If DON mycotoxins interfere with protein synthesis, how much milk protein could dairy cows be losing before clinical signs ever appear?

In this Letters from the Field episode, Dr. Larry Roth explores the hidden cost of nutrient chaos. How mycotoxins can redirect nutrients away from production and toward defense, affecting rumen function, liver health, reproduction, immune function, and overall performance.

If nutrients are being diverted from production to defense, what could that be costing your herd?

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

Scott Zehr: Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I am your host, Scott Zehr. And today, Larry, we are doing something that we’ve never done before.
I don’t know why it took me 70-plus episodes to think of this type of segment, but we routinely get questions from nutritionists or veterinaries, dairy farmers across the country, and a lot of times, Larry, we discuss them internally as a team and develop, okay, how, how can we best serve this person regarding this question.
But man, there’s some of these questions that we get from, say, the field that, I think people, people should hear the conversation that we have around this stuff. So-
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah
Scott Zehr: … think of today as like a letters from the field episode. And so Larry, I’m gonna kick it right off with a text message that I received from a nutritionist. Just to frame it up for the listener, this message, the first message I’m gonna read to you guys was forwarded to me from the nutritionist. It looks like it’s a, an exchange between him and probably his tech person. And, then Larry, I’m gonna have some questions for you around this conversation.
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay.
Scott Zehr: so- hey, thanks for the question. DON inhibits the synthesis of protein, therefore likely negatively impacts microbes, which trials have shown lower microbial protein production and lower fiber digestibility. Post-ruminally, DON is tough on the gut health. I don’t know if that’s a function of protein synthesis or by other means. I would have to go back to my notes regarding site impact for Agrarian’s DTX product.
If it does have some activity within the rumen, that could improve rumination. A cumulative effect post-rumen makes sense as well. And then the specific question I received from this nutritionist, “As we try to make more milk protein, I’m wondering how negatively DON is working against us.” That’s what started this whole conversation.
Dr. Larry Roth: Right.
Scott Zehr: The farm I’m referring to has a 13 PPM DON. So at least they’re, not starting with 500 parts per billion or .5 PPM, Larry. Wow, there’s a lot of meat on that bone from a, from a few different places, and I, I think, Larry, where I’d wanna start with, with our conversation today is more on the protein synthesis side.
My question being, if DON is inhibiting protein synthesis, what’s actually happening inside the cow to cause that? And then I’ll… I have some follow-up questions for you as well.
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. Excellent. So in a previous session, we had called DON the disruptor mycotoxin.
Scott Zehr: Yes.
Dr. Larry Roth: And I think that’s a good lead in here.
So DON alters the rumen microbial population. So if you don’t have bacteria who are fermenting the diet, creating energy, making nitrogen available to be converted into microbial protein, which is the am- ideal amino acid balance for the cow, you don’t have the ideal amino acid balance being absorbed. I think that’s one place.
The other, there’s some thought that the DON molecule may inhibit some of the actual protein synthesis within some of the cells. So if you’re not absorbing the ideal amino acid balance and then you’re inhibiting actual protein synthesis itself in the cells, you’re not gonna have the milk protein created, you’re probably gonna have l- less lean tissue, you’re probably gonna have less of the important organs such as the liver and the kidneys.
And so it’s just kind of a cascading effect, if you will. And it, to me, I think with ruminants, we always have to start with the rumen. They’ve been blessed-
Scott Zehr: Yeah
Dr. Larry Roth: With this 55-gallon fermentation vat between their ribs, and we want that fermentation to be as, both energy efficient and nitrogen efficient as, as it can be, because that sets the stage for the whole rest of the animal.
Then we have to go to the small intestine, and DON can reduce gut integrity at the small intestine, but now we gotta rebuild that small intestine. And by the way, we’re, we need some amino acids, some protein to rebuild that gut tissue. So again, it’s kind of a, if we wanna call it a cascading effect.
This happens, it inhibits this from happening, that makes it harder for another thing to happen. But it all-
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: starts with what’s going on in the rumen, and then what happens to gut integrity in the small intestine.
Scott Zehr: And I, I appreciate your call back to that episode as well, where we previously, nicknamed the different mycotoxins DON being the disruptor. And, and really we, we used that analogy then of all of these things flow downstream.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: So, you know, one of the questions I had thought of is just, what happens first? Does the rumen get compromised or the gut gets compromised, right? The small intestine. And obviously, based on what you said, we’re first gonna see efficiency drop in the, in the rumen, and that’s where-
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: That’s where the fermentation vat lives.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: But again, so the gut health side of that plays into it as well.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yes. Yeah, so I’m gonna say we lose efficiency, both energy and nitrogen efficiency in the rumen first, and then we have issues with small intestine integrity. I, I think that would be the, the proper order.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: maybe I don’t wanna say proper order, but the, the sequence for these challenges occurring.
Scott Zehr: So Larry, right now, people are trying to feed for more milk protein, so-
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep …
Scott Zehr: I I, don’t know if we can really put a number on it, but if we’re trying to maximize milk protein production-
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep
Scott Zehr: Like, how much could DON be maybe quietly working against us before we ever see clinical signs like loose manure or erratic intakes?
Dr. Larry Roth: Wow, that’s a good question. Again, I’m gonna take you back to our past podcast. Are there other mycotoxins challenging the cow at the same time?
Scott Zehr: Mmm.
Dr. Larry Roth: What is the level of DON? What other challenges might the cow be, be facing? So your, your question was what is the… you were trying to put a number on the- I, yeah, I mean- … reduction in efficiency in…
Scott Zehr: Yeah, it’s, it’s probably a hard thing to do i- in a way, right? But-
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah …
Scott Zehr: I guess the spirit of the question is we inherently know based on research, based on things that we’ve talked about on this platform, DON inhibits protein synthesis, right? And there’s a- downstream effect. I’m just imagining, we’re out there in the real world trying to feed the cows to, to increase milk protein.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yes.
Scott Zehr: And we keep throwing ingredients at it, and we keep changing strategies to try to maximize it. We have genetics that have, gosh, have elevated the cow’s ability genetically speaking to make milk protein.
But Larry, if I told you that there was a farm that was making, their percent protein was 3.6% protein, that’s pretty good. And that was a number that was good years ago too. It just, what is holding that back?
Dr. Larry Roth: From a higher level of, of protein in the milk, perhaps amino acids in the diet and perhaps the ratio of those amino acids. That could be holding them back. And also where else is that protein having to go?
If that protein is being diverted to rebuilding digestive tract tissue, if that protein is being reallocated to repairing liver damage because the liver’s doing a lot of detoxification and other issues are, are going on.
So what all challenges is the cow facing? So there’s a, s- slide that I’ve used at different times that looks at the interaction of maintenance, reproduction, milk production, and then defense, which could be the immune system, it could be reestablishing gut integrity. And when we have metabolic challenges, and I’m gonna go ahead and say social challenges, environmental challenges, the nutrients reallocated to defense grows. Okay? And so if more protein in this situation, this example, is diverted over to defense, we’re not gonna have the milk protein that we could potentially have. If defense wasn’t-
Scott Zehr: Yeah, I’ve-
Dr. Larry Roth: soaking up all that protein.
Scott Zehr: Yeah, I, I feel like we’re maybe starting to sound like a broken record, ’cause I, I think you and I have been talking about nutrient reallocation it seems like for, for the better part of two years.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah, yeah.
Scott Zehr: or, or longer, but on this platform. But it, it’s-
Dr. Larry Roth: I, I really think, Scott, that is what limits nutrient efficiency, milk production efficiency. Where are those nutrients going? Because at, at the end of the day, the cow has a limited amount of nutrients to work with. Okay? She’s eating, for the sake of discussion, 56 pounds of dry matter, 60 pounds of dry matter, I don’t know. and there’s a certain n- nutrients that comes with that.
Well, what percentage of those nutrients get absorbed as energy, BFAs? What percentage of the nitrogen or amino acids she consumes end up as microbial protein or feed protein for her to absorb? Okay? There’s some number for both of those. I think the question is where do those nutrients go in her body?
And different things are gonna cause reallocation of the nutrients, and ultimately it’s that reallocation that affects efficiency. So Scott, if we were to go to a dairy that’s got, oh, man, they’ve got absolutely fantastic, feed efficiency, turning, turning feed into milk, I’m gonna submit to you that that is a dairy that does not have a lot of inflammation going on, that probably does not have major mycotoxin issues.
There’s fires that show up, okay? But that dairy is able to put those fires out rather quickly. So that now nutrients go to more profitable purposes than just maintenance and defense. And so you see what we’ve also done here, Scott, is we’ve broken maintenance away from defense.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: And I think many times people will put defense under that umbrella of maintenance.
Scott Zehr: Yep.
Dr. Larry Roth: I think we need to separate defense from maintenance.
Scott Zehr: I think that’s fair and, you know I’m, I’m just imagining, I’m trying to, just imagining myself being a nutritionist for a minute and laying down in bed trying to connect all these dots and, and that’s, maybe that’s just giving the listener a little, too much of how my brain works.
I, I tell people my brain’s like a pegboard and it’s covered with pegs and I, I have to make sure all the strings that can connect do connect if they can. And just walking through the cause and effect of this type of conversation, Larry, it would wake me up with night sweats to think that there’s stuff going on that, that is influencing the effectiveness of the ration that I’m putting on paper. And now one, it’s one thing to recognize that. It’s another thing to figure out then what those things are.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep.
Scott Zehr: But we know, bringing this back, we know that some of those things are mycotoxins.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep
Scott Zehr: What are we doing about it? So there was another part of that, that letter that I had read that asked, or that, that the comment was in the message, I would have to go back and look through my notes, and I’m quote, quoting here, “I would have to go back and look in my notes to see what impact DTX has on the site.”
It’s speaking of the small intestine or- or even potentially in the rumen. Maybe let’s walk into that a little bit, because I, I think, you know, at the end of the day, we’re trying to make more mo- more milk protein. DON’s potentially inhibiting us from doing that. We have something that works on DON. So walk us through a little bit of how that actually happens.
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. I think when I look at how, how DTX works, it’s defending gut integrity, so you don’t have as much destruction of digestive tract lining cells. So you’re gonna have more nutrients, both the amino acids and the energy that would be required to rebuild the gut tissues that are now gonna be available for more productive purposes.
You don’t have, not only DON, with your question. But you don’t have other pathogens entering into the body to cause issues with not only the liver, but the kidney as well. So you don’t have the nutrients going to rebuild those tissues. You don’t have, DON or other, pathogens going through the body for the immune system to attack against, or to attack, rather.
And so those nutrients are gonna be… Those nutrients that would’ve gone to defending and protecting are now available for more profitable purposes. So again, it’s a cascading effect, this time in a positive direction. We’re able to protect against DON at the gut level, so all of these other good things happen.
And because this happens, then this good thing happens, then this good thing happens. So now we have a positive cascade or chain of events.
Scott Zehr: I’m, I’m gonna… I like where you, you went with that from a positive cascade, so I’m gonna kind of circle back a little bit and talk about the, the cascading effect of DON-
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: from a negative light, right? But I, Larry, you have a, a farm enterprise with beef, with chickens, with pork as well, I believe.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep, yep.
Scott Zehr: And maple syrup.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: So- if there’s a little bit of chaos happening around the farm things don’t necessarily go smoothly.
Dr. Larry Roth: Correct, yep.
Scott Zehr: What maybe should have taken you two hours to do chores now took three.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep.
Scott Zehr: We didn’t have something happen that just blew up the whole farm, but just little things all of a sudden don’t work quite as good.
Things don’t flow quite as good. And, you know, I think so many times when we get into conversations about mycotoxins, and DON specifically, we say, “Oh, are the cows showing signs of, you know, loose manure?” What’s the intakes like? What’s the…” wait a minute. If DON is a disruptor toxin, as we’ve called it-
Dr. Larry Roth: Mm-hmm
Scott Zehr: Maybe we’re thinking about this in the wrong way. Instead of DON causing a specific issue like digestive upsets, going back to, the, the analogy there of, of a little bit of chaos-
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep …
Scott Zehr: can just disrupt the whole program, maybe we need to be thinking about DON as, more of a just biological efficiency reduction agent. That’s a really mouthful way of saying that. But e- expand on that, if you could, a little bit.
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. So as, as you were talking, what was going through my mind, the word of the day is either cascade, ’cause I keep using that, this happens or this happens or this happens, or it’s chaos. Okay?
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: So as I have in my career, both professionally and otherwise, traveled around the world and been to a lot of farms, ranches, dairy operations, beef operations, pork, poultry operations, those who are successful get things done on a timely basis.
That’s time allocation. When chaos happens, time allocation is messed up and things don’t get done on a timely basis. Rather simplistic. But I think that we can look at, here’s a term for you, Scott, how about nutrient chaos?
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: When chaos happens in the cow’s body, mycotoxins, we could say leaky gut, we could say heat stress. We could continue on, but when that chaos happens, nutrients are now reallocated from where we wanted them to go.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: So, nutritionists can say, “All right, how much lysine does a cow need?” it depends what she has to do with it. If she’s having to divert some lysine to gut rebuilding, her requirement just went up.
So, maybe a term that we could start using is nutrient chaos, which comes from metabolic and environmental and social challenges. And the cow has to resolve that chaos if she wants to live. And if she doesn’t-
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: resolve it, that’s unresolved inflammation, that’s unresolved other things. She doesn’t make milk. She doesn’t get bred back. Maybe she doesn’t live and she’s not on the farm. So our word for the day could either be cascade or chaos. How’s that?
Scott Zehr: Yeah. And they, there’s some symmetry between those two words in this-
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep.
Scott Zehr: …context as well.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep. Exactly.
Scott Zehr: All right, Larry, I’m, I’m gonna do something a little bit different here as we wrap up this conversation.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: we’ll call it a lightning round, if you would. Okay. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask you to finish this sentence in a fun, rapid-fire way. Here we go. The biggest misconception nutritionists have about DON is…
Dr. Larry Roth: that it happens in a vacuum by itself. So often DON is gonna be traveling hand-in-hand with other mycotoxins. And again, it starts this cascade of events.
Scott Zehr: Okay. question two: The first number I look at when evaluating a DON challenge is…
Dr. Larry Roth: Hmm. Total parts per million of DON.
Scott Zehr: Okay.
Dr. Larry Roth: Second would be what other mycotoxins are there.
Scott Zehr: Question number three, a farm can have a DON problem even when blank.
Dr. Larry Roth: Even when the DON level is low, because there are other challenges are taking place that reduces the cow’s, or increases the cow’s susceptibility to DON.
Scott Zehr: And lastly, the most overlooked consequence of DON exposure is:
Dr. Larry Roth: Liver function.
Scott Zehr: Hmm.
Dr. Larry Roth: We think of DON as messing up, there’s a scientific term for you. Messing up ruminal fermentation, destroying gut integrity. But we don’t necessarily think of DON as impairing liver function. But if these other things, altering ruminal fermentation and increasing or decreasing gut integrity take place, there’s gonna be greater loads on the liver, and liver function is gonna suffer.
Scott Zehr: So if the chaos cascades.
Dr. Larry Roth: There you go.
Scott Zehr: I only did the lightning round so I could work that in.
Dr. Larry Roth: All right.
Scott Zehr: I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. I think there’s a, a lot of meat on this bone that we could probably dive into. And folks, if you have questions regarding this topic or any, any topic involving, the dairy industry really, but specifically, Ruminant Nutrition podcast@agrsol.com. Ask us your questions. We will get back to you personally, and you never know, it may turn into a Letters from the Field episode with Dr. Roth.
Larry, I wanna thank you for taking time out of your day today to have this conversation. I think there’s some, some good nuggets here for people to think about and, and maybe thinking about old topics in a new light, and I’ll give you the last word.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah. The last word would be just think of the chain of events, the cascading effect that comes from not just mycotoxins, but other challenges as well.
Scott Zehr: Love it. Have a great week everybody, and we’ll be talking to you again soon, from the podcast room here at Agrarian Solutions and Ruminate This.

The post 76: Where Did the Protein Go? 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

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

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 episode 72 of Ruminate This, Scott and Dr. Larry Roth explore a different way to think about dairy heat stress. Not as an isolated challenge, but as something that amplifies underlying issues like mycotoxins, reduced dry matter intake, and marginal nutrition.

They walk through how stacked stress impacts gut health, liver function, and milk production, often long before you see changes in the tank.

If you are a dairy producer, nutritionist, or consultant, this episode will help you better understand how to manage heat stress and protect cow performance during high-risk periods.

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

Scott Zehr: All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And today 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 72: Heat Stress in Dairy Cows Isn’t Just the Problem. It’s the Multiplier appeared first on Agrarian Solutions.

With milk prices under pressure and input costs still elevated, the margin for error is slim. This episode explores the real economics behind forage decisions—and how small missteps can erode profitability.

Scott and Joe discuss:

Why short-term decisions often come at a long-term cost
The difference between growing tons and feeding usable tons
How forage shrink can act like someone stealing 25% of your bank account if left unmanaged
Why securing high-quality forage for lactating cows beats scrambling to replace it later
The risk of “busy” decisions that don’t deliver financial returns
This conversation redefines forage management as one of the most controllable and impactful financial levers on a dairy operation.

If you’re looking to navigate tight margins, reduce purchased feed, and make more confident decisions under pressure, this is a must-listen.

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

Scott Zehr: Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And today I’m again joined by Joe Lawrence from Cornell Pro Dairy. Joe, thanks for jumping back on with me. Appreciate it.

Joe Lawrence: Thanks for having me.

Scott Zehr: Yeah. So Joe, we had a great conversation a couple of weeks ago here talking about forage quality, you know, thinking from the field to feed out. And there’s a lot of ground to cover, no pun intended there, from, I try to work in jokes sometimes. But there’s a lot of ground to cover there from just remembering to master those fundamentals. Right? Cut timing, cut height, storage management, as far as, you know, keeping it in repair and keeping things clean.
And there’s so many things. And, we’re gonna be in the fields in the northeast here not too long, right? It’s, it’s probably within the next month we’re gonna see, see grass coming off and, and so on. In other parts of the country, you know, probably going on right now. But we spend a lot of time, a lot of resources, man hours to get up high quality forages. And sometimes we hit our goals of, of having elite protein that we raised here on the farm and sometimes we don’t, but we’re in kind of a down cycle in the milk price right now.
And like any business owner, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, if you know the product you’re selling is, is not valued as high. And so, cost of production is pretty much still the same or maybe slightly increasing. All this stuff. It creates pressure on the organization, on the individuals to think about decisions that are going to lessen the money going out, right? If we have less money coming in, how do we get less money coming out? And, there’s probably places on every dairy that, yeah, they could probably trim some fat here and there.
I’ve been on the professional side of this where I’ve been able to work out in the field on farms now for 13 years. And, the one thing that I’ve noticed that has stood out to me above all else, I spent a lot of time on, on the genetic side of things and dairy reproduction, and now on the front end of the cow with the mycotoxins.
The pattern that I’ve noticed is that the farms that do the best through a downswing in milk prices are the guys that don’t change anything. Right? It doesn’t matter if milk is $25, a hundred, or $16 a hundred, we need to still execute at a high level. And sure, they may trim some stuff here or there, like the fat that we don’t need during these times, but they’re not going out and slashing with a sledgehammer, right? They’re going out with a pair of scissors and trimming the fat. Not beating the program to death.
So, somebody asked me recently, Joe and I, this is, may be a long lead up to this, but somebody asked me recently there’s a, a farm that short on forage and looking at the milk pricing and, and how, how are we gonna make up this, this number in our budget, this X dollars, right?
And, I mentioned it last time, like I, I don’t have that magic wand to print cash for them. But when I looked at, and I, I was just looking at their animal health side of things. When I looked at that side of the equation, I was seeing in the data we’re probably leaving somewhere between, I’m gonna say four to eight pounds of milk on the table?
If they increased eight pounds of milk, even in the low milk prices, they actually would more than break even for the year. So, that really kind of made me think about this forage conversation with you and let’s say everything goes great this year, Joe. We have the perfect growing season, the perfect harvest season. We’ve done everything.
Well, no, we probably can’t just, you know, that that haylage isn’t gonna immediately turn into cash, but what’s the economic impact to the organization, to the dairy of not having to go source protein from the feed mill. And so that’s probably a long tee up for you. But I would like to get your thoughts on that overarching and then we’ll, we’ll break it down from there.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, I think that’s a good example. And it, there’s a couple places I’d like to go with that. I’ll start with more like specifically to your question and then zoom back out a little bit. So yeah, it, it can be challenging to put a lot of really, capture a lot of good financials around forage quality ’cause there’s always kind of a what if component to it, of, you know, we’re not doing side-by-side trials with two different quality forages on the farm. Right?

Scott Zehr: Yeah.

Joe Lawrence: But, you know, we have the dairy Farm Business Summary Program through Cornell. It’s an opportunity for farms to benchmark their financials every year against, you know, everyone else that’s in the program.
And what we see consistently and some work that some of my colleagues at pro dairy have done in analyzing the data is that, you know, if we see this trend where farms that are able to feed higher forage diets trend towards an improved income over feed cost. And so, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of other variables that go into that, right?
But we have enough years of data and also from our dairy Profit Monitor program, which is a monthly program where farms input their data. We see that where we, we can’t exactly nail down everything. But we know that there’s a solid trend, at least here in the northeast and in similar growing environments, that higher forage diets are correlated with that improved income over feed cost. Right?
And I always like to go back to a, a case study that Dr. Larry Chase at Cornell did several years ago. And this is just, again, one farm, kind of little case study. We’ll take it for what it is. But it is really fascinating to me because they, they track this farm and, when this was done, we weren’t even necessarily talking about some of the fiber digestibility metrics, the UNDF 240, the NDFD 30 hour as much as, you know, really just looking at forage NDF levels, right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: And so Larry shares this data where this farm going into the fall was feeding out some haylage and pretty high NDF levels in that haylage and they were hovering around 50% forage in their diet. As the fall went on, and they shifted into some different cuttings of haylage that you saw that NDF level drop. And correspondingly you saw percent forage in the diet increasing.
And so from, in the data, you know, that’s shared from October to January, percent forage in the diet went from 50% up to almost 65% forage in the diet. And through that same time period, income over feed cost went from when there was 50% diet forage in the diet, income over feed cost was $4.27 cents.
By the time we got up to about 65% forage in the diet, income over feed cost was $5.58 cents. If you just put that on a hundred cows just for easy math, it’s about $130 per day per 100 cows, right?

Scott Zehr: Yeah.

Joe Lawrence: That, that you’ve, that you’ve increased income over feed cost with that increased forage in the diet. So, you know, when we can manage that, when back to our, you know previous discussion, when we can manage those things and put up that high quality feed, that’s what’s facilitating these higher forage diets, right. And through that it’s a, it’s a real opportunity to change some of those. Not completely eliminate our financial pressures right? But, but change some of the dynamics there.
Scott Zehr: How do we lessen the pressure? And there’s, that’s, I think that’s the, the goal here, right? I don’t think we’re gonna, you know, I don’t want anybody be thinking that I’m some crazy tinfoil hat guy, right? We’re not gonna just magically become profitable overnight in these downturns.
But financial I’m gonna go a little off, off topic here. The, the financial pressure in dairy farming, crop farming, dairy farming, cattle, agriculture in general leads to a lot of decision struggle. And, and there’s a reason that agriculture has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. And a lot of it is the financial pressure.
So that’s maybe the extreme on one side. But somewhere in there, like inherently, we’re probably going to consider making decisions that are gonna compromise long-term success of our operation. And then I guess from your chair, what are some of the things that are just completely non-negotiable on the forage side? Like, don’t even look here, don’t even consider it here.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, that’s a, it’s a bit of a hard one because it’s, I, I struggle, I, I struggle with what not to include.

Scott Zehr: Well, yeah. Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: But I guess a couple things I would just say is you know, again, our goal as we talked about last episode is how many tons of this feed do we have that actually reaches the cow’s mouth, right? And that’s the right quality for her nutritional needs.
Whatever part of her lactation she’s in, or dry cow or whatever, right? So. And to do that, yeah, we, we really, can’t compromise. One thing I would say absolutely not to do, and this isn’t even financial, but we had kind of a, a droughty challenging summer here in the northeast in New York last year.
So this is even about inventory and connected to finances obviously. But, you know, one thing I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about with some farms and different groups the last month or so here is let’s not compromise quality for tonnage this spring ’cause we think we wanna, we have to rebuild inventory.
It’s not a good trade off. it’s just not a good trade off. And you may think, well, I can wait a little longer, put up extra tons, rebuild inventory ’cause I’m kind of short and, you know, I don’t have the money to buy this extra forage. And you know, what I would say to that is you really don’t have the, you can’t afford not to put up that high quality feed that allows you to achieve that higher percent forage in your ration. Right?
Because inevitably the more the yield goes up, the less pounds of that we can fit into the cow’s rumen without her filling to her physical fill limits. Right? And just not being able to eat it. So now we, we inevitably, you know, it’s kind of the cruel irony of it is we end up with excessive inventory of stuff we just can’t put as many pounds into the ration.
And we’re, we’re back to the, you know, we’re back to relying more on purchase feed ingredients to meet her nutritional needs. So I guess that would be my biggest point is both from a financial and a, considering the year we had, like in New York, is what’s not compromise that quality to try to build inventories.

Scott Zehr: And I think that might be the one non-negotiable. If, if you’re, you know, if you wanna like, just, that’s the mic drop one right there, because the idea of going out and sourcing haylage, let’s just say haylage. To some people is really kind of a nightmare, right?
You’re writing a check for it. That’s not a normal check you have to write. So it, it seems like it’s a, you know, a double whammy if you would. But the reality of what you just described is, okay, we’re gonna, opt for a little more yield this year, and I’m okay giving up a percent or two of protein.
And then what happens, right? We, what you just described. But then you’re still gonna go purchase off farm feed stuff. But it’s gonna show up in a semi with a feed most logo on it, rather than buying a high quality haylage somewhere else, or buying, you know, whatever the forage might be.
And that’s a check that we write every month no matter what. So maybe we don’t think about it quite that way. And a lot of guys do, right? I think you’re right. If there was one area, people, especially coming out of a drought year, we’re gonna try to cut corners on, if you would, that would probably be one of the places they would look.
So Joe, you know, there’s so many things on farms that we, we can’t control, right? Milk price, weather, so on. And then there’s the things we can control. We can control our decision making, we can control our management practices. And, we have to always be mindful to do a great job of mastering those things we can control. But then in, in real life. Right. What does that look like in the forage program for putting up high quality forage to, to help ease budget pressure and that stuff?
You know, where would you tell people to, to really focus on number one? Or maybe the, the second part of this question should be specifically, right? On the things they can control, but more broadly, like how do we manage those uncontrollable things?

Joe Lawrence: Yeah. I think that’s a great question. And, I think back to the kind of that classical overlapping circles. And, and I’ve actually, you know, been in farm offices where we put this up on the whiteboard or something, and I’d encourage farms to do that with their own cropping crew and or management team, right? Like put those two overlapping circles up on the whiteboard.
And one is things that are important to forage quality. And the other circle is things we can control, right? And, so where those two overlap are where we should focus the most resources in on, right? And there’s, there’s stuff that’s very important, but if we can’t control it. And if we can reference back to our previous conversation in the last episode, thinking about the, the ranking order that I referenced from Dr. Marvin Hall at Penn State of, what has the biggest impact on forage quality in the field. And you know, starting with maturity, right? So, so having that little kind of planning session with those two overlapping circles I think is helpful. And what we see in our data, and it’s a little different from corn silage to haylage. So haylage will go back to maturity tops that list, right?

Scott Zehr: Yep.

Joe Lawrence: Corn silage and especially as we look deep, dive a little deeper into fiber digestibility, and that’s really become the standard nutritionists are using to really figure out how valuable this forage is, right? And we know from years of our trials that, and other folks trials too, that, when we have a wetter growing season, if we’re on the rainier side for the growing season, we’re gonna tend to have lower fiber digestibility in that corn plant. And, you know, in a lot of the country where we’re in rain fed agriculture, we can’t control that rain.
Right? But what we can start to think about is, you know, as early as the month of August, we can start kind of looking at how rainy has the season been? What are the implications of this? Are we feeding some really good quality corn silage right now? And all of a sudden we’re looking at the current season we’re in and saying, Hey, this is gonna, the writing’s on the wall that this probably isn’t gonna feed as well as last year’s crop.
So we get to December and we have to switch over to the new crop, and it’s a bit of a wet down, right? We’re going into something more challenging, but if we, if we start thinking about that using the, the information we have in the month of August, and we start running some scenarios with our nutritionist of, all right, if fiber digestibility goes down by this much, what’s our new ration gonna look like?
And what, feed ingredients are we gonna might, we wanna source more of to that we know we’re gonna need in that new diet. It’s not gonna be a perfect scenario, right? But we can get an idea. And maybe August, September might be a lot better time to source some of those ingredients we think we might be feeding in a higher quantity, than waiting till December or January when we start feeding that new corn silage to, to make those decisions and start looking for those other ingredients we need. Right?
And, or maybe it affects our decision making for an extra cutting of our haylage later in the year that we’re really going after some quality to offset what, you know, a challenge we might have with the corn silage. So I think in the, in the bigger picture, right, that’s a, that’s a way we can use the information we have to start making some decisions that can directly impact the finances of our feeding program.
While again, recognizing that if we, we put our resources where we can have an impact and it’s important to our feeding program and we try to avoid those areas where we could buy this product, we could get this gadget. And sometimes, you know, human psychology as that makes us feel better because we did something. But it doesn’t actually mean it had a meaningful impact on our goals. So.

Scott Zehr: It’s funny you, you kind of teed up my next question where my mind was without even knowing it. But you know, sometimes when we get into these, these price challenging times, right. We’re looking to cut forage corners. Right? But it cutting corners in general, and, and right, It, it feels smart because it makes us feel good. We’re doing something to try to alleviate the pressure. But can you think of some examples to where it’s, it’s just gonna remove our optionalities later?

Joe Lawrence: Yeah. Well I think of you know, this is kind of a detailed example, but I think it’s a helpful one. We’ll use alfalfa as an example. And, you know, when we look at like the quality of alfalfa, and obviously protein’s still important in our diets, right? But as we’ve shifted our thinking more to really how much of this can we feed, how many total digestible nutrients are in this forage?
Alfalfa is a good example of where we see, like in this first cutting where we’ll get down and Dr. Jerry Cherney at Cornell’s had some interesting work where he’s collected some of this data too, is we’ll get down, you know, that alfalfa crew protein levels going down a little bit as the plant matures. Then it might get to like 18% and it just kind of plateaus off.
But if you’re actually tracking fiber digestibility, like the 30 hour NDF value at the same time points, we see where that NDFD 30 keeps going down at a pretty linear rate, even when the, when the crew protein plateau is off around 18%. You know, that’s been a change in the last 30 years or so, right? Of what metrics we’re looking at.
If we’re looking at that 18% crude protein alfalfa, and we’re thinking, well, it’s not 21, 22% anymore, but it’s still 18. That’s better than that 14% grass that’s out there, right. But there’s a big difference. And some of the work we’ve done and, Dr. Cherney collected here in New York, like there’s a big difference between 18% crude protein and May 20th and 18% crude protein on May 30th. Right. Because

Scott Zehr: Yes.

Joe Lawrence: because fiber digestibility has continued to go down in that 10 day period. And now that we have, you know, now that we can better recognize that information, to me that’s an area where we thought we were doing all right. Like, you know, we have it in the back of our mind, kind of just thinking like, alfalfa’s a little more forgiving. I can leave it out there a few more days and it’s you know, it’s still gonna be decent protein, it’s still gonna be decent feed, but, we have the knowledge now to say, well, no, wait a minute. That’s not quite right.
And, even though the protein level’s still there, the fiber, the total nutrient digestibility of this forage is gonna continue to go down and we’re not gonna be able to utilize it as well in our rations. Right. It’s just, it’s gonna be in an ingredient in our rations that’s got some constraints around how we use it. And it’s gonna force us to make other decisions about how we balance that ration because we’ve put these constraints around how we can utilize that one ingredient.

Scott Zehr: Yeah, I mean, that’s, it’s a great example of, where quality forage is buying you decision space, right? And it’s funny ’cause it’s, it’s not just decision space, but it’s also space inside the cow, right?

Joe Lawrence: Yeah.

Scott Zehr: You know, what, what we can put into where and what we can get out of that, that plant. Man, that’s, that’s, that’s big. I like the way you framed that up because it, again, and I, I think so many times these conversations, right? we know this, like we know that 18% crude protein alfalfa on May 20 is, is not the same as 18% on May 30. But yeah, I’m gonna come back to it. So often when we as humans start to feel pressure, sometimes those are the little things that we, we put on the back burner and say, okay, yeah.
But, we’re under the gun here and we need to do something else, do a different way. But I, I’m gonna come back to, Joe, the comment I made at the beginning of the episode, which is the farms that I’ve seen in the last 13 years that survive these milk price swings the best, they don’t make those decisions. They, they stick to what they know has worked even in, you know, during the high, high swings.

Joe Lawrence: Well, and I would even take that a step further. You know, kind of similar observation, just working with having the good fortune to work with a lot of different farms over the years and learn from them as, there’s also that there’s folks that I’ve seen position themselves in the downturn to take advantage of the next upcycle, right?

Scott Zehr: Yes.

Joe Lawrence: And so it’s not just about not, so there’s the immediate sacrifice of cutting something out if you’re in a downturn. But then there’s, there’s the wagging effect of that. That sometimes we make changes that have, you know, can affect an entire lactation or affect the crop we’re gonna feed for the next 12 to 15 months. And all of a sudden milk prices turn around and we’re, we’re not in a good position that our cows are at peak production to make the most of the turnaround in the milk prices, right? So it’s a kind of a double whammy.

Scott Zehr: It, it is. And the example I’m gonna give, and I, I think I’ve, I may have used this before, maybe not on this platform, but ‘09. We all remember, oh, that’s all we have to say is ‘09 in the dairy world. And we just all nod our head and smile, and thank God we’re still here.
So this one’s pretty close to home. I’ll just word it like that. Yeah, things were tight. I was on the dairy at that time. You know, I wasn’t, wasn’t an owner by any means. Didn’t have any real decision making as far as, you know, making some of the bigger strategic decisions.
But at the time, I mean, ‘09 was tough. So one of the things that got done was we started sourcing genetics from some local farms that had some, you know, great cows, right? And, they were collecting their own bulls and, yeah, $3 straws of semen sounded awesome.
Well, you know, we lived past ‘09. And in 2013 when I started at, at Select Sires I did a genetic audit on those cows. Same ones that I, I grew up working with every day. And, you know, we weren’t making a ton of milk back then. It was never a high producing herd. 62, 65 pounds was about where we had kind of maxed out for the most part.
And I could go on a list of reasons why, but, when we got into like 2012, where those genetics were coming in now, and they, they’re mature cows and they should have been just cranking. On either side of the curve we had our genetic program that we were running prior to ‘09 that we kind of went back to once milk prices came back, right? And you could see it in the genetic audit when you sorted them by milk production, sorted them by reproduction, sorted ’em by health events, didn’t matter.
That genetic decision we made in ‘09 followed for at least six years before those cows finally weeded themselves out. And you don’t make that up overnight. Right. And you can’t. I mean, you can, you can do it extreme, but it felt good at the time. But man, what a disaster it turned out to be, you know, from, from my perspective of, there’s places to cut and there’s places not to cut. Yeah. That’s just, you know.

Joe Lawrence: and I, and, and I, you know, I’m getting dangerously outta my area talking about animals here, but you know, we, we see more and more data too about the not only lifelong effects, but generational effects of stress, right? Like heat stress events even during pregnancy.

Scott Zehr: Yeah.

Joe Lawrence: You know pulling back, mid lactation, really pulling back the nutrition to cut cost. And it’s not just, it doesn’t just affect that animal for the rest of that lactation. Right. We there’s a, you know, I, again, I can’t speak to some of the specifics, but I just know from reading enough articles and talking to the, the people that do know that these effects are long term on, on the animals. And we, you know, we have to keep that in mind when we’re trying to, to feed through a, a tough economic period, right?

Scott Zehr: Yeah. I didn’t think epigenetics would come into this conversation, but it’s actually, I’m glad you brought that up. Because you know, you take my genetic example from my own experience, but then you, come back to, okay. Right? We’re trying to put up quality forage and we’re struggling with the milk prices. And, and you can easily see that the chain of events now that we’ve, we’ve kind of flushed it out where we’re sacrificing on the front end or we, we think we’re. You’re not sacrificing on the front end.
We think we’re compromising on the front end. But really what’s happening is, and you teased it up with the generational effect, right? Whether it’s heat stress, whether it’s mycotoxins. Whatever happens to that cow in utero affects the calf that she’s carrying and affects her developing gonads.
And if you guys wanna a reference point, if you’re a listener on here, I’ll reference people back for your listeners episodes 10, which is genetics and nutrition, the keys to Healthier Long Living Cows. That was with Dr. Kevin Ziemba. And then even more specifically, into the epigenetics realm as we just talked about, episode 11 with the man, the myth, the legend himself, Dr. Jack Britt. Talking the dairy cow fertility and the significant role of epigenetics.
And you know, these, these decisions show that we’re, we’re making today. I’m so glad you brought that up. The generational impact here is a big deal. And, you know, what, what can feel good for us today to get through a downturn, and our cash flow, I just would really encourage guys to think about the downstream effect.
And, you know, Joe, there’s a man, we’re getting a little philosophical here, but I think this is a good point. There’s a book called Mastering the Complex Sale by Jeff Toole. And, and a lot of people maybe in the sales world have read it, but what it does is it talks about the different stakeholders in the business. And how, you know, the same thing matters to stakeholders differently.
So what matters to, to maybe our herd manager you know, forage quality. Let’s take forage quality, for example. To the owner or CEO of a farm, forage quality means something different to them than it does to our herd manager, than it does to maybe the people that we have that are, are milking the cows, right.
Whether they know it or not, it does matter to all three of them. But I think a good filter to think about is, we’re making decisions around forage quality and how we’re gonna survive. Or even potentially, as you mentioned, Joe, set yourself up for capturing the, the upcycle even harder. The decision we’re trying to make today, how does it affect the company at all three levels? Right?
And are we making a decision today that makes sense for the operational stuff today, but we’re, we’re not spending any time on what’s the strategic impact of that three to five years later. What’s the tactical implications of that one to two years down the road? And so many times when there’s a fire right? To the fires today, we always focus on where the fire is instead of, just take that extra bit of time to, to flush that out and, and think about the tactical and the, the strategic.
No. Yeah, I’m, I’m glad you brought that up. So I, I guess to, to kind of get back on track here, Joe, just, just kind of bringing this conversation up. I’m gonna throw a list of, a few questions at you. What’s the most expensive, cheap decision, if you would, that you’ve seen on farms? The most expensive, cheap decision that you’ve seen?

Joe Lawrence: You challenge me to come up with another answer ’cause my go-to would be the harvest timing part of it, which I’ve already,

Scott Zehr: Yeah

Joe Lawrence: Elaborated on.

Scott Zehr: Yeah. We’ve already used that one.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, we’ve already used that one. So I I don’t know if this is the, you know, that has the, the biggest impact in terms of money saved. But I think you know, given the prevalence of drive over piles, bunk silo, you know, our horizontal silos on farms is just cutting corners on the storage side and that, you know, there are, that does come back to do we have the enough drivers for the pack tractors that day? Do we rent an additional pack tractor and, and find a driver for it? You know, those are, in the heat of harvest and when finances are tight, those are those extra checks that have to be written, right?
But just not cutting corners there. Because again, going back to the theme of, you know, both of our visits here is if you it doesn’t matter how good a job you did growing that crop or what the forage sample results say coming out of the field if we don’t preserve that.
And shrink losses are just such a massive expense on farms, right? We’ve done some simple, we’ve done some simple math. You know, I mean if you, like, if we call around 10%, shrink a pretty good management because ferment, you know, because we have some biological losses with fermentation and stuff, right? But…

Scott Zehr: Yeah.

Joe Lawrence: You know, we’ve done some, just some math on a hundred cows, just you can extrapolate that number from a hundred cows. But going from 10% shrink up to 20, 25% shrink, which unfortunately we still do see on farms. That’s essentially in our little example, you know, 10 to 12 extra acres of corn that you have to grow for every hundred cows that you’re trying to feed.
And that’s 10 to 12 acres that you have to own or rent the land, prepare the land, fertilize the land, purchase the seed for plant, control the pest, run the chopper over, haul all those loads of feed back to the bunk and they never, never reach the cow. Right?

Scott Zehr: Yeah. And it’s 10 to 12 more acres of on the backside of pitching, shoveling, loading, composting.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah. So that’s, to me it’s, I guess 10 to 12 acres depending, you know, on, on your perspective may seem like kind of the flex you have in your acreage anyways. But it’s, you know, there’s just such a cost there that could be cropped, that’s building your inventory or even in a good year could be saleable crop. Right?
And, you know, I just saw recently like some estimates on the cost of growing a corn crop this year. Putting it at close to a thousand dollars or even over a little over a thousand dollars an acre to grow a crop of corn. And that’s before you even harvest it. Right. So yeah, there’s real money there and, and real implications to how many acres you have to, to run over.
And so I guess that’s a long-winded answer to, to your question is if we’re, if we’re compromising on packing on you know, I, I like to say like, when I was first outta school, there was still a lot of discussion around like innocuous and like oxygen barrier plastics. And to me today, those aren’t discussion points or extras anymore.
They should just be part of your best management practices. They’re not gonna fix other problems, but to me in today’s world, there’s enough data behind them, there’s enough information there. They should just be part of your best management practices. And so yeah, making sure you got the enough pack tractors and starting right from the get go with doing a good job with storing that feed and not being tempted to save a few bucks on a one less pack tractor or not getting the oxygen barrier plastic this year or something would, would be where I would go with that.

Scott Zehr: I think those are excellent examples. And the shrink number, you know, people, we, we don’t necessarily see it, right? We do, but we, it shout at you, right? Mm-hmm. But let’s just, you know, let’s just say we’re a farm that’s running that 15% shrink, you know, so we’re, we’re, it is just not a great job, but we’re, we’re not doing the worst job ever, right?
I had this discussion with a nutritionist at a conference one day, and we were talking about shrink. And I said, you know, if, if at the end of harvest you could just show up with payloads and dump trucks, and you divided the pile into, you know, say four. And a crew came in during the night and took 25% of the bunk and just left.
Maybe then we could, we could get more people to, to just remember that the shrink number, it’s numbers that represents the amount of forage you put up that you’re never gonna feed to that cow. What’s the difference if it leaves in a tractor trailer at the end of harvest or if it leaves quietly over the next 12 months?
And obviously there is a difference there, but that stark contrast, I think is, something that once I got that through my head, it’s like, okay, yeah, this actually is a big deal. And, and it’s the same example. I know this is a, going back to the cow side again, but same example for that non-completion rate that we talk about in dairy. You know, if you’re sitting there running 15%, 18% non-completion rate every time, every a hundred heifer calves that are born, Hey, we’re just gonna take 15 of ’em right off the top, ’cause you’re not gonna milk them anyway. So let’s just take ’em now. Boy, if you started, you know, if we thought about it in those terms, it gets kind of scary and kind of unsettling.
Joe Lawrence: That’s a really impactful way to look at it. Yeah, that would be you know, I, I, I haven’t jumped on the AI bandwagon yet, but you’d think you could like create like a graphic for a video or PowerPoint slide where you did that, right? Like,

Scott Zehr: Yeah.

Joe Lawrence: And yeah, it’s a big number. I, you know, I had a farm I was working with once, and they had some pretty challenging practices with their bunk. Will, will be nice and say it like that. But it, you know, so after at the end of harvest. I, unfortunately my camera skills weren’t the greatest. But at the end of harvest, I tried to find a reference angle with some stuff in the background, and I took a picture and then I came back four or five months later and stood in the same spot, tried to get the same angle, and took another picture. And it wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have, not, my camera skills aren’t good enough, but you could, you could clearly see, you know, the stuff in the background.
You could get a bit of an elevation and just how, how much that pile had settled. And you know, it wasn’t a super tall pile, so it wasn’t just gravity like pushing the feed down, right? It was, nutrients leaving and just burning off into the air. And I wish I could get a better reference of that sort of thing ’cause it really is impactful.
And, and another part of that that comes up is you know, and someone I respect quite a bit in the industry brings this up and I won’t, won’t take credit for it, but they you know, they talk about like, when you have leachate from your bunk, you’re not losing, that’s not pounds of just corn silage you’re losing. That’s more like pounds of corn meal you’re losing, right?
Because what’s in that leachate? It’s that it’s stuff that’s soluble in water. It’s our, you know, it’s some of that starch, it’s that sort of stuff. So that cloudy leachate that’s leaving your bunk isn’t, you can’t say that’s like x number of pounds of corn silage. You can say that’s X number of pounds of these nutrients that are actually valued at a lot higher value per ton than a ton of corn silage is valued at. Right?

Scott Zehr: Yeah.

Joe Lawrence: So.

Scott Zehr: Yeah. And you know, I was thinking about that, Dr. Roth here at Agrarian Solutions, he, he likes to remind people that, you know the forage pile you put up, that is a stack of a hundred dollars bills.
Right. You know, there’s an old saying that money’s no good, or money’s like a manure pile. It’s no good unless you spread it. Well in, in terms of forage quality, it’s you know, it is no good unless you keep it tight and keep it under control. And, and actually going back to that example that I gave of the trucks coming during the middle of the night taking 25% of your bunk because of shrink.
Well, if it’s a money pile, Joe, how often would you like somebody to maybe come in once a year and take 25% of your bank account? You know, it’s just. So, you know, last question I have for you is what do resilient operations tend to protect first? You know, in the forage quality realm or so on.

Joe Lawrence: I’m gonna stick on the storage side of this and really focus effort to protect what we’ve harvested out of the field. Yeah, there’s actually, we can put some economics to this, and I don’t have the data right in front of me. But the, the farm business management and dairy management folks at Penn State a few years ago did a large statewide survey of a lot of farms that voluntarily worked with ’em to track all of their data. And you know, think of all the things on the dairy farm that can happen.
And, their summary report of that project, that the leading thing that they found separating the higher profit farms from the lower profit farms was they word it of, it was something like ability to put up high quality feeds regardless of weather, regardless of anything else going on around them. Right.
And that, that group was actually, you know, they were able to separate financial performance by some of the metrics they collected around the forage program. So I, you know, as a forage guy, that was I thought that was pretty cool, right? That gives some, lens some credibility or some emphasis to why that’s, that’s so important.
But yeah, we just, you know, again, regardless of what the weather delivers to us for a crop, what happens in the field. I think resiliency comes from doing the best job. We kind of not compromising on, on storing that feed. So.

Scott Zehr: Well, coming from the forage guy through that lens you know, I I, I would agree on the cow side from what I see is we don’t change the genetic program or we don’t change the cow care, the cow comfort side of things. We still go about it, the, you know, the right way every day, if you would. And I know it’s easy for guys like you and I to sit here and say these things and encourage guys to not succumb to the pressure and try to avoid the bad decision making traps.
But the one thing that I would say is from the one advantage that guys like you and I do have is, you know, for the last number of years we’ve been able to travel the countryside and see very different size operation, every different management style. And it’s the pattern recognition, right? It’s, this is, whether you’re a, a producer in Florida, California, the Midwest, New York, Maine. There’s certain truths that are consistent across all sizes, shapes and management practices of dairy.
And I, I think the, the one you just mentioned is one of ’em. And then the cow side, right? That’s, those are the things that we really gotta remember not to try, not to end up compromising when we’re faced with decision pressure. So yeah, I thought that was great insight from you, Joe. Well with that, Joe, I’ll, I’ll ask you do you have any final parting words for our audience before we call it a day?

Joe Lawrence: I think I might go back to something we started last episode on, is just we’re coming into a busy part of the year and you know, at the end of the day, we’ll, we wanna do all this stuff, right? And that creates a lot of strain.
But if, you know, let’s take the steps to, to do it safely and take care of our ourselves first, right? Like I think it, becoming more acceptable to acknowledge the fact that if we don’t take care of ourselves, then we’re not gonna be able to do a good job at these other goals we have. So.

Scott Zehr: I’ve been preaching that to myself and, and to anybody that’ll listen for the last number of years. ‘Cause yeah, you don’t take care of yourself, how are you gonna take care of others? And I, I used to think that was selfish. But I actually think that’s extremely selfless. Once you understand it. So

Joe Lawrence: I would agree.

Scott Zehr: Yeah. Well, great talking to you Joe from all the way on the other side of the county line. And hopefully we have another visit soon. And with that folks appreciate you taking time. And make sure if you found value in today’s podcast, you hit that share button and send it to somebody that could use the conversation. With that, we’ll be talking to everybody again in a couple of weeks. Thank you.

The post 71: Forage Quality ROI: Stop Losing Money in the Bunk appeared first on Agrarian Solutions.

As first cutting approaches, this conversation focuses on the real-world decisions dairy producers are making right now that will impact milk production, feed efficiency, and herd performance for the entire year. From harvest timing and equipment readiness to storage management and crop strategy, Scott and Joe go beyond theory and into practical application.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why first cutting can account for 40–50% of total forage yield
• How harvest timing, not hybrid or variety, drives forage quality
• The hidden cost of shrink and poor storage management on milk production
• Why small grains and cover crops should be strategic tools, not backup plans
• The difference between maximizing tons harvested vs. tons fed

They also challenge assumptions around continuous corn systems, double cropping, and aligning agronomic decisions with labor and logistics on today’s dairy farms.

Whether you’re a dairy producer, nutritionist, agronomist, or industry professional, this episode delivers value to help you get more from your forage program.

Because what goes into the bunk today determines what ends up in the tank tomorrow.

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

Scott Zehr: Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I am your host again, Scott Zehr. And today we’re gonna be talking Forage Quality. And if you’re listening to this episode, right? Where this is the first part of April, man, it’s right around the corner putting up that first round of protein for our cattle.
And there’s a lot of stuff to, to think about. A lot of stuff going through your mind or your client’s minds. And it’s a big time of the season. You know, what we do in these early months of the year, especially around this first cutting that we’re getting ready to put in, is setting our cows up really for the whole year.
So with me to talk about this today is Joe Lawrence from Cornell Pro Dairy. Joe, I want to first thank you for jumping in. And why don’t you just give the audience a little background on who Joe is and your role there at Pro Dairy.
Joe Lawrence: Thanks Scott. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. And yeah, so I’ve been with the Pro Dairy program at Cornell for about 10 years now as a focusing on forage management. So kind of from the, I should say, my background’s more on the agronomy side.
So I started down this path more from a plant science agronomy standpoint. But really got interested in the forage quality part and not just, you know, planting the crop and killing the bugs and, and moving on from there. But harvest management, how do we put up a good quality feed so that the dairy men and the nutritionist have a product coming out of the bunk that’s gonna meet their goals for milk production or even other livestock growing, other livestock.
So, so yeah, it’s been a fun role. And prior to that, I spent some time in the county cooperative extension up in Lewis County in northern New York, as well as a few years with a local cooperative doing crop advising type work. So, so that was my background before coming to Pro Dairy.
Scott Zehr: Awesome. And yeah, Lewis County. I mean that’s where you live now. That’s where I grew up. And now I live in Jefferson County, New York where you grew up, so.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: But just proof that good things come from New York, right here, guys. Yeah. So it’s, it’s a bear.
Joe Lawrence: It’s good part of the state.
Scott Zehr: It is. It’s such a unique area. And I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve been doing this podcast for over a year, and this is the first time I’m having you on, so sorry about that.
I was telling my colleagues, like, sometimes, sometimes you forget about the people that are like closest to you in proximity. And, we’ve known each other for a lot of years. You’re one of the leading people in your field. So, but glad to have you here now.
Today’s topic, we’re talking about putting up quality forage, right? And we’re focusing on quality hay forage or alfalfa, whatever. This is our first chance in the spring, right? to just put up some awesome first cut forage that is gonna set our cows up.
You know, if, you folks have been following along, Ruminate This for a while, you’ll remember Dr. Roth last year. We talked about some, some real fundamentals. And you can, you can go back and look up that episode. It’s called Haylage Tips. And there’s some really good fundamentals there if that’s what you’re looking for.
But Joe, I want to build a little bit further off those fundamentals today. And I think we revisit ’em, you know, we make sure, I think that’s a, a big part of this. I used to have a, a picture of Vince Lombardi that hung behind me for a lot of these episodes. And I, I always loved what Vince said, right?
If you don’t master the fundamentals, you don’t have crap. We’ll go with that word. You know what? Let’s just start there. We’ll start with establishing, reestablishing those fundamentals, Joe, and then I’ll build into where you really can, can get us to the next level.
So with that, when I think of putting up haylage my mind goes to, you know, just the, the pre-work that goes into it, right? Equipment, equipment service, knives, and the chopper, like all those things. So maybe just give guys a quick rundown of five to six things that they really need to be focused on going into the season.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, that’s a great starting point, Scott. And, so I’ll always start, you know, with the interaction between safety and being prepared for that first harvest, right? So it’s, it’s a busy time of year with multiple things going on. Often we’re trying to get manure out the door onto our fields.
Were we got corn planting, maybe some other crops being planted and, and we have to be ready for that first cut. So having that equipment service, like you said, the knife sharpened is not only, you know, gonna set you up so that when the crop is at the right stage for a successful harvest, it’s gonna avoid breakdowns.
Avoid putting yourself in more dangerous situations out in the field on those long days during the spring. Another part of that to me is, also on your storage area. You know, we sometimes we run into some silos that the structural integrity is starting to look a little rough, whether that’s an upright silo or, or some T panels on a, a bunk that have maybe out outlive their useful life.
But, you know, you start looking at that and not only is it a safety issue, but it really compromises, especially in the case of like a bunk silo of compromising our ability to really efficiently and effectively pack the feed into those areas. And you know, if we have some T panels that are suspect on one side or something we end up not really doing a good job packing there.
We’re probably letting more oxygen in there. And so, I think it’s really good to, to start with just kind of assessing your infrastructure, making sure you, you have what you need and if any repairs are needed. And then to me, that rolls right into thinking about what I, for lack of a better term, just talk about flexibility in your storage system.
You know, I like to say every hay field out there, whether it’s orchard grass or pure alfalfa, or somewhere in between, has the ability to make high quality dairy feed or it can get past us and not be good feed, right? So if we have the flexibility in our storage system to try to, to separate those feeds out. And thinking about that before the season even starts. All right, where am I? If everything goes smoothly, the weather cooperates and I get this first cutting on time, which bunk is it going in? But if we get a week of rain and all of a sudden it’s over mature, you know, now where am I going with that?
And hopefully it’s not the same spot because we can make use of both of those feeds. But when, you know, there’s nothing worse than having some really high quality stuff and then having a couple months of poor quality stuff on top of it, right? Because then you’re forced to feed through that poor quality stuff before you get to the high quality.
So if we can come up with a more, you know, flexibility in our storage system that can really benefit us at feed out.
Scott Zehr: So you mean we’re not supposed to get to that poor quality forage that we’re feeding out and then like, just it’s the nutritionist problem, like that’s what we pay these guys for, right?
Yeah. But it, you know, you’re, you’re right. And I think more and more guys are doing that. But it, it’s still something that we need to talk about and, because yeah, I mean there’s forage that we’re putting up in the spring that would actually be really good for, say, heifers or, or dry cows or, you know, guys that are raising their beef on dairy calves, like whatever. But, yeah. Not so much for those milk cows.
Joe Lawrence: I’m admittedly, you know, a crop guy more than a cow guy, so I get a little pushback from the cow folks. But, you know, I, to me building out your storage infrastructure and your feed system should be on your capital improvement. With kind of wishlist.
Just like more fans in the barn, or a sprinkler system in the barn, or some stall upgrades or something like that, right? We always have this list of capital improvements that we think can bring gains to the business, either in efficiency or improve, you know, cow comfort, milk production.
And I’ve, you know, been lobbying for years that we, we need to add this forage storage system and feed system to that list. Usually the pushback I get is I’m building a barn right now. I’ll worry about the feed center later. But I think we need to reprioritize things a little bit. But that’s coming from the crop guy. So.
Scott Zehr: You know, I don’t, I don’t wanna stay on this for, for too much longer, but I’ve talked in the past on this platform. So many times when you see guys start to expand, right? What happens? So you have the 1970s freestyle that grandpa built that, we built again in the nineties, and then we built again in the mid two thousands.
Now we’re, you know, maybe two 20, you know, 2022-23 we’re putting up another barn. And, and what happens? The milk cows keep going into the best facility and grandpa’s barn that he built in the seventies now houses our dry cows. And the, the free stall in the eighties is where our fresh cows are or something like that.
And or, you know, heifers, whatever. And I’ve always said like these dry cows are quite honestly like the most important lactation group. I know they’re not making milk, but that’s the group that’s gonna determine how, how well your cows perform for the next year. If you’re not taking care of them, you’re sacrificing the next nine months.
But it’s always, it always seems like, you know, we have to figure out how we’re going to utilize that old structure. And sometimes it shouldn’t be. And I, I feel like it’s the same way what you just described in the forage, forage setups, right? It’s if we’re being realistic, you know what, what we put into these cows is what determines what they put out.
And, whether it’s mismanaged on forage timing, and we put up mature, you know, grasses or, you know, alfalfa and we have poor forage quality. But if we’re putting up rocket fuel and then we’re, we’re dumping it in a bunk that is in disrepair, you know? It like, it just doesn’t make sense. And I know there’s, there can be budget constraints and all that, but, you know, how are we, there’s a lot of money that goes out the door on farms just in forage loss.
Joe Lawrence: Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: I would love to have somebody equate that to pounds of milk.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: It’s like, you know, but it, it’s real. I mean, you and I have probably both been on some, what we would call pretty progressive dairies. I’m thinking of one right now that’s not all that far from where I grew up. And there’s a lot of nice barns. And then their forage pile, something left to be desired there. That’s a great point. I’m glad you brought that up.
Moving over, Joe, on the, the forage quality piece of this. What are we trying to accomplish here? Right. And I, I think that’s a good place to have you start. And I’ll let you take it from there. Like what are we trying to accomplish with this first cutting?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah. So I guess to me I would start with that, you know, and this isn’t new information by any means. But first cutting can represent 40 to 50 plus percent of our Haylage yield for the year. Right?
And it tends to be some of our highest quality feed if we harvest it on time because of the spring growing conditions we have versus our second and third cutting that are growing in the, you know, hotter part of the summer. So to me it just represents a huge opportunity to secure that lactating cow feed that we want.
And, you know, you started out the episode talking about kind of the basics. And I always go back to this great little extension article that Dr. Marvin Hall retired forage Agronomist from Penn State wrote, you know, 30 plus years ago. And the article ranks what he talks about the top six things or six things that affect forage quality in the field. And maturity or harvest state is, is number one on that list.
And we, we’ve known that for a long time. And then he goes, I’ll just rattle off the list ’cause I think it’s informative and I, I still believe that it’s very relevant. Number two is crop species. So that’s talking alfalfa versus grass versus winter rye versus corn. Right? The species of the crop can have a pretty big effect on quality.
Then number three is harvest and storage. So not even a field component, right? But what we’ve been talking about here. Four is the environment. You know, how that hot dry part of the summer versus the cooler growing conditions in the spring. I would lump into the air also, like that rain, you know, that inopportune rain that comes right when you wanna start mowing and now you’re delayed a week. Right?
And then number five is soil fertility. And, you know, there’s a lot of exciting things going on in the world of soil fertility. But when we look at a lot of our forage quality or the nutritional value of the crop and that data, if we do the basics right, get the pH right, basic nutrition, we need that to support a good, healthy, productive crop.
Beyond that, there’s not a lot of evidence currently that we can really affect the nutritional value of that crop with you know, with soil fertility. So that was number five on his list, 30 plus years ago, and I think that’s still fair. And then number six is variety or cultivar. So that’s, Alfalfa variety A versus alfalfa variety B, right? We, we had crop species higher on the list. But typically variety A versus variety B, there’s not a, a big difference. I would put an asterisk next to that with like low lignin alfalfa. ‘Cause that really is, that really is a different beast. And that didn’t exist when he put this list out.
But if you’re just talking about conventional alfalfa you know, you’re looking for strong agronomics. But in terms of the actual, what we get on a forage test for that nutritional value doesn’t change a lot. So, so I like to start with that list.
And you know, I think it really is helpful to, to go back to that and say, all right, if these are the things that have the biggest impact, as we’re planning in the spring and setting up our goals for that high quality first cutting that we’re prioritizing our resources based on, based on that ranking order. So
Scott Zehr: yeah, that’s really good. And that’s interesting, you know, from 30 years ago. I mean, just sometimes like the truth is the truth and it holds up over time. That’s really good. You know, just thinking about how much time is spent, thinking about the different, you know, varieties of crops we plant and, and obviously it’s not like it can just be a, you know, spur of the moment decision. But, I would say that that is appropriately placed on that list. That’s pretty good.
Joe Lawrence: Well, and I think it’s important too to differentiate the agronomics versus the nutritional value, right? Because there are, there may be whether it’s an alfalfa variety or hybrid of corn silage, there may be disease resistance packages.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: Bred into those hybrids. There may be other characteristics of those hybrids that are important agronomically. So I still think it’s a good practice to, to really look at what’s gonna work on your soil types and your region of the country and your growing conditions. Are you in a valley where you don’t have good airflow and you have more leaf diseases you know, type of thing. So, still important to look at that stuff. But just differentiating that from the nutritional value of the crop as we would see on, you know, on a forage test, I think is important.
Scott Zehr: Well, you know, staying in the agronomy lane you know, let’s talk a little bit about the small grain forages and how we can use them more as a strategic tool instead of an emergency crop.
Joe Lawrence: I think that’s a great way that you just phrased that. Because with some planning, they can really work for us. You know, I, when we treat something as like an emergency backup, we, we tend, the results tend to reflect that, right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: But if we’re treating it as a, as a part of our system, then I, you know, there’s some real opportunities there. A couple points that always come to mind. And again, this is very dependent on where you are in the country. Because, you know, in, in northern New York, we don’t, we struggle a little bit more with like the double cropping than they might in central Pennsylvania or southern Pennsylvania. Right?
And but I think there’s and it’s still an opportunity and it’s finding that right size for your farm. So, if your goal is to use a cover crop as a double crop and take that extra harvest, we really have to think about not just kind of shoehorning that cover crop in after corn silage comes off. But back up a step and ask what relative maturities are we growing and do we need to scale back a little bit on our relative maturities to put ourselves more in the driver’s seat in terms of when silage harvest is gonna happen and when we get that cover crop in.
Same thing in the spring of the year. You know, it’s really about right sizing it for your farm. If you’re further south, maybe you feel fairly comfortable with a, with having a window in the spring that you can harvest that winter cereal without compromising your corn planting timing or your first cutting or, or anything else.
But as, especially as we move further north you know, I think it’s important to have realistic expectations. One farmer had told me that on their farm, they cover crop a hundred percent of their corn acres for conservation purposes. But they only plan to harvest about 10 to 15% of those acres as a double crop. Because that’s what they feel like they can reasonably manage in the spring of the year.
So this was, this farm was growing about a thousand acres. So they would cover crop, all of that, then go out in the spring, choose a hundred to 150 acres that look the best to treat as a double crop. And they could fit that in without compromising corn planting, manure spreading, or the timing of their first cutting. Right? If they went over that number, now they’re starting to compromise in other areas.
And I’m not saying 10 to 15% is the right number for every farm, but I think it was a great example of find your number, find what’s realistic for your operation. And, and because it can be a very high quality feed and it could help bolster feed inventories, right? But we kind of gotta find what works for us without compromising our other crops or other parts of the system. I’ll pause in case you wanna cut this, but
Scott Zehr: the next No, that’s a really great point. And I think, you know, encouraging people to have that honest conversation with themselves.
And you know, I think sometimes, Joe, we get this mindset as people in agriculture, you grew up on a farm. I grew up on a farm, oh, we’re, we just need to put in some more hours and it’ll all come together, right? And, that’s sometimes all that needs to happen.
But certainly every time you’re overextending yourself you’re pushing the edges of what the structure you’ve built can handle, something is going to start to leak. And I’m glad you brought that up. So with that on the small grains, I mean, that, that’s a great way to planning of whether we’re gonna double crop or not on that cereal program.
What are some of the advantages maybe taking the, the crop side out and looking at just the agronomy side. You and I still see enough land that doesn’t get cover cropped in the fall. But what are some advantages that people might be missing out on if they’re, you know, they’re, thinking about doing it for the first time, but maybe they’re just not pulling the trigger on it.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, if we just start with cover cropping, I mean, certainly I think we have some good, you know, good data. It’s, it’s not all perfect, right? There can, we have to recognize that it’s, it’s a mixed bag. So the benefits certainly around reducing erosion and retaining nutrients, helping kind of suck up some of those nutrients that might be left in the fall of the year.
Adding organic material to the soil. You know, we get to the spring and that cover crop can potentially help dry out the field a little bit faster because it’s, it’s sucking up a lot of water that’s then transpiring out through the leaves and, and we can remove some excess moisture in the spring to get ready for planting.
So, there’s certainly some benefits, but we, we have to take that with some challenges too, right? You know, we can potentially we could, in a dry spring, we may suck too much water out of the ground and, and take some of the water that are, you know, if we’re planting corn into that field or whatever that that corn crop could have benefited from.
We can see some, you know, increased pressures with some of our cover crops. And we can also, you know, it can just be a challenge for planting and preparing fields if, if it’s too wet and it kind of gets outta control on us. There can be a lot of biomass there, which is great for the organic matter aspect, but it can be hard to manage and a little unruly, right?
So, I think taking the good with the bad. And I, I would tie that then back into the idea of double cropping because I do think, I’ll be honest, I’m a little critical of the idea of just doing a hundred percent of our crops as like a corn winter cereal rotation and not having any perennials in the system.
I really don’t consider corn and a winter cover crop, double crop as a crop rotation. It’s just two plantings of a, of an annual grass every year. And so, I think, I think we do have to reconcile that a little bit with our, in terms of, especially with a lot of our milk cooperatives and milk processors looking at carbon footprint and stuff like that.
We have to, have to reconcile a little bit that perennials really do have a benefit in our dairy systems. And yeah, I, I don’t consider corn and a cover, continuous corn with a cover crop in between as an actual crop rotation.
Scott Zehr: Well, you know, and it’s I, I don’t want to make this too silly, but I have a three-year-old son and I, I often have to tell him, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.
And it’s funny how that parallels over. Yeah. We have the technology to plant corn on corn on corn for 10 years. Or corn and wheat in the same field for 10 years. It doesn’t mean we should. And there are unintended consequences of doing that. You know, even the best, we’ll call it soil fertility plan to, to support that soil during a time like that. There’s still negative outcomes somewhere in the system. So.
Joe Lawrence: yeah.
Scott Zehr: What, what is the thought now of the frequency of rotation between annuals and perennials?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, it’s hard to put an exact number on that. ‘Cause it’s gonna, you know, the slope of your soil, how susceptible it is to erosion and stuff like that has obviously factors in.
But, but it really hasn’t changed from my perspective that once we get out past, you know, four years of continuous corn, we’re really starting to stress that system. I mean, yeah, having a cover crop in there can help some. But especially if it’s corn silage ’cause we’re removing so much biomass from the field.
We’re really not leaving much of anything there in terms of material, right? So when we look at our nutrient management systems on dairies, when we look at the pest management aspects of it, if you’re pushing out past that like you said, we can do it. I mean farms will, will point out to me all the time how many years of a field’s been in continuous corn as, as a point of, yeah, we can do this.
But the trouble is we don’t always even see the hidden cost of doing that because we still see that we’re getting a reasonable yield off of that field. It seems decent. But then if we start calculating in the extra seed costs for, you know, an extra pest management costs that we are using to manage that continuous corn, and, and we, we can never prove that the yields are, are as good as, as they would’ve been if we had a rotation in there. Right? We can,
Scott Zehr: That’s it.
Joe Lawrence: We can say the yields.
Scott Zehr: That’s it.
Joe Lawrence: We can say the yields still seem competitive and it was not a total disaster. But we can actually prove that they, they were really optimized where they could have been. Right. So.
Scott Zehr: Yeah, I’m gonna go back to a comment that my colleague Jeff Hoftetter made on this podcast early I forget which episode I could look it up, but it’s, we were talking in terms of milk production, but his comment was, I’m not really sure if people, if farmers really know what their ceiling is as far as production.
And honestly, I don’t think we do. I, I think if there’s outlier cows that can make 160 pounds of milk a day, in our current system. I think there’s probably a lot that we haven’t unlocked, right? We haven’t grown the system enough. And the same’s gonna be true for forage.
Great. You’re, you know, you’re pulling off big yields, or not big, but let, let’s just say, you know what we would consider to be above average yields on this field that’s, you know, been in corn for 10 years. Where would it be if we’d have managed the agronomy side properly?
Joe Lawrence: Exactly.
Scott Zehr: You know? And so there’s that, there’s always that what if question that, that we can challenge with. And, I think that’s something to keep in mind for folks.
Joe Lawrence: Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: I wanna go over to thinking about harvesting this stuff, whether it’s grass, alfalfa, the small grains, cutting timing, trade-offs. Yield versus quality versus logistics. What’s your thoughts on that?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah. So yeah, my tongue in cheek answer is, is all, of all of it. Right?
Scott Zehr: All of it.
Joe Lawrence: Right. All of it. yeah, so one thing I, I think about, and it’s, it’s kind of a simplistic example. It’s obviously more complex on a, on a farm with all the moving parts. But, you know, I’ll go back to something I said earlier.
Every single one of those fields has the potential to be lactating quality feed. And what I struggle with on and visiting with some farms is that they, they’ve already kind of predetermined what fields are gonna be there. We’ll say heifer feed, right? They’ve already predetermined that before the snow’s even off the field because it’s, maybe it’s further away from the farm or it’s, you know, they know it’s an older grass stand.
And my point always is, well, what if we hit, you know, May 15th here in Northern New York and that grass stand, it looks beautiful and we got a nice window of weather to go get it. Let’s go get it. Because if you ignore it and let it go past, you’ve predestined it to be low quality, right? Meanwhile we could get to that week when all your alfalfa’s ready and we get a rain event or an equipment breakdown. And now, now we’ve all shifted all of that feed into the category of, lower quality. So I always encourage the idea, sit down with your map, sit down with your list of fields, and think of every one of ’em having the potential to be that lactating quality feed if the weather window presents itself be ready to go get it.
And I would, you know, go back to the small grains conversation too. You know, some of the trade-offs to me there are, and this ties into, you know, what we talked about in terms of kind of nutritional value of the crop leaving the field versus the, the silage management part of it, is we could have these giant, giant windrows of winter rye or winter trico or something, and they’re so hard to manage that we end up with this wet, kind of sloppy haylage. It, you know, worst case scenario, it goes butyric on us, right? But even if it doesn’t, it’s not necessarily gonna ferment the way we would want it to. We’re leaving it out in those windrows for extra days and we’re losing the sugar. So what if we say, all right, like, my goal isn’t to maximize the tonnage at coming out of the field.
My goal is to maximize the tonnage of quality feed I can put in front of the animal. And those are two very different things.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: Because we can, we can maximize the tonnage coming outta the field and then have excessive shrink losses and quality losses in the, in storage that result in a much lower percentage of that feed actually reaching the animal in a way we want it, right? So.
So maybe we back off and say we’re gonna, we’re gonna take this winter rye when it gets to the, this certain height regardless of what the date is because we know at that height it’s a manageable windrow for us. And then we can dry it quickly and get it ensiled quickly.
The other part of that can be cutting height too, right? Maybe we, we cut higher and weave a little bit of that lower stock of that winter cereal in the field and kind of twofold. It weens the windrows a little bit. It also, one of the things that hurts drying the most is soil moisture, right?
And so, and in the spring of the year, what do we, we’re going out on moist soils, mowing us winter cereal. If we raise the mower up a few extra inches and essentially leave that stubble there, so that windrows now sitting on top of that higher stubble than it, being right down like on the soil surface, right?
We can, we can enhance our drying. And our windrow management through that too. So that’s one of those, you know, to me that’s one of those compromises you were mentioning between, you know, quality and timing and logistics and all that is sacrificing a little bit of that you know, what we would traditionally look at as part of the yield, right?
And just saying we’re, if we leave that in the field, we’re gonna have a more manageable windrow that we can dry more effectively and actually have more tons of feed reaching the cow. And I would translate that into our first cutting hay too. You know, we really push four inch cutting height for our grasses. But even with your alfalfa, you know, three to four inches same thing, especially with first cutting.
It can help with the drying by keeping the windrow off the soil a little bit higher, a little more air getting under there. We can reduce ash content by having that higher stubble height ’cause we’re not trying to dig into, into the ground to pick up that windrow, right. We’re using the stubble to help keep it off the, the ground. So I really encourage people to think that way in terms of this cutting height thing isn’t just about the physiology of the plant, right? It’s
Scott Zehr: right.
Joe Lawrence: It’s a logistical consideration and it can, you know, the trade off can be, I don’t have the number good numbers in front of me to make an example, but, you know, we leave 10% of that crop in the field by cutting higher. But we have a better fermentation, a higher quality product, and we actually gain that on the backend by having more, more tons of quality feed that reaches the animal. So.
Scott Zehr: yeah, I mean, if, if nothing else intuitively, I mean, we should know that, right? And yeah, that’s, that’s a big one. Seen a lot of, a lot of haylage piles ruined and, cows compromised from just missing that one fundamental of, you know, say like cut height, right? And, obviously sometimes it’s, you know, we’re not getting ash in just because of that. There’s other challenges that can happen, but, control what you can control. Right? I’d rather have it be that way than adding to the, the stuff that we can’t control. Right.
Joe Lawrence: Right.
Scott Zehr: You know, the thing about the quality forage is I was told this a while ago. I forget now who, who told me this, but, forage quality problems rarely announce themselves early. So when you hear that, Joe, what do you take from that?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, what I take from it is the whole component we’ve been talking about of, of the kind of the quality leaving the field versus the quality going to the animal, right? Because…
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: You know, I, I think even a first cutting and some, you know, sometimes a, a nutritionist or a farmer or someone from extension will go out and do what we usually refer to as scissor cut sampling, right?
And just snip a clump of the hay field, send it off to the lab, get an analysis on it, and comes back, oh, this is, you know, three days from now, let’s cut this. We hit this perfect, the weather’s perfect. Let’s go for it. And so from that perspective, we’re thinking we have this really high quality feed. We, we hit it right this year.
But when I think of, your comment, I think what, what happens after that the mower goes through the field that takes that potential we had and reduces it. And oftentimes when that compromise and quality is kind of invisible until we go to feed out that forage, right? And then all of a sudden whether it’s with the nutritional test or if it’s beyond that when we, it starts heating or, you know, the, the mycotoxins or whatever, all that stuff is kind of comes up later. So.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. And you know, it’s funny, everybody has their, their area of, I call it zone of genius, if you would, but right. We all see things through a different lens. And having spent all of my career on the cow side of stuff, I’m already thinking of like, the quiet you know, it shows up quietly, right.
Or never early, I should say. It’s, we start feeding that new forage that, we did a good enough job, but we didn’t do the best we could have. Right? And sometimes people have a hard time admitting that. But that’s the reality a lot of times. But you get, you know, maybe it doesn’t show up in the tank day one.
Maybe it shows up in the tank a month later, or it shows up from repro or it shows up, we’ve just plateaued our milk production. We’re no longer able to challenge the cows. Right? If you would.
Joe Lawrence: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: And, essentially, right, we’re, our whole goal is, with this forage conversation is how do we create on-farm protein that is so, it, it’s super high quality. Right. And just thinking back to your heifer feed comment, and the, the field that we’ve, we’ve predetermined these fields are going to be heifer feed. Whether it because it’s tradition or it’s logistics or whatever. Right. And we intuitively know that we need so many acres to feed, say the heifers. If I was to go out and have to buy forage, Joe, what am I gonna pay more for?
Joe Lawrence: Exactly. Yeah.
Scott Zehr: Am I gonna pay more for Western alfalfa to get trucked to New York that’s of peak quality so I can get, you know, challenge my, my cows? Or can I probably find some pretty decent quality round bales or haylage more locally, that would actually be a good feed for my heifers?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah. I kind of, that’s actually one of the notes I had for our, our next part of the conversation. Yeah. But it’s, I kind of, you know, said that better. It’s right. I would always rather be in the market for some lower quality feed for my non lactating animals than I would be trying to go out there finding something to make milk off of. Right?
Scott Zehr: Yeah. I’m glad you were thinking that way and, and folks, so I think we’re gonna wrap up just about the agronomic side of this conversation. But I wanna bring Joe back, and I want to talk economics of this, because at the end of the day, like if we’re a dairy farmer, we’re cattle feeder in this country. It’s hard enough to make money, right?
You know, we’re not setting our own prices in a lot of cases. The case in dairy especially. And you know, right now we’re, we’re going through a down cycle in the milk price and it’s not fun. There’s clients that you and I both work with, I’m sure that they’re feeling the pinch.
And, you know, the idea for this episode actually came up. I was on a dairy in Vermont. And the question was essentially, we’re gonna be this many dollars short this year, right? And they’re already short on forage because of, because of the drought last year, right? So we, we know how much forage we need to go buy.
We’re looking at the milk price projections, and we’re gonna be x number of dollars short. And this is a, you know, roughly say thousand cow dairy. That’s a pretty large number. We can’t just make that up overnight. Right. I, I don’t have a, a magic wand to print cash. Man, that’d be fun. But there, I, I believe there’s things that we can do in the, in the barns and in the fields that can at least soften the blow. Right.
We may not become profitable, but if we can burn less equity through a downturn, sometimes that’s a big win. And so I, I’d like to continue this discussion on, on the economic side and, you know, I, I would just, I mean, coming back, like if, if we do everything right up to this point, right?
Soil fertility, managing that resource that is the dirt, that is the soil and, and doing it properly and crop rotations and, you know, just good harvest practices and, and siloing practices. Like we’ve tried to do everything right up to this point. Then the, the real question becomes like, what does that quality actually buy us later?
And I, I look forward to picking up this discussion with you on the next episode. Any final take homes, Joe, you wanna leave people with maybe like a top three things to think about?
Joe Lawrence: Yeah, I think just a quick summary of what, where we were, is that, you know, some of those old, the knowledge we’ve known for a long time still holds true. You know, that’s the classic thing of we really need to attend to those basics before we start looking at some of these fancy new things, right?
One, we need to make sure there’s science behind some of these fancy new things. And two, we need to make sure we’ve made the investments in the basics. You know, winding your fields is boring. But it, you know, routinely comes up as still something that we overlook and sometimes we overlook it because we have some fancy new gadget, right?
And so just, going back to, you know, sometimes that stuff’s boring, but it, it can still have the biggest impact. And then, yeah, again just thinking of that and thinking of your fields in terms of every one of ’em, having the potential to be high quality feed. And that, you know, the process is only half, barely half over when we actually hit the field with the mower.
Even if we do that at the right, the exact right time there’s still a lot after that. I, there’s a slide that Dr. Lehman Kong is retired professor from the University of Delaware is a real silage guru. He’s had this slide for years. I, I think, is one of the most straightforward slides you can show in a presentation.
And it just has two columns. High quality feed in the field is in the first column. Good silo management is in the second column or bad silo management and, and you have to have the combination of both good field management plus good silage management equals good feed. Any of the other combinations of those two things don’t work. Right. You can…
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Joe Lawrence: Have poor feed coming outta the field and do a great job in the silo. It doesn’t make up for that poor feed coming outta the field. You can have great feed coming outta the field and do a poor job in the silo. And, and that doesn’t work either. Right. We have to have both. So.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. That’s a great point. Great point. Joe, I want to thank you again for jumping on with us today and look forward to talking to you in a couple of weeks for part two, if you would, where we dive into more on the economic side of, of putting up quality forages and the downstream impact of that. So thank you and we’ll be talking again soon.
Joe Lawrence: Thank you.

The post 70: Forage Quality Decisions That Drive Dairy Profitability 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.

In this episode of Ruminate This, Scott Zehr and Vice President of Nutrition Dr. Larry Roth connect their previous episode discussions and explain why multiple mycotoxins in the TMR create a multiplying negative effect in dairy cows rather than a simple additive one.

They discuss how common toxins such as DON, fumonisin, T-2/HT-2, and zearalenone each remove a critical layer of biological protection. Even when individual toxin levels appear “safe,” combinations can lower the cow’s ability to defend herself, regulate intake, maintain rumen integrity, and support reproduction.

The episode explores high-risk toxin pairings, early warning signs such as inconsistent intake, erratic manure, milk production plateaus, and reproductive challenges, and why multiple low-level mycotoxins are often more dangerous than a single high-level exposure.

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

Scott Zehr: All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I am your host, Scott Zehr once again, and also again joined by Dr. Larry Roth, our Vice President of Nutrition here at Agrarian Solutions.
Over the past couple of months here in 2026, we have spent time doing more of a deep dive into, Larry I’m gonna say the big four mycotoxins that we see in the US. Don, also known as vomitoxin, zearalenone, T-2, HT2, and fumonisin. And so Larry, I want to thank you one ’cause I felt like those episodes even for me were very informative.
So hopefully the listener got something great out of those episodes and learned a little more about what these mycotoxins do on a biological level. Larry, we get to see sample reports, you and I do, and other team members here at Agrarian from across the country daily, almost. Thousands of samples a year.
And Larry, I tell you what, it’s getting less and less common to see one mycotoxin show up on a sample. Just certain growing conditions, I’m gonna say. Weather patterns, whatever it is. This past week or in the past two weeks, I should say, going back to the beginning of February, 2026.
The first 13 days in February of samples that came in, in my region of the US, not a single sample came back with less than two toxins. Many of them had four. All four that we’ve discussed. One particular sample assay that comes back to mind was in the closeup pen of a dairy, so the closeup TMR sample.
Dr. Larry Roth: Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: High zearalenone, high DON, T-2, fumonisin. I’ve asked you this question before, Larry, but I’d like you to just kind of reiterate or frame it up for us to understand better. But, what happens biologically to that cow when she’s exposed to all four of these mycotoxins simultaneously?
Dr. Larry Roth: Wow. That’s a great question, Scott. What happens when that cow is challenged by all four of our more common mycotoxins? Well, there is a, rather than being additive, Scott, the effects coming together think of it as being more multiplying each other. Because each particular mycotoxin strips away a layer of protection. So they just gotta think of it as multiplying each other.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: Where destroying digestive tract integrity, so it’s easier for more of the other mycotoxins to get into the blood system. Then we’re slowly destroying the liver. We’re changing hormone balance. We’re taking down the immune system. And so each mycotoxin has, shall we say, a multiplying effect on the others. And that that’s what makes this kind of interesting is we can’t say it’s just a certain level of each one that causes issues, because when we have multiple mycotoxins, the threshold level for the cow to defend herself is reduced more and more by each mycotoxin that comes into play.
Scott Zehr: No. When you say it like that, I think of a term that’s used in business, especially marketing called beachheading.
Dr. Larry Roth: Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: So beachheading referring to when we put all of our troops on the beach in Normandy to storm the front and concentrated everything in one area. Well, you know, if we had just one mycotoxin in the TMR for instance
Dr. Larry Roth: mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: So, you know, when, if we just had one mycotoxin show up in the diet, it honestly, it’s almost like a win. Because if DON’s going in there doing bad stuff in the rumen causing some inflammation, the immune system’s gonna send all of its effort to that area, right? Or to take care of that thing. But now, you have four different mycotoxins each with a different attack mode or attack protocol.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep.
Scott Zehr: And you know, so that immune system’s gotta go in many different directions. Is that kind of how that would work?
Dr. Larry Roth: You bet. Yeah. Now we got four different mycotoxins that are attacking the immune system or the liver. I’m gonna back up to, and I really like your analogy, the beachhead use of that term.
Think of the beachhead here as breaking through the castle wall. That’s the dog. We’re disrupting the rumen lining, we’re disrupting the small intestine lining, so it’s that much easier for everybody to get into the body. And now the immune system has to deal with multiple mycotoxins. Now the liver has to deal with multiple mycotoxins.
So yeah, I kind of like that beachhead term. We just have to get that break in the digestive track lining, and then everybody comes ashore, if you will, and gets into the animal to cause their mischief.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. And, and I think, we’ve talked in the past about this and it feels like oftentimes it becomes a, almost like a chicken in the egg conversation. What’s worse? One mycotoxin at a really high level? Or three or four mycotoxins, even just two mycotoxins at a lower to moderate contamination risk? I’ll let you expand on that.
Dr. Larry Roth: I’m gonna go ahead and vote for the multiple.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: ‘Cause again, each particular type of mycotoxin strips away a certain level of protection.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: So I really do like thinking of the effects being multiplied rather than being additive. So I would vote for multiple mycotoxins at lower levels as being worse than a single mycotoxin at a higher level.
Scott Zehr: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. It just each one that’s there, they just attack a different way, so it creates more problems. Yep. So, I wanna think about some of these assays that I’ve seen come through, and I’ll just kind of do a back and forth with you. What do we need to be concerned about when we see DON with fumonisin?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay, DON and fumonisin. Well, the DON is breaking through the castle wall, increasing gut permeability, and then you got fumonisin that has a liver effect as well as taking down the immune system. So we’ve got gut permeability and inflammation taking place.
Scott Zehr: Okay. How about fumonisin with zearalenone?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. Similarly, we got fumonisin taken down the immune system attacking the liver, and then we’ve got zearalenone disrupting hormones.
Scott Zehr: Okay. How about DON and T-2 running together?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. DON again, come back to our gut permeability is increased and this can be rumen or small intestine. And then T-2 just takes everything down. That’s the finisher. When we talked about T-2 recently, we were emphasizing HBS, hemorrhagic bowel syndrome. So, we have increased gut permeability so that more bad guys get in and now we’re taking everything down to increase the HBS risk.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. And then I’m gonna throw this one at you, zearalenone with almost anything else that we, that we test for. ‘Cause there’s I think, a unique thing about zearalenone being fat soluble that plays into this.
Dr. Larry Roth: Right, right. Yeah. Well, again, zearalenone disrupts hormone balances and all of the others, they work either increasing gut permeability, taking down the liver and its detoxifying abilities. Taking down the immune system related to trying to reduce inflammation.
So think of zearalenone and anything else as we’re disrupting hormone balance and making it that much harder to protect the body and resolve the different issues. The key is that multiplying effect of multiple mycotoxins showing up in the feed.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. You know, and I think some things that, you know we see, I always say, okay, well what do I need to look for? Right? And so I’m, I’m thinking of inconsistent intakes with the, with the DON, right? Or, or erratic manure.
Dr. Larry Roth: Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: What, what are some other things we should probably think about?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. Milk production. Cows aren’t increasing in milk production like they should, being flat to trending down, and then the reproductive success. Cows aren’t getting pregnant and staying pregnant. Either because zearalenone is messing up the hormone balance or all of the other mycotoxins were showing up and causing inflammation issues that redirects nutrients to less profitable purposes, just trying to stay alive.
Scott Zehr: You know, one of the, I think things that we hear on a regular basis and I certainly experienced it when I was on the dairy. Why do I just all of a sudden have random cows going off feed? What’s causing this? And then you get the vet there and they’re like, “I don’t know.” Probably ought to look maybe towards the mycotoxins as being causative.
Dr. Larry Roth: Absolutely. Again, the analogy I like to use Scott is if we were to go to a real nice buffet, and if one of us wasn’t feeling well, that person’s probably only going to go up once or twice. Whereas if that person was healthy, man, they’d be going up time, after time, after time.
So when cows don’t like to eat, it’s probably because they’re not feeling well. And all of these mycotoxins can contribute to the cow feeling outta sorts, not eating like she should. And if the cow is eating less than what she should, we have fewer nutrients going in to take care of the immune system. The body’s military.
We have the cow not feeling well, not drinking like it ought to. It’s more likely dehydrated, and we lose our tight junctions. Tight junctions now become interstate highways for pathogens and other bad stuff in the digestive tract to get into the body. So again, I keep coming back to, with multiple mycotoxins, the effects aren’t additive. It’s more of a multiplying effect.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. You know, I wanna just kind of think about some takeaways here and we’ve all heard the term Dirty Feed before. And when I hear the term dirty feed, usually it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s related to either high mycotoxins or it’s moldy or whatever. And, you know, we talk an awful lot of at Agrarian about feed hygiene.
Dr. Larry Roth: Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: And certainly I think mycotoxins fall into the conversation of feed hygiene.
Dr. Larry Roth: Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: But Larry, expand on this point, if you would. I don’t necessarily look, at this point in my career, to mycotoxins as being a feed defect or a feed hygiene issue, per se. But maybe I’m starting to think of it more as a challenge to the biological system that the cow is. Your thoughts on that.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah. I really like that biological system. We can back up all the way to the soil. Soil’s biological system. The plant’s biological system, the fermentation process is biological.
And then the feed being utilized by the cow is a biological system. And the cow itself is biological system. So you can see where, if we start to have issues with soil health relates to plant health relates to mycotoxin occurrence. So it’s also interrelated. And again, forgive me for repeating myself, Scott, it’s not additive. It has a multiplying effect.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. So, you know, let’s think about maybe Larry I’m gonna say traditionally the way that perhaps we have always thought to mitigate the effects of mycotoxins in cattle, right?
Dr. Larry Roth: Mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: We had clay-based products or yeast cell wall fracture based products.
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay.
Scott Zehr: And, you know, they’re going back to the Cajal et al in 2022 research that we’ve discussed on this platform. There’s some binding that takes place on certain mycotoxins zearalenone as one of those ones that for instance is bound at a higher percentage than say DON is, but it’s still not a very high percentage.
Dr. Larry Roth: Right.
Scott Zehr: But I guess the way I wanna frame this question up to you is, if I have multiple mycotoxins present and I were to feed an ingredient that helps mitigate one of those, how much benefit is that going to give me?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay, great question. Well, I think the classic research on this area, Cajal, et al from the December of 22 journal of Animal Science would suggest that yeah, there are variations between the different mycotoxin mitigation products for their ability to tie up mycotoxins, just as there’s variations in ability to tie up nutrients.
So tell me the mycotoxins in question. Tell me about the different challenges that the animal is going through and how the people are trying to manage the animal. And we come back to our biological systems. They’re all interrelated.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: That all starts with the soil.
Scott Zehr: So, I’m gonna ask you one more question here. And so, if we’re dealing with a biological system…
Dr. Larry Roth: mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: And we’re trying to mitigate the effects of mycotoxins within a biological system, how does DTX play into that as a biological approach?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay.
Scott Zehr: And what is DTX doing biologically to help that cow?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. What’s the logic behind using DTX? Well, we theorize that DTX being a live bacteria is working at the small intestine level because of small size to take up residence in some of the intestinal cells. Doesn’t have to be every cell because there’s something called quorum sensing where the cells kind of communicate across each other saying, “Hey, we’ve got something here. We need to elevate our ability to kick these mycotoxins out,” just like other waste products or undesirable substances, we have these export proteins. And the export proteins seem to be activated by the mere presence of the cell wall deficient bacteria.
So mycotoxin gets in, transport of proteins finds them, seeks to kick the toxin or undesirable substance back out into the digestive tract to flush down the river. And again, we don’t have to be in every single intestinal cell because there’s communication that takes place across the intestinal cells. So it’s really, it’s a neat biological system. The different animals, in our particular case, the one of greatest interest is the dairy cow. The high production dairy cow has that ability to recognize these pathogens and decide to kick them out. So it’s, it is really neat, Scott, how all of this is integrated together.
Scott Zehr: It is. And, I think that’s the, the unique approach here, right? Is, is that we’re not treating the feed, we’re not treating the mycotoxin. We’re elevating the cow’s ability…
Dr. Larry Roth: mm-hmm.
Scott Zehr: To protect herself by helping the rumen, the gut, the liver, the immune system, and the endocrine system.
Dr. Larry Roth: That’s right. Yep. And it all comes together. It’s also Integrated as that biological system.
Scott Zehr: Yep. Well, I, I really appreciate you doing these deep dives with me and in particular today’s episode because we, we do continue to see a lot of multiple mycotoxins, and I think sometimes we get hyperfocused on DON, or we get hyperfocused on zearalenone, and then if T-2 and fumonisin show up that, I’m gonna call it low contamination levels.
Dr. Larry Roth: Right.
Scott Zehr: We just kind of say, oh, well those numbers look low on the, on the assay, so we don’t really have to worry about it.
Dr. Larry Roth: Well come back to our multiplying effect. Each particular type of mycotoxin takes away one particular layer of protection. So again, that multiplying effect.
Scott Zehr: Yep. Awesome. Well, thank you again Dr. Roth for jumping on with us today and bringing this series if you would home and if you all have any questions you wanna ask of us, you can always go to agrariansolutions.com and fill out the question form on the website.
You can also email us directly, podcast@agrsol.com and we can put you in touch with Dr. Roth or Caroline. We can make sure we answer any questions you might have in this space. My last takeaway, Larry, and I’ll ask you for one as well. I’m gonna say sample, sample sample. Test your forages regularly. Test that TMR on a monthly basis. Know what is going into that cow.
Dr. Larry Roth: Absolutely. And Scott, I would just encourage people to sample their different feeds going into storage.
Scott Zehr: Yes.
Scott Zehr: And then do the regular testing as we feed them out.
Scott Zehr: Absolutely. Alright, well, hey everybody, we’ll be talking to you again in a couple of weeks. Again, remember we air on the second and fourth Monday of every month. Have a great time.
Dr. Larry Roth: All right. Thanks Scott.

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