Disbudding is performed on nearly 94% of U.S. dairy farms. Dr. Alycia Drwencke, PhD, Tucker Lab Member at the University of California, Davis, shares research comparing methods and why proper pain management requires both a local block and NSAID.
She also discusses the impact of disbudding on calf behavior, feeding, and performance, and the role of polled genetics to reduce stress.
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Scott Zehr
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And today I’m going to be joined by one of my friends, somebody I’m proud to call a friend a YDLI-12 alumni just like me. Dr… I think that’s got’s such a great ring to it. I’m so proud of you, Dr. Alicia Drwencke.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Thank you, Scott.
Scott Zehr
So Alicia, I want to start by first saying thanks for coming on Ruminate this. I’m, I’m excited to dive into what we’re gonna talk about today, which is your research project in calf pain management during like the horning, that sort of thing. But before we do, let’s give everybody a little bit of a backstory of who you are, where you’re at in the world, what have you been doing
and then I’ll let you dive into what your research was on to your PhD.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Perfect. Yeah, so a little bit of background on myself. I originally am from Michigan. So I spent a majority of my young adulthood there and did my undergrad at Michigan State University in the animal science department. And kind of throughout my undergrad was one of those people that thought I wanted to go to vet school and decided that that wasn’t actually the best fit for me.
So from there, I chose to go to graduate school, and first I received a master’s in animal biology from the University of California Davis. So when I first moved there, it was kind of the exciting thing to get out of the Midwest and go to the west coast. And I studied heat stress in dairy cattle.
From there I spent about two years working for Cornell Cooperative Extension in the southwest New York region. So just kind of bouncing back and forth across the US. And after about two years with Cornell, I chose to go back and pursue my PhD. Again, at the University of California Davis focusing on calf behavior and welfare, specifically, as you mentioned around disbudding, and I completed that in March.
And recently started a position with Novus International as a technical services specialist, working with their cows program. So excited to talk more about my research. Of course, I’m very passionate about it, so I always appreciate when I have the opportunity to speak a little bit more about it.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. And so, you know, we’ve talked in the past at different conferences we’ve been at about some of the things that you guys saw during your research study. And I think where I wanna start with this is walk us through like just the simple pros and cons, right? Of disbudding.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah, so I guess one of the things that I kind of like to talk about first when I’m talking about disbudding is that it’s very common in the US, which probably isn’t surprising to you or any of the listeners. It occurs on about 94% of farms in the United States. And there’s two kind of primary methods that farms are using to perform this procedure.
One is with a hot iron that creates a heat burn to prevent horn growth. And then the second is with caustic paste. And caustic paste creates a chemical burn to prevent horn growth. And of course, we also have kind of the alternative of not doing this procedure altogether. Either by using polled genetics or by leaving cattle horned.
But there are some different conversations to be had around kind of whether we do this procedure at all or if we use kind of some of these alternatives. But yeah, so kind of high level pros and cons. Of course, anytime that you do perform the disbudding procedure it is going to cause pain for the calves.
And so if we can start to utilize things like polled genetics, that is going to be best from the calf’s perspective. And it’s also gonna be easier on the humans, right? We don’t have to actually spend the time to go out and do this procedure. We don’t have to provide pain relief because we just don’t have to do it at all. So it’s less stressful.
Scott Zehr
Well, it’s one less thing.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah, exactly. Less stress on the calves. Less stress on the humans for sure.
Scott Zehr
Okay. I mean 90, would you say 94% of the animals are being de-horned, right? In the US. So let’s talk about that side of it. So one like gouging has gone away completely. Right? Hopefully.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
It is supposed to not be conducted with the big
Scott Zehr
breaker, right?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah. It’s not supposed to be occurring anymore. That is no longer allowed under the national Milk FARM program.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
We do see some instances where firms will use that as a cleanup method. So later in life if they have horn regrowth, we do see some farms use kind of the scooping. But that should not be anybody’s primary method of disbudding. So if anybody’s listening, doing that, maybe move away from that.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. So now coming down to the hot iron burn or the chemical burn. Right? I’ve had experience with both on my dad’s farm. Honestly, I, I always, and this is just my own brain, but I always felt like the hot iron was maybe a little better in the sense that like, I’ve been burned before and I’ve been chemically burned before. And the chemical burn seems to hurt a hell of a lot worse. So is that what you guys saw in the calves?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah. No, that’s a great point. And I am interested or intrigued by your perspective. ‘Cause I feel like a lot of times I hear the opposite from folks where they think the paste is actually better for the calves. And because there’s been such a strong perception that the paste is better, we’ve seen that it’s become much more common in the US.
But until kind of my PhD, we had very little research that was actually conducted on this method of disbudding and very few research projects that had compared hot iron to caustic paste in kind of an apples to apples way I’ll say. And ultimately what I found throughout my PhD is that you are actually very much correct that the hot iron is better from the calf’s perspective in terms of pain and healing.
So we are better able to mitigate the pain associated with the hot iron because when we provide pain relief, it’s effective during the time when we’re doing the procedure. But for the paste it continues to burn for a very long period of time, and we don’t actually know how long it continues to burn for.
So if you think about it, it’s wet when you put it on and it continues to absorb into the skin for multiple hours and continues to create that burning sensation. And so in a lot of instances, even if you’re giving a local block or a NSAID for pain relief, that’s gonna wear off, while that caustic paste is still burning.
So the hot iron, we’re better able to manage the pain associated with the procedure. But then we also see that the wounds from the hot iron heal twice as fast as those from the caustic paste. So on average, they, a new layer of skin is formed in seven to nine weeks from a hot iron, and for caustic paste it takes 14 to 18 weeks.
Scott Zehr
Just hearing that explanation like to me again, it makes perfect sense. Like you burn your hand and remove the heat source. Yeah. It’s sore for a day. You know, I burned my finger actually two nights ago, right here, making some maple pecans. But it was fine the next day.
But, I’ve spilled acid. I, I had a, I had some really bad chlorine burns on my hands when I was running my catering business. My hands hurt for two days, two to three days. Like it was, it sucked.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
So I guess that, to me that makes perfect sense and it’s like, you know, what a shocker. Common sense, you know, wins the day. What I’m curious, like, did you guys look at intakes on these calves?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
We, and…
Scott Zehr
Then under the two different yeah, strategies.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
We didn’t necessarily look at intake. We did look at average daily gain in one of my experiments. But we did not see any differences between that experiment with just caustic paste versus non despotic controls, but we didn’t see any differences in average daily gain.
But one of the things that I think that feeds into that is that the animals in my experiment and in many experiments were kind of on a limit fed milk diet. So they were getting about six liters of milk per day which we know is limit feeding milk for calves. So it would be interesting to look at those results in a situation where the, the calves are being fed a higher plane of milk. So something more like the 8, 10, 12 liters of milk per day that we know calves will choose to consume very readily.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. What about in the way of any other like sicknesses?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
You know, we, because I, I guess my, the basis of my question is I’m, I’m thinking through like, obviously we created a stress, there’s an immune response. Did we see any other secondary things pop up in either group at a more prevalent rate?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah, it’s a good question. And for the project where I compared both methods, we did have a pretty high prevalence in all of the calves for sickness and disease. We didn’t see really many infections specific to the horn bud. But we did see pretty high rates of sickness overall within our population.
And I think that kind of goes back again to these calves are in a limit fed situation. They were all individually housed. You know, they’re experiencing pain from disbudding, this was also during the summer, so we add the heat component into it.
So those calves were under a lot of stressors, so it was kind of hard to disentangle, is it the whole system? Is it specific to the disbudding method? But one thing I can speak to is that we collected a measure of pain that is called basically evoked pain or sensitivity, where we measured basically how much force can we apply around the wound before the calf responds. So you can maybe think of this for yourself.
Like when you’ve had those burns on your hand, if you touch it, you are gonna pull away much sooner than the times when you don’t have the burn on your hand. Right? And so we basically do that with the calves and like measure and quantify how much force can be applied before they respond. And we found that…
Scott Zehr
We call, we call that the hertz donut method. It’s when you, when you hit Hertz donut. So,
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah, exactly. And we found that for both the Hot Iron and the Caustic Paste, they had similar responses to that evoked response, that sensitivity. But what the difference was is that because the hot iron heals so much faster, that evoked pain goes away much sooner for those calves.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
So I think that when we start to think about kind of some of these feeding questions that you’re asking about and what are the potential effects on that, I think that’s really where it could play in. But unfortunately, our experiment just didn’t have quite the right setup. But if we’re thinking about especially like milk feeding, for example, and if they’re feeding out of a bottle.
We know that calves do a lot of head butting, right? Even when they’re feeding out of a bottle. So if they’re experiencing this evoked pain when they’re doing that headbutting, they’re likely going to hit their heads on something and respond more frequently with that pain response.
But, so I think that would be something to also look at more as well is kind of, we found this evoked pain. It’s similar for both methods, but how does that then translate to auto feeders, for example, or yeah, some other housing and management systems. And how does that affect their intake in those settings?
Scott Zehr
I’ve seen it, right? I mean, I’ve fed calves enough too to, to see that even drinking out of a bucket, you know, they’ll smash their head, they jolt back. To your point, right? It’d be cool to look at and as, as my colleague, Dr. Roth likes to remind everybody the, the perfect research trial has never been done. And so I guess that’s why we have to keep doing research.
But, I think that’s a big deal though. If you, I mean, just thinking about it practically, right? So if we’re healing that wound up quicker, like, doesn’t it stand a reason they’re going to want to eat quicker? They’re going to eat more quicker. You know, so it, it’d be really interesting, like you said, to, to look at that from a, a non-limited diet to where they, you know, maybe not truly adlib, but that eight to 10 liter diet. To see if there’d be any difference there.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
And one thing that I didn’t necessarily look at, but my colleague, she used the like ear tag behavior monitors and she found this was with hot iron disbudding versus a non deputed animal for three weeks after the procedure the calves spent less time ruminating when they were desbudded, so I would expect we would see a similar response for the caustic paste and that that behavioral response may persist for longer since we see that the wounds last longer.
So we do see kind of some of those feeding behaviors altered in different experiments. So, I think there’s definitely more questions to be asked. But I definitely agree that reason would stand to suggest that like calves are experiencing pain on their head that’s going to alter their feeding behavior.
And they’re going to try to avoid that pain, right? So the more that we can do to, a, reduce the need for this procedure by using things like pulled genetics, but then b, also use methods that are going to heal faster. So using the hot iron and then of course giving pain relief at the time of the procedure. All of those are gonna be beneficial for the calves.
Scott Zehr
Alicia, do you think that for the dairy farms out there that are using paste now because of maybe the perceived convenience or you know, whatever like do you think this would have the ability to help change their perspective on this and maybe give them reason to think about going back to the hot iron?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah, I definitely think that it does. And I can totally appreciate from, you know, the farms out there that are using paste. It is objectively pretty easy to like, walk by, put on some paste, not think about it anymore. But I think that that is kind of making the assumption that we don’t need to provide the same level of pain relief for the calves that we do for the hot iron. And so in reality, we should be providing pain relief to those calves. So the labor component theoretically, if we’re following best practice should be pretty similar.
Scott Zehr
But that’s a good point.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah. And I have, I personally have seen this data actually change producer’s minds, which I thought was very touching. So the farm that I conducted one of my experiments on was a commercial dairy in the central Valley of California. And they milk about 3000 cows. And all of this hot iron versus paste research was conducted on their facility. And they were a farm who had been using hot iron. The dairyman himself used to have to do that chore when he was growing up and he hated it.
And so he switched to paste because he thought that it was much better for the calves, that it was less painful, and that ultimately he was doing a very kind things for the calves which I totally appreciate. And so when I was conducting my research and I finished it up and showed him the results and showed him how much longer it took for the wounds to heal and show that there were similar levels of pain for the calves, he actually switched back.
And I was able to help him kind of do some training with his employees, show them how to do best pain management practices and kind of work through that transition back to the iron. Also talk about some of the practical things like for example, some irons require a plugin for electricity, but we also have the option to use like butane ones or some other gas powered ones, or like more portable options that are more feasible depending on your setup.
So, I do think and have seen personally this data change dairy producer’s minds and I’m always happy to talk through that with farms. If that’s something that is of interest to them, I’m definitely more than happy to have those conversations and kind of help troubleshoot if that’s of use for them or yeah, whatever is helpful for farms, I think we can see that this data will change their minds.
Scott Zehr
So with that, I will remind the audience that if you email us [email protected] I will be happy to put you in touch with Dr. Drwencke to go over some of that information with you or answer any questions you might have. And one other question I have, Alicia, too, is your research papers, can we make those available in the show notes for the audience as well?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Please. I would love that.
Scott Zehr
We’ll, we’ll do that. Yeah, we’ll definitely do that. You know, just a, a few other things that I wanted to, I guess bring up in terms of this. So do you have any data on like what percentage of polled genetics are out there currently? Was that part of your research?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
No, unfortunately it wasn’t. It was something we talked about. But I don’t currently have that information. It is something that I think the farm program is now asking about. So hopefully we’ll start to see that data come out. Previously, kind of the organization that had been collecting that data was the USDA and they did these like nom surveys.
So NHS that kind of looked at basically animal management. But it seems like those surveys are probably not gonna be conducted anymore. It would also be interesting to maybe talk to some of the semen companies to see if they have data on how much they’re actually getting pulled genetics used.
‘Cause I would expect they would have those numbers as well. But I haven’t personally seen any kind of comprehensive overview of “20% of animals are being bred” or anything like that? Yeah.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. I, I know in my time at premier Select hires especially the last two years, so say 18, 19, and for part 20, the request for, not just homozygous poll, but even, heterozygous poll bulls was, was increasing. The drawback at that time, and again, that’s seven years ago now, was you were probably gonna have to give up some net merit dollars to get that homozygous pole bull.
But I’d say by the time that I left in 2020, there were some homozygous bulls that were like really competing at the top end of the net merit spectrum. And I know there’s some milk cooperatives here in New York that have not made it mandatory, but strongly encouraged their producers to lean towards poll genetics and even a two a two which is a totally another discussion, obviously. But I think to get in a world where we’re dealing with all pulled genetics would be obviously most ideal.
I’d like to challenge any of the studs out there, any of the major studs to make that a bigger focus to try to make that happen before regulatory agencies say it’s this or nothing. Right. Yeah, and I know they’re working on it. You know, that’s obviously something that’s happening, but just like anything, it’s gonna take time to breed those elite metric bulls that are also homozygous pulled.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Yeah. And I know there has been, in my conversations with some of the geneticists and some of these companies, they have made huge improvements in terms of the merit. So I definitely think that the concerns about losing the quality or losing that merit is much less of a concern for a majority of the farms these days.
So I definitely would encourage folks to, you know, have a conversation with your semen rep and, kind of encourage them to start to sell you some of the pulled semen or, request it from those companies. Because in my conversations, I’ve found that the merit piece is much less of a concern. And the other fun fact is that the polled gene is actually dominant. So even if you’re not using exclusively polled if…
Scott Zehr:
Yeah.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
If any of the parents has the pulled gene, that’s gonna be the dominant trait. So it’s okay if you choose to use one versus the other, like definitely, you’re still gonna get the advantages. So definitely I think encourage folks to use, have those conversations and use polled genetics and that for a majority of farms, the merit conversation is much less of a concern now.
Scott Zehr
You know, and it’s not impossible. I mean, you look at what we’ve done with black Angus, the best example limbflex, so they’re, so limousines came from Europe. They were red and horned. And now we have brought them over. We’ve brought ’em up. There’s these limb flex sires, like Dr. Key Jim uses at, at Wolf Cattle Company and, and feedlot. And they’re black and pulled now.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
So it’s crazy what we can do.
Scott Zehr
It took a red horned animal and made ’em black and pulled, so. Alicia, if you could just provide us with maybe like a three point recap of, you know, what do you want the nutritionist listening right now, or the veterinary that’s listening right now, herd owner, manager that’s listening right now to take back with them and really consider?
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
So first I would say that disputing is painful regardless of the method that you’re using. Whether it’s hot iron or caustic paste, the calves are gonna experience pain. And so because of that, we should be following best practice for pain relief and using multiple methods of pain relief. So by that I mean the combination of a local block and an nsaid. And that should be provided at the time of the procedure.
So point number one, painful no matter what. Use pain relief. Point number two, if we can use the hot iron, that’s gonna be better for the calves. We’re better able to mitigate the pain at the time of the procedure. We have fewer kind of secondary repercussions, I’ll say because the paste, for example, can get rubbed off onto the calf’s head or onto other body parts and create secondary burns more readily.
And we also see that the wounds heal much faster for the hot iron. So again, kind of seven to nine weeks compared to 14 to 18 weeks. So use hot iron whenever we possibly can to promote the best possible calf welfare. And then my third and final point would definitely be to start to switch to pulled genetics, if you can.
And start to, yeah, incorporate that into your farm because not performing the procedure is gonna truly be the only way to avoid the pain for the calves. But then also, you know, the stress and the hassle for the human side of things. Every single conversation I’ve had with a dairyman or a dairy producer or their employees, everybody says they hate to do this chore or they hate to do this task, but they do it anyway.
So I really encourage folks to start to have those conversations start to make the switch to things like pulled genetics and then make it easier for everybody within the system, you know, your employees, yourselves, whoever’s doing this procedure and also making it better for your calfs would be definitely like the top recommendation. Right?
Scott Zehr
It’s funny, I’ll ask people to give a, you know, the recap as we’re trying to close up the show. But then as always during the recap, you say something and it’s ironic because you talk with, if you talk with a dairyman that, what are the qualities you wanna look for in the calf manager of your program?
A lot of times you hear things like empathy. So great. And I agree like having a calf program manager that has empathy for the livestock that he or she is overseeing, great quality. And then what do we do? We ask them to go inflict pain on these animals. And obviously it’s, I’m making it sound worse maybe than what it is, but it’s reality, right? It is reality.
And so, you know, I think there’s times where we overlook what that does to the psyche of the people that are performing the job. Right. And again you know, like you said, people have chosen the route of caustic paste because of the perceived convenience and perceived time saving. But really as you said, that’s, that’s really gone. The only way to actually capture that is gonna be through the use of pulled genetics.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Definitely. Yeah. No, I can totally appreciate that. And I think you’re right on with, we wanna select folks that have empathy and that have care for our animals because as an industry, that’s, that’s what we want to embody and that’s what we do for the most part, embody. So.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Challenging the status quo and trying to do things that make sure that we uphold that for everybody, I think is beneficial.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Alicia, thank you for taking time out of your day today to visit with me all the way from the other side of the country, as she is in California. I’m over here in New York, obviously. And we’ll be looking forward to talking to our audience again in two weeks with the CEO of Agrarian Solutions, Mr. Mark Carpenter. So thank you Alicia, and have a great day.
Dr. Alycia Drwencke
Thank you, Scott. You as well.
