’s doing for mycotoxins. And…
Caroline Knoblock
I don’t think we’re supposed to tell this story, Scott.
Scott Zehr
We can actually, yeah.
Caroline Knoblock
Maybe you need to start over.
Scott Zehr
Well, yeah, that’s okay.
Caroline Knoblock
I’m not sure Larry wants us to tell people this story.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, he actually mentioned that, yesterday on, when we were talking.
Caroline Knoblock
Okay. Sorry to break your roll.
Scott Zehr
That’s all right. That’s all right. Yeah. So he, talked about in his time spent with another company doing some of these in vitro studies and, we throw DTX.Yyou know, he’d heard about DTX and they threw it in a test tube to compare it like you would a binder. Because you know, it’s like at this point, binders have become the standard parlance, if you would, of something you feed for toxin control.
And so oftentimes DTX, although it’s a probiotic, it’s classified as a binder. So they, they threw it in a vitro tube and, guess what, Caroline? It did, it did exactly what we say. It doesn’t bind, Bound nothing in the test tube.
So I, think that’s a cool thing that we can talk about. And, again, folks, you know, I just, say, Hey, if you have any questions or you’d like to talk to Caroline about her numbers that she came up with, maybe you have some ideas on how we can do it better, or maybe you just like to sit down with Caroline on zoom, and talk about it.
Feel free to reach out to us, [email protected] and I will make sure that we get you in contact with Caroline or Dr. Roth or both and kind of have that discussion. But, you know, I, appreciate you coming on today, Caroline, because I think that, there’s so much about these cows that we’ve learn in the last, I’m gonna say 5 to 10 years, nutritionally speaking.
I think there’s a ton more we don’t know that they can do, that is still yet to be unlocked. But I’m going to say from my own personal experience when I was on the dairy with my father feeding these types of ingredients, this is going back over 20 years ago now. We had a toxin challenge. We fed two, three X rates of a binder, clay binder. Yeast cell all binder.
We had trouble getting cows bred. We were struggling with milk production. We took the binders out and cows started showing estrous again. And one of the things that tipped us off to that back then, and I think this was pre multi min 90. So what tipped us off to it, tipped my veterinary off to it was we had a lot of open cows, a preg check, like for the third, fourth month in a row on our 80 cow dairy.
And we passed out injectable vitamin A, D and E, B complex and muci, like water, to these open cows. And boom, they came in heat. Like we got him pregnant and it was like, Oh, well, this is what we have to do now to get cows pregnant.
You know, I look back on that story, Caroline, and I just ask myself the question now, how much of the B vitamins, the A, D, and E, the selenium, amino acids, how much of those things were being bound up to the point where our cows were actually malnutritioned, from a vitamin standpoint?
Caroline Knoblock
Well, I’ve been asked a couple of times now, you know, does DTX increase components? No, probably not. We help take care of the mycotoxin issues. So if mycotoxins were suppressing the rumen, we’re helping return her to baseline. If you were feeding a lot of binders before DTX, and then you just cut them out and put in DTX? No, DTX didn’t increase your components. But we, we stopped binding up your amino acids and your other nutrients that the cow needs to make components.
Scott Zehr
A great point. Yeah. Wow. Caroline, I think you’ve given us a to think about here today on Ruminate This. So, again, I want to thank you so much for coming on and joining us. And, folks, if you have any questions, you want to reach out, have questions for Caroline or myself on this topic, I’m probably not smart enough to answer the questions, but I will definitely put you in contact with either Caroline or Dr. Roth. Again, that email is [email protected]. So with that, we will see everybody in a couple of weeks. And Caroline, we’ll be talking again soon.
Caroline Knoblock
Thank you.
Scott Zehr
Thanks.
