In this episode of Ruminate This, we explore the top 12 diseases causing the greatest economic losses in the global dairy industry and the critical role nutrition and mycotoxins play. At an alarming cost of $12 billion annually, subclinical ketosis leads the list globally, while in the U.S., mastitis ranks number one, with yearly losses reaching $2 billion.
While better cattle management, facility improvements, and environmental control are essential, nutrition is still a major factor in preventing diseases. Even the best ration is ineffective if cows aren’t consuming it properly. Mycotoxins further complicate the issue by triggering inflammation and weakening the immune system, leaving cows more vulnerable to disease. Tune in as host Scott Zehr, and Agrarian Solutions Vice President of Nutrition, Dr. Larry Roth, discuss how to better protect your herd from these costly health issues!
🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!
Scott Zehr
Hey, welcome back to Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host Scott Zehr. And, I know I say this every time, Dr. Roth, but I’m excited to have you as part of this conversation today. We’re going to be talking about the impact of diseases on U.S. dairy farms and abroad.
And, an interesting article that you and I have looked over, I think I first saw it maybe, dairy herd management or, somewhere where it was reposted. And I know you sent me an article from, the bovine veterinarian. But, what this kind of brought to light for us is, relooking, I guess, a little bit at some of the diseases that impact dairy. Globally and domestically.
And so, just to kind of, give a little bit of an overview, there’s a, a group that Dr. Philip Rasmussen, he’s out at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. And, he put together a study that they’re hoping to have soon published in the Journal of Dairy Science. And basically they ranked, this was a global ranking of the top 12 diseases in terms of annual loss, and you reported in US dollars and did that ranking globally.
And Larry, I have to admit, when I first read that, I said, wow, I’m curious how that tracks with the U.. And we did discover some differences. So globally, they’ve discovered, subclinical ketosis was the number one thing with an $18 billion economic impact, and annual losses for dairies, followed by subclinical mastitis and clinical mastitis, I should say
they have them separate, but clinical mastitis was $13 billion subclinical $9 billion. This is annually globally. Lameness number four on the list is $6 billion. You get into metritis $5 billion. Number six, ovarian cysts at $4 billion. Number seven, you have Yoni’s and, perituberculosis at $4 billion, retained placenta, #3 billion DA’s. We’re going to call it $600 million.
Dystocia $600 million, milk fever, hypercalcemia number 11 at $600 million. And, lastly on the list, clinical ketosis at about $200 million annually. So Larry, you dove into a little bit of this and, just wanted to get your take on that list globally. I know you had done some digging as to what countries maybe were most affected by say subclinical ketosis. And I don’t know if you wanted to chime in on that.
Dr. Larry Roth
Right, yeah. Well, it’s just very interesting, Scott. I mean, it looks at your top 12 diseases across the world. And, this article appeared in the Journal of Dairy Science in August, so it’s out there for people to view. And, excuse me in September, and they put a lot of work into this and combined into a lot of numbers and, or there’s so much to dig into and understand with it.
But a lot of it comes back to meeting that cow’s nutrient needs that very first day. For example, they had New Zealand and Australia by themselves as Oceania. And they had the biggest losses for subclinical ketosis. So we think of those cows is freshening on to grass and they’re just not able to meet their energy needs. Now, exactly how they measured subclinical.
I don’t know what level of bleeding did they do the cows and so forth. So, you know, there’s all of that to take into account. But you look at it, things like, milk fever, things that we just don’t think about anymore in this country. In other countries where they don’t have dry periods or dry periods, or they just let the cow walk down the road.
Some of these problems come back up.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth
There’s so many interesting things in this study, looking at the value of milk, the highest value per mil is actually in Africa. But yet the people aren’t able to buy the product. And there’s different nutritional challenges that come up in different areas. So just a very interesting article.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. And I think one of the things that kind of prompted me to want to discuss this with you on a podcast so. The countries that have the biggest overall annual losses. So India checked in a number one with $12 billion, which, I mean, there’s a lot of cows in India.
Don’t necessarily make a whole lot of milk per cow. However, the U.S. checked in at $8 billion annual, China at $5 billion. Let’s dive into that $8 billion domestically, for us here in the U S. I was digging up some articles online and, and they were all pretty consistent.
And the sense that if you ranked the diseases by economic impact or loss to the industry, good old mastitis comes up number one in the U.S. And you know, that’s looking at clinical and subclinical together, followed by lameness, and then reproductive disorders such as metritis and retained placenta.
And then you get down to number four on the list, the metabolic diseases, the ketosis, milk fever, DAs. So a little bit different shakedown here in the U.S. But I, I’d like to jump up to that number one on the list, the mastitis part. Right? I mean, there’s a lot that go, that can go into a cow getting mastitis, right? Bacterial, viral.
And then the economic impact, obviously you have treatment costs, nope discarding, loss of production, you know, for the rest of that lactation, a lot of times. Just your thoughts on that, that ranking mastitis, lameness, and reproductive disorders here in the U.S., and I’ll let you kind of elaborate there.
Dr. Larry Roth
Okay. Let’s do that. Let’s look at those in relation to the comment I made earlier that a lot of these disorders can trace back their origin to challenges the day of calving. So the first one was mastitis. And mastitis to me is saying that the teen is unable to defend itself against invading agents. Why would that be?
Certainly it could be due to sanitation, what’s the level of pathogens in the environment. But we also know that cows who have milk fever, or more importantly subclinical milk fever, later on have higher incidence of mastitis, showing that there’s a relationship between subclinical milk fever or a calcium shortage and immune function.
So right there, we’re not able to beat the cows calcium needs. And if she has short on dry matter intake, even once we get several days out, she’s not meeting her calcium needs and then she’s going to be more likely to have mastitis. So that that’s where that comes into play. What the, what is kind of interesting is lameness. And we can trace lameness back to so many different things.
It isn’t just acidosis or foundry and it’s the environment, it’s cement, so many different things. But, again, I think there’s a digestive origin there. If we’re feeding too high of an energy diet, again, just not beating her knees, she may be more prone to some laminitis and, you know, there’s so many things that come into play with hoof trimming and so forth.
Scott Zehr
Oh, hoof trimming, genetics, structure of the leg, heel angle, everything, you know, there’s a lot. And you mentioned the flooring, right? Concrete. Is it grouped well and they’re slipping? What are the beds like? There’s a lot to unpack in that conversation. And I think, we see a lot of different farms across the country and, there’s a lot of work being done on dairies to manage things like the cleanliness of the freshening pen, the stalls. The deep bedded sand, right?
I appreciate you bringing in the nutrition component to it because it’s never just one thing. If I’ve learned anything in the 10, 11 years I’ve worked on in the professional space and the dairy industry, I’ve never discovered one thing is the single smoking gun in any of these, herds that I’ve ever been on. Diving into number three, we got the reproductive disorders, metritis, RPs, talk to us from a nutritional perspective.
Dr. Larry Roth
All right. Yeah. I mean, it comes back to, to me as simple as the BRITT hypothesis. If the cow is slow on taking off from lactation, she’s got immune challenges going on. We have glucose taken away to keep her alive, keep her functioning, keep her trying to make lactose.
And the last need to be met is going to be reproduction. The metritis, be it subclinical or clinical, again, to me, the immune system isn’t able to defend the reproductive tract. We can talk about retained placentas, correlations between that and immune function. Another one’s the ovarian cysts.
There’s a mycotoxin element to ovarian cysts. But there’s also an element of, I don’t want to say poor nutrition, but under nutrition, because the cow is being fed right? But is she consuming it up? And we go back again to challenges day one. We go back to rumen challenges. And she may be consuming it up, but the nutrients are going to other things.
What are the most interesting items in this article is figure two, which appears on page 69, 50, but they’ve got the good old circle graph and they got all of these different metabolic disorders. And then they got lines going between the disorders. And they vary by thickness and by color indicating the level of relationship between the two. Kind of interesting.
If you look at, Yoni’s, when was the last time we really talked about Yoni’s? The biggest thing that it is related to is Lemonida. You know, we bring in things like milk fever. Very strong relation that comes over to calving difficulties, subclinical ketosis, very strong relation to milk fever, subclinical milk fever.
So again, anything that slows the cow off in increasing it for feed intake is going to lead to a host of challenges. And then we look at how interrelated they are. And the interesting thing about Rasmussen et al, was they tried to take into account the comorbidities. Using different studies and doing statistics and so forth for that.
So, I think need to make that kind of comment that they are trying to take comorbidities into play. But, again, sometimes we overthink things, Scott. Is the cow comfortable? Is she could consuming feed, second lactation and greater? Are we meeting her calcium needs? Is the rumen functioning right?
You do those things right there. Easy for me to say, you do those things right. She’s going to take off in feed intake. She’s going to take off the milk production. She’s going to get bred on a timely basis and stay pregnant, and life is good. So to me, this study brings us back to the importance of the dry period, and those first three weeks of lactation. And especially day one.
Scott Zehr
It never fails. If, you’re looking to figure out transition issues, if you’re looking to figure out reproductive, I’m going to say, lack of reproductive efficiency at service one, it’s the dry period. You know, it all starts, before you see the outcomes.
So speaking of where things begin, I’m looking at number five on the top list of things impacting US dairymen, bovine respiratory disease. So typically we’re going to see that in calves, right? But, you have, it can affect adult cows, obviously. But on the calf side in particular, you have a saying day one, week one, month one.
And that’s really where BRD is going to have the biggest impact, not just on that animal, but for the rest of her life. Right? So we’re looking at decreased growth rates, lower milk yield, and obviously in bad cases, these cattle die or are euthanized. So, talk to us a little about, BRD and, again, where we can speak to that nutritionally.
Dr. Larry Roth
You bet. So again, whatever happens to that calf from the moment it enters the world. And yeah, we get a little bit of respiratory and do we let that fire linger? Might be just a smoldering fire or do we go in and we put it out with a big fire extinguisher?
Because the basic thing is this, if we reduce the animal’s lung capacity as a calf. Becomes a mature cow, uses its lungs for cooling. So she freshens on that hot July day. She’s dependent upon her impaired lungs. And maybe they’re just reducing capacity by 5%, we’ve reduced her ability number one to cool herself, number two to bring in oxygen for metabolism.
And, I think sometimes we forget about just the importance of having oxygen to do metabolism. And what’s interesting is in this top 12 list, respiratory does not appear at any place. But, respiratory is related to probably each one of the disorders that are listed. bBcause again, we got to have oxygen for basic physiological processes.
And again, if the animal is hot and cools herself with her lungs, and we reduce that ability to cool herself, she’s going to be more prone to have some of these disorders. So, again, Scott, I think one of the things that I find so interesting, the figure that showed the interrelationship between the disorders, and then to think about the relationships to items that didn’t make the list. So, it’s all quite interesting.
Scott Zehr
Well, it’s all connected, right? You and I were on a dairy a couple of years ago that where, seeing some lung lesions in calves and they were scoring and we’re looking at it. And your comment that day to the dairyman and to myself was, if we take care of the gut health, the lung health will get better. It’s all connected.
Dr. Larry Roth
Absolutely.
Scott Zehr
Speaking of mycotoxins, if you’re listening to this episode, the Monday that this episode airs, we are going to be discussing our mycotoxin report. So we’re going to be looking at some 2024 corn silage samples in a couple of weeks. Anything that’s been coming in through the lab and hopefully you guys can tune in for that one.
And Larry, just quickly, what would be some of the advantages to understanding what the toxin levels are going into the plant?
Dr. Larry Roth
Scott, we’ve got a thousand tons of corn silage, a hundred thousand tons of corn silage, whatever. That’s inventory and we need to know if that’s a clean inventory, if it’s got a lot of starch to it, a lot of energy.
That determines a lot about what our feeding program is going to be for the next year from a nutrition standpoint. It also determines, do we have a clean inventory? Or do we need to be prepared for some challenges? So if we’re sampling our corn forage going into storage, we’re already ahead of the game for when we get into feeding it.
Why wait three months or a month until we start feeding that corn solids and then say, “Oh my God, we got all kinds of mycotoxins. What are we going to do?” If we know what we have in terms of feed hygiene and nutrition going into the pile, into storage, we know what we’re going to have coming out. And coming out it’s only going to be worse than what it was going in. So we need to know a starting point so we can put our game plan together.
Scott Zehr
You made a great point and I’ll just piggyback off what you said by one of the things that I like about sampling the corn as it’s going in. And I know for most of the country at this point harvest is over. So think about next year, is then when we do sample after the fact, we can see what changes happened and we can tell a lot about how well the stuff was ensiled by what toxins may have grown during storage.
So with that, if anybody would like to take advantage of our sampling program, email us, [email protected].
And so what’d we do, Larry? We actually did a better job with the gut health and the lungs, the lung scores, seem to improve. So, you know, just going back to the top of the list, mastitis, ketosis, those things, we talk about in Agrarian that, we exist to help others succeed. What’s our place in this conversation? Right. Where do we fit?
Dr. Larry Roth
We’ve kind of made our reputation on the ability to help defend and protect against mycotoxins. What do mycotoxins do? They impair physiology of the animal. So the animal now is having to divert nutrients from productive purposes.
And shall we say defensive purposes to try to resolve this mycotoxin related inflammation. Well, she’s got other challenges going on. She may be attacked by respiratory organisms, digestive pathogens. But she’s not able to defend herself against those. And so then we start to see these other disorders show up.
If the cow has an impaired liver due to mycotoxin related inflammation, she’s going to be more prone to ketosis, be it clinical or subclinical. The liver is the body’s biochemical factory. And if our factory is in disrepair, everything related to her physiology is going to suffer. So I look at mycotoxins as being the foundation to helping the cow defend and protect herself against all of these other issues. I mean, no place on this list, Scott, is there mycotoxicosis, all right?
Scott Zehr
Right.
Dr. Larry Roth
But we can make the case that mycotoxins are related to each one of these items. All right. If the cow is under mycotoxin attack, her use of calcium is going to be altered. If the cow is under mycotoxin attack, she doesn’t have as much energy or more specifically glucose to make milk, fuel the immune system, do other physiological processes.
She’s more likely to fall into clinical or subclinical ketosis. Take the mastitis and the metritis, she’s dealing with mycotoxin attack. We don’t have the nutrients to support the immune system or, helping to resolve some of these reproductive related challenges. So let’s think about building a strong foundation in the cow, resolve the mycotoxin situation, help her be prepared for her most challenging day of the year, and then recover from that. And then I think these major metabolic disorders start to go down.
Scott Zehr
Larry, when you think about things, there’s a cause and effect to everything that happens within the dairy, within a dairy cow, within a beef cow, but focusing more on the dairy side, like we are today. It kind of makes me questio, what, If you would, the tolerance level of mycotoxins, on an individual cow basis, right? So a lot of times we think of, well, we test the TMR and it’s less than one PPM of DON and it’s less than a hundred parts per billion of zearalenone.
That’s probably not causing any issues. But if we’re still dealing with cows that are having issues such as increased somatic cell or clinical mastitis, some milk fever, some ketosis subclinical, if you would. I just wonder, if 70 percent of the cows aren’t really affected by those levels, but 30 percent are, what’s that hidden cost there to that dairyman?
Dr. Larry Roth
Right. I love how you said that a tolerance basis. And so what instantly went to my mind was tolerance basis reflected the mentality of the dairy producer and the nutritionist. How willing are they to tolerate the mycotoxins or tolerate the damage that’s occurring to the cow? You came back and you talked about resistance. Okay.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth
Yeah. What I’m going to define is resistant.
Scott Zehr
Right.
Dr. Larry Roth
So number one, we have to think from a human perspective, what level of mycotoxins and their damage are we willing to tolerate before we do something to help defend and protect the cow? Very noted nutritionist. Talk to three parts per million of DON. We know that’s having an impact on the cow.
“The cows are doing all right.” Scott, we’ve got our research study. There’s other research studies that show at that level of DON, you’re losing milk, but are we willing to tolerate that? Then let’s bring that back to the cows resistance, okay? So I’m, maybe I’m saying tomato, tomato, you came back to the cows ability. I’m going to say to resist the mycotoxins.
If she’s dealing with some of these disorders and her immune system is trying to resolve this inflammation, she’s going to be more susceptible to these diseases, or these diseases have lowered her ability to resist. So it’s all comes into play. The more challenges that she has to deal with, be it overcrowding, be it subclinical ketosis.
She didn’t take off like she ought to because the post rectal pain was overcrowded. Her ability to resist mycotoxin attack has been reduced. So all of this comes into play. And I think the question becomes, how willing are we as the producer or the nutritionist, how willing are we to tolerate that risk that the cow is going through?
How willing are we to let her be at risk? Because if she’s at risk, her ability to resist has been lowered. Her ability to resist these different diseases has been reduced as well. And again, I keep coming back to how interrelated all of these challenges are.
Scott Zehr
I’m thinking of the bottom 20 to 25% of the herd that has been affected by BBD as a calf or scours.
Dr. Larry Roth
Yep.
Scott Zehr
I’m thinking of the bottom 20, 25% of the herd that has had some case of mastitis. And I’ve seen a lot of dairy comp records in my day. I mean, 20 percent of the herd be affected by mastitis is not a high number by any means. I’m thinking of the five to 8 percent of the cows that have been affected by clinical ketosis or clinical milk fever. And some studies show up to 50 percent of the herd that’s affected by subclinical milk fever.
Boy, we just talked about a lot of cows, you know? If you’re one of these guys that have 20 to 25 percent of your animals that have had some sort of challenge along the way, I could see where assisting them with DTX, helping them fight that mycotoxin challenge. You’re going to get a bigger bang for your buck there.
So maybe in a lower toxin environment, let’s say maybe the TMR is only running, Larry 500 parts per billion of DON, which we would consider relatively low, low levels. Maybe on the very best cows that have never had an issue, they’re going to sail right along through there. But is there an opportunity there to feed some of these animals or even feed the herd and start cutting into the number of subsequent metabolic disorders. Subsequent, DA’s, mastitis cases, because we’re helping that animal.
Dr. Larry Roth
You bet. The more on the edge of the knife that the cow is, the more susceptible she’s going to be to the reduced mycotoxin levels. Man, you know what? Everything’s great at this dairy. They’ve got excellent management. Cows are fed consistently. Excellent rations. Cows aren’t overcrowded. All of the things are done right. They can probably tolerate a higher level of mycotoxins. But cows that are overcrowded, they’re not fed on a consistent basis, they’re going to be more susceptible to challenges at a lower level of mycotoxins.
They’re going to, you’re probably going to see a higher incidence of these diseases. Or if these diseases are going on, they have made the cow more susceptible to reduce mycotoxin levels. So that, that’s where Scott, you know, you mentioned 500 parts per billion, 0.5 parts per million, same thing. We would tend to call that at a medium risk.
Scott Zehr
Yep.
Dr. Larry Roth
And so if a cow was having to deal with all of these other issues, she may be spun out of control by 0.5 part per million DON. Whereas the other cow where everything is done right, there’s no overcrowding, there’s minimal challenges put on this cow, she can tolerate a much higher level of mycotoxin, and you’re probably going to see fewer of these different diseases.
So again, I just come back to how interrelated all of this is. That’s why when people ask about, well, what level of mycotoxin do I need to be concerned about? Well, I don’t know. Because what all else is going on with the cow? How many other challenges is she dealing with? The more challenges she’s got to deal with, the lower her threshold is for mycotoxins.
Scott Zehr
Well, I think you wrap that up really well, Larry. I appreciate you taking time out of your day today to visit with us about some of these disease challenges we have on U.S. dairies and abroad. And, where Agrarian’s place is within that conversation.
So again, we do really believe we exist to help others succeed. So if you’d like to reach out with any questions, we’re here for you. Again, that’s [email protected]. Email me and we’ll help you out. So we thank everybody for tuning in. If you’d like the show, subscribe and share it with your friends. And we will talk to everybody next week. Thank you.
Dr. Larry Roth
Thank you, Scott.
