Are mycotoxins really limiting performance, or is something else happening? In episode 49 of Ruminate This, we tackle common questions from dairy professionals. When should you consider an immune enhancement product? How can you tell if toxins are the hidden culprit? Why is listening to your cows might be the best diagnostic tool you have. Pinpointing and solving nutrition challenges takes science, intuition, and experience. Agrarian Solutions brings all three to the table.
Ready to take a closer look at what the cows you are feeding might be telling you? Reach out to [email protected] to connect with our team.
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Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I am your host, Scott Zehr. And today I am going to be talking to you folks about some of the common questions I get in the field. And in relation to cattle health in relation to mycotoxins. I’m gonna dive right in.
But first, I would though, want to make mention of the fact that we are wrapping up the end of June. You know, June is Dairy Month and I hope everybody had a good dairy month. I know, locally, we had an awesome dairy parade here in Watertown, New York and it’s great to see so many people come out and support the local dairy industry.
With that, I do want to kind of dive into today’s topic and, you know, as I get a chance to go out on Dairy farms across the Northeast especially, I get a lot of these questions that keep coming up and, you know, some of this stuff we’ve already covered in different episodes here on Ruminate This. However, the questions do come up enough that I think it’s probably worth visiting some of these questions.
So the questions from the field. I think the number one question that I get from the field is, “Hey, Scott, you know, we, we did the sampling. The toxins are low. So do we really need to be feeding a mycotoxin mitigation product?”
So that’s actually probably a two part question. So we did a sample. The toxins are low. So, question number one is, why did we take a sample? What suspicion is it part of a routine mycotoxin sampling program like we offer here at Agrarian Solutions?
Or were you thinking that maybe there’s an issue that’s mycotoxin related because you have, you know, looked at every other option and just couldn’t figure out what is causing an issue. So the sample comes back, it’s low. So what’s the definition of low? You know, it’s a little bit subjective, but if you look on our toxin assay, we’re gonna say less than one ppm DON is probably considered low.
Another question would be, did we have multiple mycotoxins present? Were they all low? What is the cumulative effect of two or three or even four different mycotoxins, all at low risk levels on the assay report? And, and so I, come back to why did we take the sample in the first place?
Again, if it’s routine, we’re not feeding anything, we’re happy with our metrics that we, we measure like repro, like milk production components, those sorts of things. You know, maybe these cows are doing a good enough job on their own, mitigating the negative effects of mycotoxins.
But then I come back to this question of if the reason we sampled is because we can’t put our finger on what is maybe the issue. At the end of the day, mycotoxins cause inflammation, right?
So anytime we have an inflammatory response going on because of mycotoxins or any other inflammation causing pathogen, virus, what have you. We are taking nutrients away from productive purposes. We’ve heard Dr. Larry Roth say this a bunch of times, but that’s what’s happening.
It takes an incredible amount of glucose to mount a full fledged immune response inside that animal to take care of even a little bit of damage caused by mycotoxins. So when I get this question, I come back to again, folks, I can’t stress it enough. Why did we take the sample? If we feel like we’re missing something, we’ve crossed our T’s, we’ve dotted our i’s, I like to say if two plus two doesn’t equal four anymore, when we’re diagnosing what the issue is, it probably is mycotoxins.
And keep in mind too that mycotoxins are not distributed evenly in the field. They’re not distributed evenly in the bunk. We could take a sample of a corn silage pile or a TMR sample today and get a different number than we get next week. So there is value in having those routine sampling. That’s why we promote it. But one test shouldn’t confirm or deny the need for a mycotoxin mitigation product.
Now, when we get into talking about mycotoxin mitigation, you’ve all heard us talk here on this platform before binders versus our approach with DTX, and I would say if, if you’re considering a binder please go look at some episodes that we’ve done, in particular episode two and episode three, where we talk about the DTX research and we dive into, I think it’s episode four or five, we dive into some of the unintended collateral damage caused by your traditional binders.
So one of the next questions I get a lot is “do I really need an immune enhancement product?” And there’s a lot of different products out there that claim to enhance the immune system, modulate the immune system, you know, all these different terminologies.
I really struggle with this one, I’ll be honest. Because of a number of reasons. So one, what we see when we eliminate the mycotoxin challenge when we introduce DTX into a ratio, is that once we remove this inflammation from mycotoxins, even at a low level, we see improved, I would say health events.
We do see less issues around calving. We see less mastitis. We see lower somatic cell count. So when I get into this conversation on farm, I think the question comes back to do we have a situation that is, is chronic or ongoing where we have a constant inflammation source?
So for example you know, imagine we’re feeding DTX, right? We’ve eliminated that mycotoxin challenge. But we’re still seeing, you know, maybe poor, signs of poor immune function. A case in point would be, I was recently on a dairy that’s using you know, solids for betting, so manure, waste betting. And it’s maybe not always as dry as it should be.
So I think there’s a, maybe a challenge there for somatic cells, they do have elevated somatic cell count. And so I, I think this, these cows are just constantly under a barrage of challenges from this, this compost bedding, if you would, this manure, solid bedding, and they have just a, a constant, elevated demand on the immune system.
I think situationally with something like that there might be a spot for, say a biocycle product that we carry here at Agrarian, to where we’re just trying to give that immune system that little extra umph, that little extra, you know help to deal with that constant source of inflammation.
And I’m gonna preface this, all of that by saying that I would rather see us eliminate the cause of the inflammation. So if it’s manure solids, bedding, and we have a better way to do it, let’s figure that out first. Right? Let’s try to eliminate the source that’s always the best option.
Even in mycotoxin mitigation I know there’s, there’s folks out on the west coast especially, where we feed a lot of different ingredients. I mean, we can’t always just throw our corn, corn silage pile, you know, away. Let it compost down because it’s high mycotoxins. I get that.
But there’s times where maybe we’re feeding a wet brewer’s grain or we’re feeding some apple promise and it tends they, they can be of mycotoxins and we might be better off eliminating the feed similar to eliminating the cause of that inflammation, our solids bedding.
But we live in a very imperfect world, especially in the dairy industry. So, chances are we’re probably gonna have to work through that manure solids. Whatever the situation is, we can’t get it dry enough. We’re just gonna have to deal with it.
So I, I think that’s a, a good opportunity to look, you know, how can we support that cow, maybe with like a biocycle, or if we’re having manure solids issues and mycotoxins we would think Biocycle plus. I think overwhelmingly the question that I get, the question that my colleague Chad Christensen gets, Caroline, Dr. Roth, how do we really know mycotoxins are the issue?
And I, I think we’ve all been down this road. I have personally, we introduce a product, a feed additive. Maybe it’s a binder. I hope not. But maybe it’s DTX. Right? And we start feeding it and we don’t really know if anything has changed.
Maybe we, we see marginal improvement, but it can also be explained away because of other things on the farm going on or just, you know, seasonality, that kind of thing. There’s two things that we know, for sure. Mycotoxins will disrupt that cow. They will cause inflammation and that will cause an immune response and everything that goes with an immune response in a dairy cow or any cow.
So that’s the first thing we definitely know. The other side of that is we know through our data. Through our research. Again, DTX is the most researched mycotoxin mitigation product as far as I’m concerned, or as far as I’m aware, in the world.
We know that if we’re feeding DTX, we’re really taking that mycotoxin challenge off the table. So, I would almost say in a lot of cases, we’re able to just kind of take that worry right out of play. So when we are trying to diagnose a challenge, we don’t have to start with mycotoxins.
We can start somewhere else. And the value of that is the time it takes us to get, you know, to a potential solution that’s robbing us of profitability or robbing us of even if it’s just a, you know, an extra five, 10 cents per cow per day. If we don’t have to start with mycotoxins or even have to even consider that, we can go right to something else.
So one of the other questions I get in the field is binders. Do binders have a place? If I’m sitting here saying that binders are not the solution for mycotoxin mitigation, these products were created for something, what were they created for? And what I would tell you that these products that rely on maybe like a clay or a yeast cell wall as their active ingredient to combat toxins, they were created for a specific toxin.
They were created to combat aflatoxin. And they work great for combating aflatoxin. We at Agrarian are gonna be the first people to tell you if you’re dealing with an aflatoxin issue, don’t take the slightest chance of having your milk rejected because aflatoxin is in the milk.
Go ahead, get the binder in there. Get it taken care of, work through that challenge, and as soon as that aflatoxin is gone, get rid of the binder because it is going to bind up good stuff that those cows need.
One of the other questions I get: how is it that nobody’s ever heard of us? And I, I always laugh at that question a little bit. So just to give you guys a little history there, for a number of years Agrarian spent their time back in the early nineties preaching this story that mycotoxins caused issues. We were working more in poultry at the time.
But actually it was one of the stud companies that sought us out. And so for years we marketed our products exclusively through the stud company Select Sires. However over time, as farms have evolved, as nutritionists have changed kind of their ways of what goes into that cow and what doesn’t go into that cow.
I mean, back in the day we used to feed a lot of products like around the barn. I can remember as a kid I’d have a five gallon bucket or a 10 quart bucket, and I would put a dose of something in front of the cows every day. We no longer really need to do that. Right? And it’s not even practical in today’s modern dairy farming practices.
So that’s probably why the nutrition world is, is a little bit late to the game of getting to know us. It’s really been over the last four years that we have started working with feed mills and nutritionists more in a direct fashion to make the ease of feeding a mycotoxin mitigation product like DTX just simple and clean coming right in your concentrate you buy from the feed company.
So those are probably the big questions that I get on a regular basis. Just wanted to take a minute. Answer some of those questions, get that out there. If you guys have any questions you want to bring to Ruminate This, our email is [email protected]. Just put questions in your heading and we will get those answered here on the platform as well.
So with that, I appreciate everybody tuning into this episode of Ruminate This. Be sure to check out our new website too. It is www.agrariansolutions.com and we have a new makeover on our website. I think you guys will really enjoy it. You can catch all the previous episodes of Ruminate This on there as well.
A lot of good stuff, a lot of good customer testimonials. If you need to leave a question for Caroline and she’ll be happy to get back to you as well. Thank you everybody, and we’ll talk again soon.
