But what if the biggest opportunity starts much earlier?

We’re excited to share this episode of The Dairy Podcast Show, where host Dr. Barry Bradford sits down with John Lawlor, dairy industry consultant, to discuss why forage quality, feed management, and system-wide thinking have a greater impact on profitability than many producers realize.

From harvest decisions to feed efficiency and long-term herd performance, this conversation explores how seemingly small management choices can influence milk production, feed costs, and overall business success.

In this episode:

•  Why profitability begins before feed reaches the ration
•  How forage quality drives feed efficiency
•  The hidden costs of poor feed management
•  Why system thinking improves dairy performance
•  The importance of measuring what matters
•  Common management decisions that quietly reduce profitability
•  Building a more resilient dairy operation
•  Practical ways to improve long-term return

💬 Have thoughts or a story to share? Email podcast@agrsol.com.

<h2>🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!</h2>

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Barry Bradford: Hello. Welcome back to the Dairy podcast show, brought to you by Wisenetix. My name is Barry Bradford from Michigan State University. Today I’m happy to welcome to the show John Lawlor. John is the managing director of Anchor Life Sciences Limited. John, thanks a lot for being on the show today.

John Lawlor: Thanks, Barry. It’s an absolute pleasure to be chatting to you today. And we’ve done a lot of research in the past, and one of the big areas that kick started all was a lot of your research back in the day, looking at the the role of information and what it does and certainly think a little bit differently about transition cows and performance and to see, well, you know, is it all about calcium or something else at play.

And that really started the kind of ball rolling. And I think we’ve learned an awful lot more in terms of tradition, cows, maybe in the last 5 or 10 years that we have for a long, long time before. And there’s a lot more data research being done in this whole area. So another five years, ten years. We know a huge Whittemore.

Barry Bradford: Yeah. That’s exciting. Thank you. Let’s start a little bit with where you’re from, how you got to where you’re at. It doesn’t sound like you’re from Pennsylvania necessarily. No, no. Tell us about this space.

John Lawlor: This is a very strong Irish accent. So I, I grew up on a dairy farm just north of Dublin in Ireland. My local hometown is actually the hometown of Pierce Brosnan, who used to be James Bond back in the day. So we have a bit of a link. And so at home we milked about 350 cows on what we call a liquid build system.

So autumn calving and spring calving and trying to produce much grass as possible from far, and particularly grass if we can. And I suppose I went from the farming into business, so I started, I spent five years with Altec, the nutritional supplement company, and then started with a company called Celtic Sea Minerals. And they harvest a special type of seaweed called Lithuanian calcareoun up in Iceland.

And that business has a human health prior to the business. It has an animal health practice which is Calyx Minerals. And now we have Anchor Life Science, which is an animal veterinary product division. And between all of those, we have about 130 peer reviewed published papers on the role of that seaweed. So it’s very well studied, understood. I could do an awful, really fantastic things.

And when I saw some of the data of the beneficial role in terms of animal and human health, that’s where I suppose anchor kind of sprung from. How can we apply this type of seaweed into a range of health products? And that’s really where this was the product we have today: Cow Start Complete. It’s really kind of come from.

Barry Bradford: Very cool. Maybe we could take a minute and help us understand, like at least to people in the US, I think if you’re like, oh, I’m going to feed seaweed. Maybe people think of methane reduction or something, but like help us understand is, is it like dried and ground and what’s, what’s the logic of using a seaweed for cows?

John Lawlor: Yeah. So there’s three species of seaweed. There’s brown seaweed and green seaweed. Most people think of seaweed, they think of the stuff that washes up on the beach. And that generally is the brown seaweed. And the green seaweed. Very much a kind of a kind of a plant. And if we think about this bit like compared to making silage, you know, you let the grass grow, you cut it, you take it away and then it grows again.

You cut it. That’s the brown seaweed on the ground. So you’d have that kind of a life cycle. Okay. Our seaweed was a raid species and it has a very different life cycle. So it grows down to a depth of 15m because it needs sunlight for photosynthesis. And it grows really, really slowly. And what it does is over a long time, it absorbs 74 different minerals from the seawater, and it embeds them in a very unique plant matrix.

And then over time, as it matures, it gets carried away in the current to a an area of dead material. So we only harvest for the dead materials. We never got here, the live plants, we need them to keep producing and growing. We just have us over the dead material. So as a comparison, I would say that the red seaweed is more like an apple orchard.

You have the trees, they grow a crop of apples, they fall down. We take those apples away, but we leave the trees to keep growing apples every year.

Barry Bradford: Yeah, I like that. Okay. That’s cool.

John Lawlor: Yeah. So as a product is very it’s purely a mineral product except a 74 different minerals. But what makes it unique is that because our plant structure they’re very bioavailable in the human and in the cow very different. So say if you say main captive source might be limestone a rock source, it’s not nearly as bio available. Whereas the calcium and our product is completely bio available.

Barry Bradford: Kind of like what we talk about with like milk complex calcium versus a supplement like for humans. Same idea. Yeah. That’s cool.

John Lawlor: Exactly.

Barry Bradford: Okay. Well, I know your anchor is focused on transition cows, so maybe we could start off with you work across different systems, you know, kind of work with people around the world. What do you see kind of as big trends in terms of managing transition cows? Are we making progress on reducing disease incidents and that sort of thing?

John Lawlor: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating. In the last month I’ve been to South Africa. I’ve been to Holland, Ireland as well. We do a lot in New Zealand as well, and I think it really depends on the region you’re in. Some countries are at the cutting edge, like America, in terms of using native decade diets as much as possible and then supplementing cows at the point of calving to try and improve performance.

And other countries are really far behind where really what they’re trying to tackle is clinical milk fever. Okay? They’re just the cow that’s gone down. They get up, they get a going, and they think that that’s what they can do to solve it. But the one trend that really is growing everywhere is the use of oral calcium supplements, the ability to pick and choose higher risk cows and target a kind of a treatment program on them to try and reduce the risk of those issues.

And that is growing very strongly, the US being probably a more mature market, but certainly in Ireland we’re probably 5 or 6 years behind the US. Other markets could be 5 or 6 years behind us. But the one thing that’s really clicking into gear comprehensively everywhere is the picking a choosing of cows and supplementing to try and reduce the risk, because there’s no bigger problem or pain in the backside than a cow It goes down and then trying to trade or lifter and get it going, and there’s a good chance you’ll end up never really coming to anything anyway. So it’s just something to be avoided at all costs.

Barry Bradford: Yeah, yeah. Good point. And maybe a lot of our listeners, I mean, we have listeners from all different systems, but maybe you could help us understand a little bit better. What what are the biggest pain points for pasture based systems versus TMR based systems? Do they differ very much or not really?

John Lawlor: Yeah, I suppose very, very different and very the same at the at the same time. So pasture based systems were typically if cows are out on grass during the dry period, it’s a complete recipe for milk fever.

Barry Bradford: Yeah it is. Yeah.

John Lawlor: Absolutely. Absolutely. We see that in South Africa. We see it in New Zealand or we see it in Ireland. And our biggest challenge, I would say on the European side is we have a strict ban on the spreading of slurry during the winter. Yeah. So generally what happens is you make your first cut silage a really good stuff that goes to your milking cows, your higher ceiling, and then you put as much story out as you can on the second, third quarter.

And it’s low and you can, you know, you’re just restricted. And on every grazing system it just plays havoc. So certainly in Ireland, UK, lots of countries, the main cause of fever is not calcium, it’s potassium. Absolutely too much potassium locks up your magnesium. You can’t get the calcium going. Well you need to. So that’s the biggest challenge I think in other systems like in North America, you know, the forest, the diet you have can be quite high in calcium.

So you could be dealing in a, you know, a .8.8 5% calcium in the background in Ireland is probably 0.6, 0.55. So you have to tackle calcium and also potassium levels in the diet source. It’s very much the potassium managing grazing after that for the for the factors are different. The challenges are still the same. When cows are calving in the amount of time it takes to try and avoid the issue, and the cost of that issue are the same number of what part of the world you’re in. It costs exactly the same on that goes down. And obviously the sub tentacle cow is the biggest cost of all. It’s 80% of all of the costs of the subclinical cow. 

Barry Bradford: Yeah okay. Help us then. You made a point that I’m not sure I would have seen from my vantage point that you said, you know, we see increasing adoption of oral calcium bolus is at or shortly post calving. What’s your read on I guess the research literature on that lately. What’s the takeaway points?

John Lawlor: Really interesting. There was a paper you’re from my alias. It was published a couple of years ago, and they did a meta analysis of 22 peer reviewed published papers on the use of oral calcium products and essentially what they were doing and what they weren’t doing. And I think traditional thinking is if we can keep that cow on our feet on the day after calving we’ve done everything we can do what you love a great lactation going forward, it’d be very productive and reproductive.

And this paper really said actually the data doesn’t support that viewpoint. So what it did find is in the day after calving in terms of clinical milk fever cases and retained the use of oral calcium products, did reduce the risk of those two diseases. But when you go to four days in milk fever, no effect, where you go to three weeks looking at urine infections displays amazing and ketosis no effect.

When you go to 100 days, you look at energy status in terms of body condition scoring. You look at milk production, you look at fertility, no effect. So I think it does a certain amount, but it may not just do everything we think it’s going to do.

Barry Bradford: Interesting. And how do you think that intersects with the concepts of the transient, hypocalcemia and persistent? Are you familiar with those ideas?

John Lawlor: Yes. Yes. We use that research from Jesse McCartney and Cornell in the development of of our product. And it’s interesting. Some of our data would support it, and some of our data would say, well, we get the calcium levels quite high in those calcium first four days. They produce more milk than any other group of cows, the ones that go down and back up, but the ones that go down completely.

So I think we need more data, more data points to see exactly. And I think if you look at the latest research from Cornell, you know, where they looked. The initial paper was looking at the transient cows and the delayed cows and the four different groups, and then they looked at the calcium level as being the kind of driver of cattle was low on day one, but okay.

Or day four or then that was perfectly fine. And I know they reviewed and actually looked in terms of inflammation markers of all of those cows to see what’s happening. And they’ve also seen a link certainly in one of those groups, it was inflammation. That was also a key factor in that. So I think this whole area, like I said, where you started all those years ago, looking information has a much bigger role to play, and our data would support that.

In terms of what we’ve seen, we certainly see that there’s more than calcium at play here. If we want to get the best performance out of transition cows, we need to look beyond just putting it to those cows because like that, that review of 22 papers, the effect is actually reasonably limited. And up to day one, there’s an effect what we want to get a successful transition cow period.

We’re not just thinking about day one. We’re thinking about the following days. We’re taking about production of fertility, fewer issues, fewer vet calls, that successful transition management. And if we want to achieve that uncertainty our data would support, we need to think a bit more than just calcium in these cows.

Barry Bradford: Okay, that makes sense. So yeah, like you said, that’s like one of the biggest headaches for a farm is down cows with milk fever. No. Yeah. Nobody likes that. It’s a headache that you feel horrible for the cow. But let’s say, you know, we we have strategies are hard to implement in some systems, but we have strategies that are pretty good at reducing that. Right? But we still don’t have great performance from all of our cows. So you said we got to look beyond calcium. So what do you what do you think about then? What’s the next things you’re looking at?

John Lawlor: Yeah. So I suppose when we were looking to develop the product first we kind of had the philosophy, you know, cows of three problems at calving. Calcium is only one of them. But immune function and energy status of two of them massively challenges those cows face. So I suppose our logical as well, if we can tackle those three issues together, if we can reduce the level of issues in those first two weeks after calving, can we then go and see a better performance of good production of fertility?

So in our product we have our seaweed in there. So it is very, very high levels of completely bioavailable calcium and easement as well as 72 other minerals in there. We have and again like I said, potassium is a huge challenge in a lot of areas. Having that extra magnesium in there is a huge benefit, but not usually available in most oral calcium products.

We also have some vitamin D3 in there. But we have to remember that our seaweed is proven in humans and in cattle to have a very strong, natural and potent anti-inflammatory effect. So we have the ideal ingredient in terms of we have something of a lot of calcium, magnesium, but it also acts as a very potent anti-inflammatory. And if you look at the latest work from Lance Baumgart where he’s saying, well, actually information is the first thing that happens, and then the drop in blood calcium levels is a consequence of the inflammation.

We used to think of this slide of this gateway disease idea, this gateway calcium drops and then all the problems happen afterwards. Whereas Lance is kind of saying, well, actually information happens for us. One of the side effects of that is the calcium dropping. But you have all the other issues in terms of energy, data production and other.

But the calcium dropping is side-effectively. It’s not the main event that starts. Everything that we used to think was and I think again, our data would, would show that when we have our, our product in there with that anti-inflammatory effect, when we compared to products that just put calcium in there, we get a very different range of performance across the lactation.

Barry Bradford: That’s interesting. Maybe you don’t know, but I’m curious, like the way you’re talking about this, it’s like a plant complex set of many minerals. So I’m sitting here thinking, okay, you see anti-inflammatory effects in multiple species. Do you have any idea what might drive that response with this product?

John Lawlor: Yeah, we’ve done a nice bit of research. So in cows we’ve seen in terms of induced acidosis, induced heat stress and in transition cows lowering of those markers of inflammation. We’re also just seeing a more detailed research. You know when there is an inflammation response, when that cow has an infection as an inflammatory response, we do want the cow to have some level of information because that is that response is a natural thing.

So we generally have a kind of a 12 hour quick response. And then you have a chronic response, which is for 12 hours afterwards. So what we’ve seen with our seaweed is it does not affect the natural first response of the body, but after that the chronic response, it has a very potent role to reduce the level that ongoing inflammation, which is the thing when we start rolling into one week, into two weeks, into three weeks, if if you’re that inflammation going, it’s holding back the performance of those cows.

So it’s good because if we had something that knocked inflammation right off the bat, that would be not an optimal scenario for the cow, because you’re just switching off our natural ability to tackle an infection. So we know that we can have, lead the code to do our natural thing to get that thing under control. And then we help from that 12 hour point afterwards to try and reduce the challenge on those cows.

And we look at body temperatures. Interestingly, we could see that we see an increase in the first 12, 18 hours after calving as that natural response kicked in. But from that point all the way to two weeks after calving, that the cows getting our product have lower body temperatures compared to the control groups. So there is, there’s definitely an effect there that is happening.

And we know that if you get a high, a rise in body temperature, it a is a huge challenge for the cow, but also takes a lot of energy for the immune system to fight that high level of inflammation, the high level of temperature. And at the time when every ounce of dry matter is really critical to really t this cow up, we don’t really want to be shipping 1 or 2 kilos of that to fight at the temperature effect.

Barry Bradford: Yeah. That’s fair. So yeah, you’ve referred to some important insights from your research. Maybe you could talk us through 1 or 2 of the studies you’ve conducted with, with this product.

John Lawlor: Yeah. I suppose the most interesting one is it’s a very large herd. And in the year 2024 on the main farm, they camped in 2035 second lactation and all the cows and all that, they had five cases of milk fever. So using an egg had died, but absolutely exemplary in terms of managing cows and calcium status. And no matter where you go in the world, you know, a quarter of a percent of cows having attended a case is as good as you will get.

So we knew when we started the work there that, you know, we’re going to get it was going to be a tough challenge to match what those cows are doing, but it was absolutely exemplary. So in the trial, we had group getting the standard treatment and then getting our two Cow Star Complete bonuses are calving. And when we looked at blood clotting status, it was exactly the same. 

Numerically, we were a little bit ahead, but from a statistical point of view, there was no difference. And that’s interesting because that shows that those cows were ISO calcium. So if we saw any difference in performance after that, it was nothing to do with calcium because they were all exactly the same in terms of calcium. We also saw in terms of rumination levels, and we know rumination and calcium status are completely correlated.

But the rumination levels in those two groups was exactly the same as well. But we look at the levels of metabolic issues. So we look at in terms of, So there were no clinical cases in either book, which we expected. You look at your cases of retained the center, you look at the center. Traders displays are made some ketosis.

The cows and our group had lower results of metabolic issues in those first three weeks after calving. Really where we see the big difference when we look at body condition scoring, we can see and this is 147 cows per group. We can see that we have a statistically significant higher body conditions for every two weeks to 12 weeks into the lactation.

So despite the calcium being exactly the same and the rumination being exactly same, the energy status was notably different. We then saw in terms of those cows 2.6 kilo. So it’s going to be 5.3, 5.5 pounds of milk increase in milk production per day across the first 12 weeks. Imitation. That control group were at about 100 pounds of milk, so there were no slouches.

They were really, really top performers, but we still managed to increase the milk production on those cows across that time period. And again, when we look at fertility in that group, the conception rate for service was 49%, which for that level of performance and production, these are 29,000 pound cows is really good. Again, no slouches, whereas we started the group at 63%.

So a massive improvement of performance. So we’ve seen reduced levels of retained placenta and uterine infections and better body condition scores. And we know that those are two key drivers of better fertility in cows. And that data is very consistent. We do that on grazing cows and very high yielding cows. We get a very, very similar profile of terms of that increase in milk production and the increase in fertility and better body condition scores.

And if we go back to that research paper from the 22 studies they showed when we put oral calcium just straight oral calcium into those cows, no effect of body condition scores, no effect on milk production and no effect of fertility. Whereas we take Cow Star Complete, we’ve taken a wider range approach to tackling a wider range of issues. We do see a benefit across the board that you don’t get with other oral calcium products. 

Barry Bradford: That’s fascinating. 

John Lawlor: And there was another, there’s another research group who are doing a lot around this whole idea of getting the calcium consistently up to 48 and 96 hours after calving, but very much focused on the calcium side of the equation and getting the calcium perfect.

And in that way they have got the calcium perfect. But certainly from the the available public, publicly available data on that research group, they’re not having an impact in terms of energy status, in terms of glucose, in terms of BSB, in terms of body condition score, and not seeing an effect in terms of production either. So I think, again, when we look purely at the calcium side, we don’t shift the needle in terms of stuff that’s actually going to pay the farmer return on investment in terms of more milk production and better fertility as well.

Barry Bradford: Very interesting. So I think you talked about a little bit, but this is a bolus that you give one time. Like what’s your target window. Is that right?

John Lawlor: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So one of the big things we tried took us seven years to perfect the technology, what it is to be able to give one dose to the calcium, one doses, two boluses at the point of calving, and it will elevate the blood calcium all the way to 48 hours and all the way to 96 hours in those cows.

And that’s really important because, statistically speaking, the highest risk period for milk fever is between 12 and 24 hours after calving. So it’s not the first 12 hours, it’s the second 12 hours. Most traditional oral calcium products masked for what they claim 12 hours, but it may only be 8 to 10 hours. So when you put the first one in all those manufacturers, if you look at the label, recommend that the farmers give a second dose 12 hours after calving so that when the first one is out, is out of the system, you give an extra hit of calcium for these girls has of just entering into a higher risk period, whereas the concept we have is much more simple. It’s just one handling of the cow. 

The two boluses is going to go on at the same time, but once she’s done, she’s okay for 48 hours and at that point they can start increasing their own supply of calcium. So it’s very much in terms of convenience, in terms of farms that may not have a lot of labor available, but they may not a very good handling and drafting facilities. So catching that the second time can be too much of an effort in a job and it just doesn’t get done. This just simplifies that.

Barry Bradford: Yeah. Well, and I was going to say too. I think I’ve seen a lot of farms thinking more about the stress implications of locking up the fresh pen every day. And that’s really declined in the US, I think. So having a strategy that you could take care of this in the fresh pen and then in theory, if she’s healthy, you’re not locking her up again.

John Lawlor: Exactly.

Barry Bradford: As has some real advantages. Interesting.

John Lawlor: And I think one of the real advantages in reality is, you know, the first time you go and you get the gun and you bolus that cow, you know, that’s okay. When she sees you coming for the second time with the gun in hand, she knows what you’re about. And they generally tend to be very uncooperative. So it can be a really tough job to do.

Barry Bradford: Yeah I agree with that. Okay. Well we’ve got our famous questions we’ve got to throw at you. So first of all, what’s what’s your favorite dairy related book or resource?

John Lawlor: As you might have guessed, I like people who think outside the box and who just won’t accept, you know, the standard protocol and say, well, can we not do things better? And I think as dairy farmers spend a lot of money asking and talking to people like the accountant, like the vet, like the nutritionist, but there’s one team out there that can tell those farmers an awful lot out there, and it’s the cows themselves.

If you can only learn how to read what that cow wants to tell you, because if every cow is at all times telling you something about the environment she’s in. So there are two guys in Holland who developed this system called cow signals. So I’m not sure if it’s very popular in the US or some people know or not.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a fantastic way of thinking about things. And if you could just learn to read what that cow is telling you, it can tell you so many things and you can make some small, what you might think are small changes, but could be big changes for the cow. And you can make a lot of improvements quite quickly.

If you could just learn how to read what that cow is telling you. It’s very simple, but it can be very, very powerful and effective. And I think in terms of a dairy related resource, that to me is one of the best ones out there.

Barry Bradford: Yeah, I don’t think any major brought that up on this show that I’ve heard. That’s great. That’s a good point. I’m familiar with that program. Very good. All right. What about your favorite book or resource outside of agriculture?

John Lawlor: Okay. This one is a special one to be. So this is a book called Race Without End. So this was published in 1994 and I actually had a signed copy. So back in the 80s and the early to mid 90s in Ireland, Ireland was a very poor country. We were bottom of the league in terms of economic development and everything, and this guy called Eddie Jordan set up a Formula One team and he became massively successful with that former team.

He was a really great entrepreneur. He won the Irish Entrepreneur of the year competition, but he had an Irish team fighting at the pinnacle of the biggest sport in the world. And just in terms of inspiration, when you’re looking and nothing is going right in your country and you can say, well, actually people from Ireland can do the best of the best and fight up with Ferrari and with Williams and McLaren and all these big guys.

And he was a hell of a story. That team now is the Aston Martin formula one team. That team is worth billions today. But it started one Irish guy who was plucky enough to just give it a go and see how far he could take it.

Barry Bradford: Wow. I hadn’t heard of that story. That sounds awesome. And then that was kind of right when the what? The Irish tiger economy took off.

John Lawlor: The mid 90s. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Really started to take off. And we grew up a lot and everything developed. So we’re very much at the top end of the scale running the bottom. But but you’re in a place where you look around and everything is dreary and unemployment is 30% and there’s no real kind of hope and you can see something like this happen.

I know he’s inspired a lot of Irish people to kind of go, you know, we can do these things. We can fight on the global stage and a really interesting, unfortunately, we lost Eddie Jordan last year. He died. But he left a big legacy in sport and in business in Ireland.

Barry Bradford: Okay. Last question. In your opinion, what sets successful dairy professionals apart from those who are less successful?

John Lawlor: If I could distill down to one thing? Honesty. Being brutally honest, I find and I would go to a lot of dairy farms and I have a discussion with them and the guys that are really open and say, look, these are the problems I have. You can make a lot of progress with those guys, and sometimes a lot of times, what we might find as being a solution has nothing to do with us as not to do.

Bolus isn’t like that. There could be something else, but if you could just find a guy that’s really honest, you can make real progress. And I think sometimes you go to farm and the farmers telling you I’m here, or you walk around the cows and you see the farm and maybe they’re here, but they might be down there, you know.

So but you get out and you see, you get a really good appreciation for where they’re at. But the guys that are completely honest, if the farm is here, they’re, they’re they’re not up here, they’re here are sometimes a little bit down here. They’ll be humble. But the guys that can be really honest and say, look, these are the challenges.

This is what it’s been we’ve been struggling with for the last few years. And we really want to focus on improving this part of the business. They can make real progress. The guys who just don’t think it’s a problem or don’t address it, or just a bit embarrassed or they don’t want to admit it, you know, they just keep muddling on and not making progress.

Barry Bradford: I like that a lot. It brings back to mind to me a very short list of key traits of a good leader. And one of them was deal in reality. Like, you know, you can, you can pump people up, you can try to support them. But we have to face the real issues we have with honesty, like you said. That’s good. Yeah. Well, John, I very much enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for being on the show today.

John Lawlor: It’s been an absolute pleasure. Barry. Thank you very much for having me.

Barry Bradford: So again, our guest today has been John Lawlor from Anchor Life Sciences. And this has been another episode of the Dairy podcast show, brought to you by Wisenetix. If you’re not already following the show or you haven’t liked it, make sure you do that so you don’t miss the next episode, and we’ll see you then.

The post 78: Rethinking Transition Cow Health appeared first on Agrarian Solutions.

Our own Dr. Larry Roth, Vice President of Nutrition at Agrarian Solutions and frequent guest of the Ruminate This podcast recently presented at the Wisenetix Dairy Feed Additive Summit. In the webinar, Dr. Larry Roth and host Dr. Todd Callaway discuss how the impact of mycotoxins extends far beyond feed quality concerns. From gut integrity and immune function to nutrient allocation, follicle development, and conception rates, they examine the biological and economic consequences mycotoxins can have on dairy operations.

Key topics covered include:
• What mycotoxins are and how they develop in feedstuffs
• The most common mycotoxins affecting North American dairies, including DON, Zearalenone, T-2, Fumonisin, and Aflatoxin
• Why multiple mycotoxins are increasingly common in modern dairy production
• How mycotoxins damage gut integrity and increase nutrient demands on the immune system
• The relationship between nutrient allocation, follicular development, and reproductive success
• Research evaluating traditional mycotoxin binders and their limitations
• Independent field trial results demonstrating improved pregnancy rates when using DTX™ technology from Agrarian Solutions
• Practical recommendations for mycotoxin testing and mitigation strategies

Dr. Roth also reviews data from a large commercial dairy trial involving more than 900 cows, highlighting significant improvements in pregnancies per service for both artificial insemination and embryo transfer programs.

Whether you’re a dairy producer, nutritionist, veterinarian, or consultant, this presentation provides valuable insights into protecting herd performance and maximizing reproductive efficiency in the face of mycotoxin challenges.

💬 Have thoughts or a story to share? Email podcast@agrsol.com.

🔗 Stay informed: Get expert livestock nutrition insights, cutting-edge research, and updates on future episodes by subscribing here: agrariansolutions.com/podcast

The post 75: Dairy Reproduction & Mycotoxins: Hidden Threats to Pregnancy Success appeared first on Agrarian Solutions.

🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. Before we jump in, I’m just gonna mention something at the top. If you’ve listened to Ruminate This for really any length of time, you probably get the feeling that most of these episodes are pretty free-flowing. To be honest, I usually have just a few notes.
By a few, I mean one to five. And usually if I have a guest, I’ll maybe send a loose outline. I really believe that the gold is always in the dialogue, and so I usually let the conversation go wherever it wants to go. Today is going to feel different. I actually wrote down much of this episode. Not because I have answers.
Quite honestly I don’t, and that’s why I’m doing this episode. But this is a lot… This is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. And I found that every time I tried to record this episode off the cuff, I ended up with more questions than conclusions. So if I sound a little more scripted than normal today, it’s intentional.
This isn’t me teaching. This is me trying to better understand something that I think affects a lot of people in our industry. Normally on this podcast, we’re talking about mycotoxins, amino acids, starch digestion, transition cows, feed ingredients, bunk management strategies, all helpful stuff for producers to become more successful. And we’re gonna continue to talk about those things in the future.
Today we’re talking about people. So a few months back, I came across yet another tragic story involving a young person in our industry who left this world far too soon. He was 22 years old.
I’m not gonna spend much time discussing the particular story because this episode is not about one individual, it’s about a question I found myself asking over and over throughout my career, why is burnout so prevalent in dairy?
Before we go any further, let me be clear about what I mean. Burnout and suicide are not the same thing. Most people who experience burnout recover. They grow and they move forward. But when tragic stories continue appearing in our industry, I think it’s worth asking difficult questions. Agrarian’s creed says that we exist to help others succeed.
Not cows, not just dairy businesses, people. And since they let me have a microphone, and I have a voice, and people out there are willing to listen, I think this is a conversation worth having. So today, instead of discussing what makes cows healthier, I wanna spend a little time talking about the people who care for them.
If I asked a room full of dairy producers why burnout exists, I’d probably hear some familiar answers. We all would. I was a dairy farmer at one time. I would give these same answers: long hours, labor shortages, milk prices, the weather, regulations, financial pressure, market volatility. And every one of those answers is technically true. But what if they’re incomplete?
Because there are plenty of professions that work long hours. There are plenty of professions that deal with stress. There are plenty of professions that face uncertainty, yet agriculture continues to struggle with burnout at rates that are undeniably disproportionate to the size of our industry. Maybe there’s something deeper going on that we need to talk about.
One thing that I’ve observed over the years is that for many producers, the dairy isn’t where they work. The dairy is who they are. The cows aren’t just livestock, they’re family. The farm isn’t just a business. The land isn’t just an asset, it’s legacy. It’s their identity. They feel it’s their internal responsibility. It’s their purpose. And when things go well, that’s incredibly rewarding. But when things go poorly, it becomes incredibly personal.
Because on a dairy, a milk check isn’t just a milk check. It’s my family’s income. A crop failure isn’t just a crop failure. It’s my family’s future for the next year. And a sick calf isn’t just a sick calf. It’s the hope of what she could be over the next five years. Every challenge feels connected to something much bigger. Carrying that kind of emotional weight day after day is exhausting.
And I think there’s a bit of a responsibility trap that’s part of this. And this is what I’ve been thinking about the most. Because maybe burnout isn’t always caused by carrying too much work. Maybe it’s caused by carrying too much responsibility. Let’s think about the average dairy owner. They care about breeding, they care about nutrition, they care about calf health, they care about employees, they care about finances, they care about the equipment, they care about their family, they care about their community.
And because they care, they start carrying. Eventually, they’re carrying every problem. Every decision, every mistake, every crisis, every outcome. Not because someone assigned it to them, but because they genuinely care. The very trait that makes them successful, I think becomes the thing that slows them down or wears them down.
The other thing about agriculture is that it is a culture of toughness. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re nodding your head right now. I’ve been in it my whole life. We’re tough people. Agriculture has always been built on resilience. It’s one of the things I admire most about our industry. Farmers are among the toughest people I’ve ever met.
The thing about strength though is that there’s a shadow side. Sometimes resilience turns into isolation and toughness becomes silence. Sometimes self-resilience becomes believing you have to handle everything alone. Those aren’t the same things.
I have met a lot of producers who would do anything to help a neighbor, yet many of those same people would never ask for help themselves. Why is that? Why is it easier to carry someone else’s burden than to admit you’re struggling with your own? I’ve seen it firsthand.
We had neighbors. I can remember a specific story. The neighbor’s wife passed away, the fall time of the year. A bunch of neighbors got together to help put the guy’s corn up. Wasn’t a large dairy. There was probably 120, 130 acres of corn to chop. My dad and I, we took our pull-type chopper over. Everybody had pull-type choppers. If I recall, there was three or four pull-type choppers chopping corn for that guy.
But when other farms are struggling and there’s not some external public thing that happens, for the community to see and respond to, why is it so scary for that person to reach out and ask for a hand? Let me think, let me say it like this. What if we’re asking the wrong questions about this problem?
What if instead of asking why are dairy producers burning out, maybe the question is, how much weight can one person carry before something starts to give? Most people don’t wake up one morning burned out. It happens slowly, one responsibility at a time. One season at a time, one challenge at a time. And before you know it, a few pounds added to the backpack every year until one day they realize they’re exhausted. Not because they’re weak, because they’re human.
I don’t have the answers today. I think you can see that I have more questions than anything. But I think conversations like this matter because we need to do more talking about it. Agrarian’s creed says that we exist to help others succeed. And I would implore you to keep in mind that success is n- not only measured in milk shipped, calves raised, or profitability. Success also includes healthy people, healthy families, healthy relationships, healthy leaders.
Maybe burnout isn’t caused by caring too much. Maybe it’s caused by believing you’re responsible for everything you care about. Again, those aren’t the same thing. Learning the difference may be one of the most important lessons any of us ever learn. Until next time, keep asking questions and keep ruminating.

The post 74: Why is burnout so prevalent in dairy? appeared first on Agrarian Solutions.

The episode also explores how DTX™ with Livox uses probiotic technology and plant actives like curcumin, naringen, and carnosic acid to support dairy cows during periods of heat stress. Learn how internal biological support may help cows better withstand the stacked environmental insults of summer while supporting health, performance, and resilience.

🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!

🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform

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Scott Zehr: All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And today I’m gonna be joined by Dr. Larry Roth, the Vice President of Nutrition here at Agrarian Solutions. And Larry I’m hoping to have a really good discussion today with you on the topic of heat stress.
However, I’m gonna challenge you a little bit because this topic has been covered a lot in our industry, obviously. This is a north of a billion dollar economic impact in as far as loss is concerned in the US dairy industry. But I think we’ve heard enough in the past about sprinklers and fans and so on, that I have a different take that I’d like you to explore with me today.
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay.
Scott Zehr: And so with that, I guess, welcome, Larry.
Dr. Larry Roth: Good to be here.
Scott Zehr: All right. Dr. Roth we’ve been taught about this a lot over the years, as I mentioned. And I think we’ve almost been taught to think about heat stress as the problem. But based on what we’re seeing now, is it more accurate to say that heat stress is actually exposing everything else we don’t control?
Dr. Larry Roth: I think that would be fair to say. It is another stressor. Sometimes we use the term, Scott, stacked stressors. And so it, shall we say, exacerbates other challenges going on. If our diet, for an example, is kinda marginal in terms of readily formidable carbohydrates, and we’re at risk of subacute acidosis, and now we got heat stress, and it changes eating patterns. It may cause the cows to experience some periodic subacute acidosis, which if the temperature was 20 degrees Fahrenheit and the cows were eating more consistently, would not be an issue. Yeah, so we could go on with other examples, but I think it would be fair to say, Scott, that heat stress is another stressor that we stack on top of everything else with which the cow is dealing.
Scott Zehr: Yeah, and I, I don’t want the audience to be confused. I’m not saying that heat stress is not a problem in and of itself. But I think that the deeper layer is that all by itself it’s maybe not as problematic as when we have all these other stacked things going on that the heat stress then exacerbates, like you said.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. So when you look at things like heat stress, mycotoxins, intake disruptions, are these additive problems or are we actually dealing with more of a multiplicative effect inside the cow?
Dr. Larry Roth: Oh. I think that we may be dealing with more of a multiplying effect. Especially dependent upon how many stressors there are. And when we use that term stressor, I think it’s important, Scott, to say we’re not implying mismanagement.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: We’re just saying that we’re asking this cow to do a lot. She’s gotta live in a real world situation, eat real world rations, live in a real world freestall barn. So we’re not implying mismanagement. But I would say that…
Scott Zehr: No, and I think the better term is probably environmental insult, right?
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah, there you go. Yep.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. No, and I don’t think, you look at the management practices across the US dairies, we’re- we’ve figured out how to manage groups of cows extremely well and- Yes … and, what we’re looking at here today is the relationship between those environmental insults and mycotoxins. And really again just trying to reframe this conversation in a way that, essentially how do we take this to a step where we can’t control the weather, but here are the environmental insults that we can control, right?
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: So I guess going– you mentioned mycotoxins, so specifically speaking to that, to the mycotoxin challenges, what changes inside the cow during a heat stress event that would potentially make a manageable mycotoxin load all of a sudden a much bigger problem?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay, fantastic question. What’s that interaction between heat stress and mycotoxins? When cows are heat stressed, they go through a couple of changes. One, increased respiration. They’re getting rid of more moisture, and they also cause greater blood flow to the extremities to radiate heat away, much like the radiator on your truck tends to send engine heat off to the environment.
So all of that is reducing blood flow to the digestive tract. And then the digestive tract needs a tremendous amount of blood flow to provide nutrients for the turnover in cells to also keep those cells alive. And to pull nutrients that are absorbed into the bloodstream to go to different parts of the body.
So if we’re losing moisture through the lungs, and we’re shunting blood flow more to the extremities to radiate heat, what ends up happening is our intestinal lining cells can become dehydrated. They tend to shrink. And we talk a lot about the tight junctions between the cells. It’s like the mortar that holds the castle blocks together so that the barbarians are kept in the digestive tract and out of the body.
So if our intestinal cells start to shrink, we lose our tight junctions. Now we’ve got interstate highways for pathogens, mycotoxins, all of this bad stuff to get through the castle wall, the intestinal lining, and into the body. Flows through the bloodstream, ends up in the liver, the body’s biochemical factory not just processing nutrients, but also getting rid of toxins.
So now we got an extra load on the liver which, depending upon the stage of production, is maybe processing a lot of fats that have been broken down in that early lactation cow. And at any stage of lactation, just doing a tremendous amount of work to make glucose so that we have glucose to make lactose for milk sugar serve as a carbon source for rapidly developing cells like the follicle and the embryo. So it’s, it is a cascading effect.
Scott Zehr: As I’ve heard you say many times.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep. Yeah. Intestinal cells are short on water, they shrink, and now everything starts to go downhill from there.
Scott Zehr: Larry, the cascading effect, we’ve talked about the downstream effect of a lot of these things over the last number of episodes here. But also you mentioned the liver making glucose, and I think there’s always room for one of the famous Larry quotes that I’ve heard a number of times which is, “No glucose, no lactose. No lactose, no milk.”
Dr. Larry Roth: There you go.
Scott Zehr: And uh, so, you know, as right at the downstream side of that is we see a lot of decreased milk production during heat stress events and essentially we’re just not keeping up with that process, right? ‘Cause we’re diverting stuff to other purposes. So you’ve had the chance over the last shall we say- couple of decades at least to…
Dr. Larry Roth: Nice way to put it.
Scott Zehr: To spend a lot of time not just talking with dairymen and talking with nutritionists, but actually being on farm and seeing the operations and understanding the management.
But when you walk into really high-performing dairies, what are they doing before summer hits that average operations wait too long to address?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. That’s a fantastic question. What are the high-producing dairies doing to get ready for heat stress? They know it’s gonna happen. And Scott, it can be as simple as fan maintenance.
Blades are clean, motors are ready to go. Sprinklers, all of the plumbing is right. But we don’t have leaks so that we don’t have too much water flowing where it shouldn’t be, filling up the lagoon. Comfort, the freestalls are bedded right. Curtains are up. We don’t let the sun shine in, but we also want to have air movement taking place.
With cross-ventilated barns, all of the fans are working right. We know that summer is coming. We’re just making sure that everything’s ready to go. Also looking at different feed additives that people are looking at. Things such as betaine and osmolyte to keep water in cells. People are also looking at capsaicin coming from peppers, which excuse me, hot peppers, which can increase blood flow to the extremities.
And I think, Scott, we should be looking at DTX, our cell-wall-deficient bacteria technology that helps to protect digestive tract integrity and what we’ve done with plant extracts that help to protect the intestinal lining cells and also to protect liver health. So it’s a combination of factors.
And I would say over the last number of decades, number one, we’ve recognized that heat stress is an issue. We’ve said that we gotta do something about it and become proactive. Even just consider, Scott, how we design freestall barns now.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: Consider the cross-ventilated barns, the number that we see. So the industry does stand to have a significant financial loss to heat stress, as you mentioned. But the industry is also making a tremendous investment each year to reduce that loss to heat stress.
Scott Zehr: Absolutely. I love the fact that you brought up the fans first. I’ve probably told you before my dirty fan theory, which is you walk into a barn in the middle of February, and if the fans are dirty, maybe they’re letting other things slide, too. And…
Dr. Larry Roth: There you go.
Scott Zehr: I’ve walked into a number of barns in February where the fans are spotless. There’s not a drop of dust on those blades. Those farms tend to not miss a beat. They have mastered the fundamentals.
And continue to keep up with them. Everything you just described there, Larry is all things that the dairy has for the most part within their control, right? Taking care of water situations, sprinklers, fans…
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: maintenance, stall care. How often do we see, it’s springtime, I get it. We have planting, we have, we’re ramping up to get ready for first cutting. And the beds didn’t get sanded this week because we just couldn’t spare a person.
Dr. Larry Roth: Right.
Scott Zehr: And it’s just, it’s a recipe for disaster. and so many times these conversations come down to fundamentals and doing things the right way every day, every time. But I think, a- again, it’s like heat stress is a problem. Don’t let it be a bigger problem than what it is, right?
And you mentioned the DTX which is our mycotoxin mitigation product here at Agrarian, and I’m gonna ask you more questions on that in a subsequent episode. But I think the big takeaway that I’d give to producers right now, Larry, is for the first time in my lifetime, there is a research-backed mitigation tool, mycotoxin mitigation tool that is appropriate for the mycotoxins we see in today’s herds.
And we manage so many other things on dairies, some of them extremely well. Here’s a tool for us to look at and say, “Can we just take mycotoxins out of the conversation for now?”
I guess just to reiterate what you said recently, your last comments here, if a producer’s talking to you and you’re a nutritionist and they’re just saying “I can’t control the weather,” maybe just give us three things that you would push back and say, “No, but here are the top three things you can control and are responsible for.”
Dr. Larry Roth: Wow, top three things. I would have to start with ventilation, air movement. Number two would be sprinklers to help wet the cows. Number three, the feed additives so that we can work from the inside out with cows. And you said three, so I gotta stop at that point.
Scott Zehr: Okay. But,
Dr. Larry Roth: but-
Scott Zehr: if you have a couple bonus ones, that’s okay, too
Dr. Larry Roth: I think how we take care of the freestall beds-
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: comfort. Because-
Scott Zehr: Yep.
Dr. Larry Roth: When it’s hot, cows tend to stand a little bit more, so that’s extra stress on the feet and legs. And cows tend to make more milk when they’re laying down, and there’s a variety of reasons for that. So general cow comfort, and you mentioned water availability. I didn’t mention that before, but I think that is absolutely key.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. Larry I think as we wrap up here, we started the episode talking about stacked, we’ll call it, we’ll say insults, right? And we have-
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay.
Scott Zehr: We’ve talked mycotoxins, we’ve talked heat stress. But also I think there’s maybe some other things that sometimes come into play that we don’t always think about because they’re routine things we have to do, like pen moves, hoof trimming routines, all these kinda normal processes that happen that just add an additional layer to these cows.
And I’m not saying don’t hoof trim during the summertime, but be aware of maybe there’s a way we could look at the weather and say, “Hey, it’s gonna be 15 degrees cooler at the end of the week. Can we move some things around sometimes?”
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah, that’s right. Can we postpone certain animal movements and so forth until the weather cools down, like you said, this weekend? When the temperature’s gonna go down 15 degrees as opposed to today. So it, again it’s thinking how is this particular item going to affect the cow today? Is this something that I should delay a little bit? Is this something that I should do a little bit differently to minimize the challenge that’s put on the cow?
Scott Zehr: Yep. Yep. One of the saddest things I’d ever seen on a dairy, it was a move from one farm to the other, and it was summertime. And Larry, what could go wrong with 10 cows on a trailer that have to go 30 miles?
Dr. Larry Roth: We get a flat tire, and it’s 100 degrees, and they’re not getting the ventilation and so forth. Yeah.
Scott Zehr: Yep. Final takeaways, Larry?
Dr. Larry Roth: Heat stress is gonna come. What are we doing to get ready? Make our checklist, have our strategy in place, and be prepared to enact that strategy.
Scott Zehr: That’s right. Control what we can control. I like it. Yep. All right. Larry, I’m gonna bring you back for a little more in-depth discussion on what all DTX is actually doing to help the cow from the inside out, on another episode. So with that, I wanna thank you for taking time out of your day to visit with us, Larry, and we’ll be talking again soon.
Dr. Larry Roth: All right. Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Scott.
Scott Zehr: Thanks, Larry.

The post 73: Heat Stress and Inflammation in Dairy Cows appeared first on Agrarian Solutions.

What you’ll learn:
– Mycotoxin risk factors
– Gut integrity impact
– Testing strategies importance
– Multiple toxins interaction
– Nutrient reallocation effects

🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!

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The post [Bonus Interview] The Dairy Podcast Show – Dr. Larry Roth: Mycotoxins and Dairy Gut Health appeared first on Agrarian Solutions.

In this episode of Ruminate This, Scott Zehr explores whether mycotoxins in virgin heifer TMRs could be quietly influencing heifer conception rates and dairy fertility. While dairies have made major advances in reproductive protocols, genetics, and technology, heifers may represent one of the biggest remaining opportunities for improvement.

Scott explores why heifer diets are often among the least-tested rations on the farm, how multiple mycotoxins can affect immune function and hormone signaling, and why young animals may actually have less margin for error than many assume.

🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!

If heifer fertility has plateaued, maybe it isn’t a protocol problem at all, maybe it’s a fundamentals problem.

Scott Zehr: All right. Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr, and today we are gonna be talking about virgin heifer reproduction. One of my passion topics here.
Over the last decade, dear reproduction in the US has seen incredible gains. If I think back to 2013, 2016, the years I was breeding cows man, if we had a 44% conception rate on cows and 68% heat detection rate, we were doing good.
Put you at about a 30 preg rate, and that was exceptional actually. Now we fast forward to 2026 and we’re seeing first service conception rates in mature cows, 50 to 55% pretty regularly. We have preg rates over 40 in a lot of herds. High thirties if nothing else.
And I think the industry has just gotten way better at getting cows pregnant over the last 10 to 12 years. Genetics is a big part of that. I think we’ve learned better how to feed cows. No doubt. That’s why we’re seeing eight pounds of components and herds shipped out the door.
But today I want to talk more about the Virgin Heifers. I recall a conversation I had with somebody at select Sires at the time. This is probably 10 years ago. And, the conversation basically, the guy told me that the largest opportunity for repro improvement in US dairies is in the Virgin Heifer population. And I could still make that same argument today.
And it’s not, I’m not trying to paint a real broad brush. There are certainly outliers in every dataset. But for the most part, if I go back to 2013 through 2018 as when I was breeding cows, we’re using gender sorted semen on virgin heifers, and we were achieving 46 to 55% conception rate? Depending on the farm.
And I think that’s just about where we’re still at today. We may have some herds in the sixties. But for the most part, I would say heifer reproduction in the US over the last decade is honestly plateaued from my perspective. So it raises the question why is this happening? Or why has it happened?
And we all look at things through a different lens. We have so many things going for us to help us get heifers bred more efficiently. Better protocols than we had 15 years ago. The introduction of monitoring systems used a lot over the last decade, it’s becoming more and more common in, in the Virgin Heifer population.
But when I look internally at Agrarian Solutions, one of the things that we don’t see is we do not see very many TMR samples being sent in from mycotoxin analysis from our virgin heifers. And, to me that begs the question one, why is that? Number two, the next question I think about is, are mycotoxins a contributing factor to this plateau?
You know, I think we just assume sometimes that virgin heifers are, they’re young, they’re healthy, they’re resilient, and they’re low risk. And looking at the, through the lens of mycotoxins.
But I think sometimes because of that assumption, we treat their nutrition a little bit differently. We don’t test regularly for mycotoxins. We feed refusals, so we have a chance for increased wild yeast in the TMR. And then you contrast that with the cows. A lot of herds are testing their forages on a weekly basis.
A lot of herds that we work with Agrarian Solutions are testing their TMRs on a monthly basis. We test the fresh pen, we test the lactating pens. We test the dry cows even, which is a big step forward. But the heifers, it’s rare.
Oftentimes the only time we see a heifer TMR sample come in is if myself or Chad Christensen out in the Midwest. Jeff Hostetter in the south. If we actually are on the farm and we just pull the sample ’cause we’re testing every TMR group while we’re there. So what happens when we actually take a look? We find mycotoxins. Routinely.
We’re not necessarily seeing mycotoxins come through at catastrophic levels in these virgin heifer TMRs. Generally it’s more the low to moderate contamination. But oftentimes we’re seeing multiple mycotoxins. It stands to reason. If we’re seeing more and more samples come through of our corn silage or of our, our lactating TMR with DON present, zearalenone present, fumonisin present. T-2 Present. It stands to reason we’re gonna have multiple mycotoxins show up in the virgin heifer feed stuff.
And why is this important? Right? It matters biologically because mycotoxins are going to drain nutrients. They’re gonna challenge the immune function of that animal. Zearalenone’s going in disrupting hormone signaling. It creates a competition for energy needed for growth and reproduction. I would say our heifer reproduction, for the most part, is not failing loudly. We’re not seeing big crashes. We’re seeing this plateau. And I’ll come back to it, you know, the myth that we talk about with heifers being younger and more resilient.
They’re still growing. They’re building body reserves, they’re developing mammary tissue, they’re developing their reproductive system. They actually don’t have any extra nutrients to waste on fighting a chronic mycotoxin exposure. The youth doesn’t necessarily mean resilience. It actually probably means less margin for error.
Mature cows have a stronger adaptive capacity. Heifers are allocating nutrients to frame growth, mammary development, immune function, as I mentioned, reproductive maturity, mycotoxins attack all of those systems simultaneously. So it brings us back to that plateau.
You know the industry as a whole, we have improved our AI protocols immensely, as I mentioned. The semen technology, the monitoring systems, genetics. But I still come back to heifer reproduction hasn’t moved nearly as much as our cow reproduction. And I can’t help but wonder if this glass ceiling is a false ceiling.
So as I mentioned we all look at things through a different lens. But I’m gonna come back to, are we missing something in the heifer TMR that’s holding us back? And again, if we’re not sampling, we can’t measure what that thing is. So as I wrap up this episode I wanna just give some practical takeaways.
Number one, start testing. And, you hear me talk about that a lot. If we’re not testing, we don’t know what we’re dealing with. We can’t make a plan for mitigation. We really shouldn’t assume that just because, you know, virgin heifers are young and perhaps more resilient that we don’t need to pay closer attention to those TMRs and what we’re doing with them.
If we think about the fundamentals of rearing animals, right? We wanna provide enough nutrients when they’re young for growth and development. And we’re trying to hit average daily gain numbers. We wanna get these animals bred efficiently, turned around and in the milking herd by 22, 23 months or sometimes less.
What are we doing to defend and protect that virgin heifer to make sure that she flows through the program the way we’re trying to get her to do that? We focused a lot in the last 10 years on non-completion rates in heifers, and I would argue that still today, the same as 10 years ago, one of the reasons virgin heifers leave the herd probably the most predominant reason is they don’t get breaded.
So I would just challenge you as listeners to, to think about, how do we come up with a better solution for managing our virgin heifer TMRs? Let’s take a look at it. Let’s test it. Let’s know what we’re dealing with. And if nothing else, if we routinely test that TMR even once a month, once every six weeks, routinely, we can either check mycotoxins off the box as, “Hey, we’re not seeing any.” Or we can have a discussion about how we’re gonna handle the mycotoxin exposures there.
I would be hard pressed to think that the next gains and heifer reproduction are gonna come from better protocols or sorted semen is going to become all of a sudden, as effective, if not more effective than conventional semen.
And also we’re seeing a rise in embryo implantation. Which is going to have a lesser conception rate for the most part than sort of semen would. So let’s think about what’s going into the front end of our virgin heifers. Let’s have a conversation about how DTX can potentially be a solution to mitigate the chronic exposure from mycotoxins and these heifer TMRs.
And, lastly, I wanna say it again. The dairy industry has done an incredible job over the last decade of modernizing cow reproduction. We have some of the best genetics in the world. In our virgin heifer population. Beef on dairy, as far as helping improve reproduction, it has given us this opportunity to rather than shotgun genetics across the population, it has driven us into a more rifled approach where we’re breeding the best of the best in creating the best.
And in doing so, we’ve created this amazing genetically driven animal. And I guess my challenge would be to, let’s think about applying that same strategy to the TMR, that rifled approach.
Maybe the next improvement in virgin heifer reproduction doesn’t come from another protocol. Maybe it comes from us respecting and understanding the biology of the animals that we’re assuming are fine. So maybe, and this is a what if question. What if virgin heifer reproduction isn’t what has plateaued? What if it’s our assumptions?
Again, I’m gonna come back to it, folks, test those TMRs, send them in, we’ll test them complimentary. And let’s have a conversation about how we can defend and protect those virgin heifers from these environmental challenges. And break that glass ceiling on Virgin Heifer reproduction. Hey, if you found value in today’s podcast, please share it with a friend, and we look forward to talking to you again soon.

The post 69: Cow Reproduction Is Improving… So Why Aren’t Heifers? appeared first on Agrarian Solutions.