But what if the biggest opportunity starts much earlier?

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

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

In this episode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Lawlor: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barry Bradford: Yeah it is. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barry Bradford: That’s fascinating. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Lawlor: Exactly.

Barry Bradford: As has some real advantages. Interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode of Ruminate This, Dr. Larry Roth, Vice President of Nutrition at Agrarian Solutions, explains why corn silage should be managed like one of the farm’s most valuable assets. He discusses how harvest timing, kernel processing, packing density, dry matter testing, storage management, and feedout strategy all influence forage quality, shrink, mycotoxin risk, feed efficiency, milk production, and components.

Whether you’re managing the dairy or helping producers build feeding programs, you’ll gain practical insights to improve forage management, protect the value of every ton harvested, and support healthier cows, stronger performance, and better returns.

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

Scott Zehr: All right. Hey, welcome back to Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. Joining myself today, I have Dr. Larry Roth, our Vice President of Nutrition. I’m Scott Zehr, back in the seat, glad to be with you guys. And Larry, man, what’s more fun in agriculture to talk than to, to talk about than talking about money?
Yeah we have so much money in agriculture, I just… Back on the dairy, I just thought we always had so much money to pass around and… Oh, wait, then reality hit me. Yeah, Larry, we work in tight margins in the dairy world, in, in the beef world, in any world where we’re harvesting crops, where we’re taking a risk in the spring, we’re putting out crops, we’re hoping we have a good growing season, we’re harvesting them, we’re feeding them to try to get an ROI, whether it’s milk or beef or what have you.
And so today’s episode really is I’d like to talk to you about asset management. And, when I think of that term asset management, my brain always goes to some venture capitalist company that has teams of people that help guide the decision-making process on managing their portfolio of assets.
That’s where my brain goes. But when I think about asset management on a dairy really in any farming operation Larry I come to corn silage. I come to the corn that we raise, whether it’s corn silage or even grain corn or high moisture, whatever, could be soybeans, could be haylage, the crops that we’re putting out in the field in the spring and hoping for an ROI later, there’s so many variables that go into getting a good crop.
We’re very weather dependent, time dependent, all of it. And I’m not saying anything new. But there’s a reason the term corn silage season exists, because that’s how it is treated. It’s treated like an event. And there’s a lot of time and energy spent to make sure this harvest season goes off well.
Larry, in, in previous episodes, which is episode 52 back on August 4th of 2025, we talked about the fundamentals of things we need to pay attention to put up good corn silage. And I’d like to talk to you today on how do we manage that asset to make sure we get an ROI.
You’ve told us num- number of times that we need to think of our forage piles as a pile of money. And then I think there’s a term that we’ve talked about on this platform as well of think of shrink as the interest you pay on that money. Larry, I’m gonna throw it to you for your take here starting the episode, but I hate paying interest on money. So I’ll let you kinda take it from here as far as your thoughts on that.
Dr. Larry Roth: Wow. Fantastic, Scott. Yep. So we think of shrink could be the interest that we’re paying. Could be just lost feed, lost opportunity. Asset is gone. We could look at a 20,000 bunker, 20,000-ton bunker that would be worth, what? $1.2 million? And if we had $1.2 million out there i- in dollar bills we would at least put a rock on it so it doesn’t blow away in the wind. We’d at least put some metal over it so it doesn’t get wet when it rains. Scott, what are we doing to protect that asset so that we don’t lose it? And there’s so many places to go there. As you were doing the prelude here, I was thinking our corn silage asset really begins with the soil.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: What’s the fertility? What’s the conditions when we plant and right afterwards? Do we get a lot of rain on it? Do we not get rain? All of these things that come into affecting corn silage quality. And then we have to think about our plant genetics. Our plant genetics for making corn silage are so vastly improved compared to even 20 years ago.
So temptation becomes I’ll save some money on that seed corn because it’s just for silage. Again, if we’re thinking about our $1.2 million bunker, do we really wanna skimp on seed corn to make…
Scott Zehr: Yeah
Dr. Larry Roth: So a- again, there, there’s so many different things that come into play, and I know that diesel is higher priced right now, and so we might be tempted we’ll just kinda open up the rollers a little bit.
Then we don’t process our corn. And then that corn is gonna show up when we wash out the parlor. It’s gonna show up in lower milk production, or having to do things differently with the diet. We think of the price of diesel, and we think of packing. You only get one chance to pack that pile. And that may be one of the biggest factors. Note I said one of, one of the biggest factors for determining what our shrink is gonna be.
How good a job did we do at packing so that we exclude the oxygen so the yeast don’t grow and the plant doesn’t continue through metabolism? We could think about our plastic that we’re gonna put over. Oh, man, if we could just use a little bit qu- lower quality plastic, that shouldn’t hurt us too bad, should it?
All of these different things that come into play, but it has to begin with the mindset that corn silage is an asset. And that asset is going to affect the cows. It’s going to affect the cows potentially from a longevity standpoint, production standpoint, repro standpoint. All of these things come into play.
So it’s hard to say here’s one thing that we should be doing to protect our asset, when there are so many different factors.
Scott Zehr: Yeah, i- it’s
Dr. Larry Roth: But Scott let’s just start by thinking about corn silage as an asset.
Scott Zehr: I think so. And, I would almost use the example, right? So throughout the last 20 years in dairy, I spent a lot of time on the cow side of stuff, whether it was actually actively on the dairy or in genetics. And boy, the heifer calves were the most sought after asset, rightly right?
And for a number of years, Larry, bull calves were… They were the money that helped put groceries on the table or gas in the truck for the week or maybe pay a few small bills.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep.
Scott Zehr: And then black hidden calves ca- came around and for a while they were treated like a, a little bit more, maybe opportunity than a Holstein bull calf, but now all of a sudden markets have shifted.
Things have happened on the beef side. These calves are now an extremely valuable asset. and so we’ve had to… There’s been a shift in viewing how we view these day-old calves, especially if they’re black hided, into a really an asset that we can capitalize on.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: Larry, I drive down the road time and time again, and I know farms that view those black calves as this premium two-day-old asset. And I see a bunker that’s not covered from 2025 corn silage.
So I think it is fair to really challenge the listener today to be thinking about this as an asset. And inherently, Larry, I think every dairyman out there or anybody that grows corn to then feed the cattle knows they’re working with an asset. But why do we still see such mismanagement?
Dr. Larry Roth: You bet. I think it is a matter of understanding how this asset affects other assets. So you talked about black-hided calves. If we don’t do a good job with our corn silage, we may not have as many black-hided calves. We don’t do a good job with our corn silage, I would contend that it could affect the health and wellbeing of those black-hided calves.
Scott Zehr: We certainly can.
Dr. Larry Roth: So, corn silage is at the center of so much that we’ve got going on. If we’ve got a dairy that is also maybe raising some soybeans from a cash crop standpoint, if we can reduce the shrink, improve the quality of our corn silage, do we need to put up as much corn silage? Can some of those acres, a land asset, can that go into raising a cash crop such as soybeans?
So, let change our mindset to where corn silage is an asset that we have to manage because it affects so many other assets on the dairy.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. I think my hope today, Larry, through our conversation is that somebody listening to this, maybe a nutritionist listening can say, “Oh I think I have a farm in mind that I’d like to go have a visit with,” or a veterinarian listening in the same manner. And if you’re a dairyman today, I want this conversation to feel like, “Hey, thanks for talking about this, guys, ’cause it makes me feel good, ’cause we’re really checking the box.”
But also if you’re somebody putting up corn silage, I don’t want you to take it like you’re doing a poor job, but look at the opportunity. Just if there’s… Larry there’s just not a lot of opportunity anymore for us to ignore the interest we’re paying from the time we plant the corn to the time we ask the cow to convert it into milk.
Dr. Larry Roth: Absolutely. With margins being thin, we need to get a return from everything that we do with that crop. Again, going back to the land, be it owned land that we paid cash for at some point or still have a mortgage on or rent. It took money to put that crop in the ground, put a fungicide on it, to chop it. So again, it’s that mindset. And Scott, you talked about two different types of individuals, somebody who’s… They’re doing a fantastic job, they’re checking all the boxes, but again, there’s so many moving parts on the dairy. Do we really need to do all of this with our corn silage? Yeah, you do, because if you’re not checking those boxes, it’s going to affect other parts of the operation.
Or the other producer who says, “corn silage it’s just a feed. There’s other things that we need to pay attention to.” Yes, it is a feed, but it is probably the largest fed feed on the dairy. And so we gotta put so much emphasis on corn silage quality, corn silage hygiene, and reducing that corn silage shrink.
So, congratulations if somebody’s checking all of the boxes, keep doing that. If somebody’s not checking all those boxes, let’s think of the implications of not going to the nth degree with our corn silage.
Scott Zehr: Yeah, I have a friend of mine, Larry, he ran a custom harvest business for a long time. And, you’d get a kick out of this guy. But if you asked him his favorite time of year, he would tell you resoundingly, “Oh, chopping corn. Oh, I love chopping. I love everything that goes into chopping corn.”
And this crazy nut, he would sit in a chopper for 26 hours a day if he could. If he could get other people to drive truck and back tractor, he’d do it. He preps for corn silage season, you’d think he… and he’ll tell you that’s his Super Bowl. That’s his Daytona 500. That’s his US Open tennis championship.
That’s his Masters Tournament. Whatever sports analogy you wanna throw out there, the Rose Bowl.
How he approaches it. And when you talk about maybe the individual that, that is, is asking are all these steps necessary? I would ask you this, Larry is getting ready for one of the most important 10, 12-day stretches on your farm that important?
Dr. Larry Roth: Absolutely, you bet. Because it’s gonna impact the entire rest of the year, and it may have impacts even past the rest of the year.
Scott Zehr: I…
Dr. Larry Roth: If we have corn silage hygiene issues, maybe it delays re-breeding on the cows, maybe it has an effect upon calf health from reducing colostrum quantity and quality. We’re starting to understand so much about epigenetics and what affects the calf before it is born.
We think of different types of inflammation, heat stress. Heat stress is really just another inflammation. What’s the impact of these mycotoxins on the developing calf inside the cow? Be it gonna be one of the black-hided calves that you talked about earlier, or be it the high genetic value heifer that’s gonna hopefully stay in the herd for a long time as a lactating cow.
So yeah, corn silage, that is probably the most critical stretch of time on the dairy because of its long-term implications.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. Measuring the success of corn silage season, and there’s a lot of downstream stuff. There’s milk production, there’s cow health, there’s reproduction, all the stuff you just mentioned with the calves, that all plays into it. But I, having spent time as a Dairy Comp 305 geek and mining data and looking at data for a number of years. There’s stuff that I would run into and questions that I would have and I’d ask the producer, “where’s the records on this?”
“We actually don’t keep track of that.” “Okay. If you don’t track it, how can I look at it and give advice on it to know what to improve on, right?”
Dr. Larry Roth: If y- if you’re not tracking it, how can you manage it and improve that particular aspect?
Scott Zehr: Exactly. So when I think of the corn silage, you know, we, we have, I’m just thinking in terms of some of these, the clients that, that we visit. The nutritionist is there once or twice a week, or once a week or maybe every two weeks to do a nutrient analysis, to do some dry matter testing. Are we doing kernel processing scores once throughout the season or twice, not at all, five times, right?
But what is it that- one, like what are the things that we should be tracking? How do we… What are the metrics we should look at in a corn silage pile to help us determine if we’re doing a good job or not?
Dr. Larry Roth: Fan- fantastic question. I think one of the items is if we can weigh corn silage coming in, it’s gonna tell us something about how good a job we did raising the crop through all of the different agronomic and weather challenges. Then I would look at my good old bucket of water trick. You mentioned kernel processing scores.
Those are good. It’s a good quantitative measurement. But by the time we get that kernel processing score, the chopper is probably already onto the next farm, or it’s put back in the shed.
So my little five-gallon bucket of water trick is put a couple handfuls of corn silage, fresh chopped corn silage into a five-gallon bucket, maybe two-thirds, three-quarter full, stir it up with a stick, let it sit for a couple of minutes, pour off the water and the forage, and then look and see what you have for kernels in the bottom, because that’s what’s gonna end up on the parlor floor when you wash it next February or March.
That’s gonna be the starch that doesn’t get utilized by the cow. And then I think I would be sending in corn silage samples, maybe taking a composite by day of chopping, send that in so that we’re able to determine what is the quality, nutritive quality of this crop that we’re producing. I could have tremendous dry matter yields, but if the quality isn’t there, so what?
And then measuring nutritive quality of the crop going into the pile gives me an idea of what nutritive value corn silage we’re gonna have coming out of the pile whenever we start feeding it out. And then that enables the nutritionist or the dairy producer to put together a game plan. Man, we got all the starch in the world, we got excellent fiber digestibility.
We don’t need to do anything to complement or make up for deficiencies in our corn silage. But let’s say, for whatever reason, our corn silage is low in starch, maybe we need to get some more starch from off of the farm. Maybe our fiber digestibility is low, maybe we need some kind of higher fiber digestibility byproduct. So I think that nutritive value of the crop going into the pile is so very critical.
Scott Zehr: I’m gonna, I’m gonna jump in there, Larry, because you brought up something really important that is, what’s the old saying? Time is money, right? So if I harvest corn silage in August, and I’m taking composite samples as we’re chopping, the one thing I- you didn’t bring up is when we’re doing these nutrition analysis, we can also do mycotoxin analysis. W- we’ve talked about that in the past. I’m not dwell on that today.
Dr. Larry Roth: Thank you.
Scott Zehr: But in a lot of cases, certain customers that I work with, clients that I work with in the Northeast here, they’re gonna say “I don’t have any leftover corn silage.” But in, in a lot of cases, Larry, we’re gonna not feed this corn silage till December, January? Some cases February or March, right?
If we’re doing some of this measurement now, and you alluded to it, it’s not even so much about coming up with a game plan, but I think of budgeting. So I think of it like a CEO of a business. What nutrition plan do I have in my pile, and how much money do I need to think about budgeting towards off-farm starch and off-farm protein, throughout the rest of the year? I would rather have that conversation in September than the day I open that bunk in April.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Or after you’ve been into that bunker for a month and we discover we have mycotoxin issues, so thank you for bringing that up. We wanna measure mycotoxins on our fresh corn forage so we know what we’re putting into the pile or the bunker from a mycotoxin standpoint.
But yeah let’s know what we’ve got going into the game. And so I think that’s one of the most critical steps is knowing what our corn silage asset is quality-wise, hygiene-wise, before we have to start feeding it.
Scott Zehr: I, I know you like football analogies, Larry, and there’s probably a number of people on our podcast that do. But going back to that Super Bowl mindset of my friend that preps for corn silage like it’s the Super Bowl. Everything that you just described with looking at this corn silage during harvest, that’s pract- that’s practically like watching game film on the opponent. You know what expect when finally get to the day.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep. Or watching game film on yourself…
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: to know what you need to change for next year. We’re into corn silage season, we’re in the middle of it. We may not be able to make some changes this year, but we’re able to start making plans for next year. So I just really think that those fresh corn forage samples are so critical.
I know there’s a lot going on during corn silage season, and we always wanna be safe. But we need to be pulling some samples as we’re building the pile, filling the bunker or filling the silo. How- however we store it, we need to know what our quality and hygiene is going into the feeding period. Feed- feeding for a month and then figuring out what we got is not a winning game plan.
Scott Zehr: No.
Dr. Larry Roth: We need to know in advance.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. Rob Hamacher our VP of market here in at Agrarian Solutions across the US, there, there’s something that he says an awful lot, whether it’s at our staff meetings, I think at one point, or maybe it still is, this little saying was in his email signature, and he truly believes it. Maybe you know where I’m going with this, maybe you don’t. But what he likes to say is, “Teamwork makes the dream work.”
Now, okay, maybe it sounds a little cliché, but it’s true. We don’t do these things on our own. And so I wanna talk about communication for a minute, and ownership of the outcome of this O- ROI, because we’re… this isn’t just the dairyman and his son on a small farm or the dairy and a herdsman and a crop crew and…
We’re talking owners and feeders and crop managers, nutritionists, agronomists, custom harvester, the employees executing the strategy, the vets, the consultants that are watching the data like I used to. That is the team of people that are involved one way or another with this asset. And so talk about the importance of the communication between everybody.
Dr. Larry Roth: It’s funny how different things come to mind, but as you started talking about teamwork, I was thinking of a 2,500 cow dairy that I showed up to buy some calves on the day that one of the brothers was heading out to plant corn. And they were running just a little bit behind because of weather, and his comment was, “I’m gonna go faster today than what we normally do.” Okay. What could go wrong, Scott, with something like that?
We start getting skips. We start not getting corn planted at a good, consistent depth. Yeah, he may get all of those acres planted, but he’s not gonna really know the consequence of that speed up decision until they start chopping and filling the bunker. Then we don’t have as much coming in. Our plants are stressed, so maybe we don’t have the nutritive quality. The plants are stressed early on, so we have more mycotoxin issues.
So comm- communication, teamwork, everybody who has anything to do with that crop understands the importance of their action or responsibility, from the person who orders the corn to the person who puts it in the ground, the person who sprays it for weeds, sprays fungicide, setting the chopper hauling it in, dumping it, not going through the mud and the manure to track it up onto the pile.
All of these things come into play, that we have to understand that each person who has something to do with that crop, that asset, excuse me, determines the success of that asset and how it affects all the other assets on the dairy.
Scott Zehr: That is so widespread. I’m not trying to nauseate the audience with football preferences, but oftentimes American football is talked about as the ul- ultimate team sport with 53 men on each roster. But when you go down through that list of individuals that I just talked about and the scenario you just played out for a 2,500 cow dairy, we’re talking there could be close to 50, 75 different people involved.
And everybody has to understand their role, and it’s discipline. Discipline comes into mind, not in a negative way, but being disciplined in the fundamentals. And it’s always interesting how so many of our conversations, Larry, come back to the fundamentals. And for the people that have been following us along for a while, I used to have a picture that is just rotated on a different wall right now of Vince Lombardi. And, just talking about mastering the fundamentals, and communication is one of those fundamentals, but understanding. Understanding
Dr. Larry Roth: I, I think the biggest fundamental is understanding what our objective is with this asset. Is it as many tons of dry matter? Is it as many tons of starch? Is it as many tons of digestible fiber? Is it as clean of mycotoxins as possible? And it’s not gonna be probably one single objective, but understanding the overall objectives. How is what I do today with this crop influencing the ability of this dairy to accomplish their objectives with this asset?
Scott Zehr: So Larry, as we wrap up today’s show I got a few questions I wanna ask of you, and not necessarily in rapid fire form, but, we’ll go down through a little bit of a list here to leave people something to think about. So question number one, Larry, what are the biggest harvest day decisions that determine whether this asset starts strong or starts compromised?
Dr. Larry Roth: I think, first one is how do we set, number one, the height of the chopper? We’re seeing more in- interest in high chop corn silage. Gonna be higher digestible fiber, higher starch content. I think setting the chopper for destroying kernels so that every kernel is processed. I think also of moisture of the crop, moisture or dry matter, however you wanna look at it, of the crop.
Those are probably the… And then the packing decision. How many pack tractors based upon how much corn silage we have coming in per hour. So are we bringing it in from a long distance away, or is it close-up fields? And then finally, do we have the crew around to cover it and pack it at the end of the day? So how’s that? That’s a whole bunch of decisions.
Scott Zehr: love it and it reminds me of one of your one, one of the, your sayings that I enjoyed the most or have enjoyed the most is letting, reminding people to let the packing tractor determine the speed of the chopper.
Dr. Larry Roth: There you go. Yeah, exactly. That person should have the opportunity to say, “Hey, Mr. Chopper, take a break. You’re getting ahead of me.”
Scott Zehr: Yep. I shared that, Larry, with a dairy farm the one day and we talk about time is money. He goes, “But the guy’s getting paid by the hour to run the chopper.” Ah, as the custom harvester, you’re paying on the cutter bar hour, buddy. Oh yeah, good point. But think about that.
Dr. Larry Roth: So are you paying by the hour or are you paying… I understand what you’re saying, but I bring that back to the quality of crop that we’re creating.
Scott Zehr: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay.
Scott Zehr: Okay, next question. I like this one. So what storage mistakes are easy to overlook but expensive later?
Dr. Larry Roth: Oh, I think it’s easy to overlook the packing. What you were just talking about. Man, we are really making progress today. We’re bringing in a tremendous number of corn silage tons, but we’re getting ahead of the packer. I think another decision that is easy to overlook is the slopes on the pile, or even with the bunker. Because we gotta get everything packed, and if we get too steep we’re not gonna be able to pack like what we should, ’cause we don’t wanna roll the pack tractor.
So I think, again, it’s easy to overlook what is the rate of corn silage coming in and in relation to the pack tractor or tractors, and then the slope of our pile or bunker.
Scott Zehr: I’m gonna add in a bonus one that I observe too many times, and that is they’re predicting rain for the next two days and we decide to not cover the pile in between the stoppage. It’s a pain in the butt. It takes people, it takes energy, it takes time. But Larry, that pile is money, and that rain is washing pennies right drain.
Dr. Larry Roth: And you know what, Scott? Every day that you’re feeding out of that bunker, you’re going to see that spot where you didn’t cover. And it’s gonna remind you that decision was made back on August 28th not to cover. ‘Cause that line is gonna be there all through that pile or that bunker.
Scott Zehr: Yep. I was on a dairy in another state, I think it was up in Maine, looking at this bunker, and this was six months after they started feeding the pile, Larry. And I… “Oh, right there is where you guys took a break for a week during the rain that you talked about. It’s there.”
Dr. Larry Roth: Yep. Absolutely.
Scott Zehr: the dairyman just kinda hung his head. The weather’s the weather, but control you can control. You can control whether we make the decision to go out and cover it.
Dr. Larry Roth: Absolutely.
Scott Zehr: When corn silage starts feeding poorly, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind?
Dr. Larry Roth: When you say it starts feeding poorly, I’m gonna take that as meaning production goes down. We could also say repro goes down. So, first thing that is gonna go through my mind is, how did we do with those kernels, destroying them? And then secondly, near and dear to my heart, mycotoxin contamination. So is the energy th- there? Is the energy available? And then do we have a hygiene issue?
Scott Zehr: Yep I would agree. And like you did initially with milk and repro, just the way my pegboard works in my head, I like to chase that all the way down through because there’s such a long list of cascading events that happen. It’s not just the three, four pounds of milk today. It’s not just the five points of conception rate over the next 60 days.
It’s elongated days in milk. It’s higher body condition score at calving. It’s compromised calvings. It’s transition health. It’s another lactation. I could go on, but we all know the kind of the downstream there. We talked about this a little bit, but I, about what we’re measuring with that pile, the dry matter, the starch, the fiber digestibility, the mycotoxins that, that, you know when we’re harvesting. But how do we connect that forage analysis to actual cow response instead of treating the lab report like the finish line?
Dr. Larry Roth: Okay. I will add one more to what you just said, ash content.
Scott Zehr: Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: If our ash content is high, it may be telling us something about tracking dirt onto the pile. So your question is, are we just trying to make a good lab report? The lab report is on the corn forage. It doesn’t tell us how the fermentation process went. It doesn’t tell us how good a job of packing we did. Oh, we did a horrible job of packing, so now our, we got some heating, prolonged fermentation, so our sugar content is gonna be lower. Our pH aren’t gonna be low, and our heat damage protein is gonna be higher. So it isn’t just the lab report on the corn forage. The final check is gonna be those assays as we feed out the asset.
Scott Zehr: Yeah. And then, ironically as you were talking, you say the final check, but really then there’s the cow and the story she’s gonna tell. There’s another final check. And, you know, it makes me realize corn silage season when you drive around during corn silage season, and it’s, it feels like a rat race if you’re in a concentrated dairy community like I am.
There’s choppers flying through the fields. There’s trucks going down the road both ways. There’s corn silage flying off the trucks in the air. Litter on the side of the road, right? And it’s, it feels like a rat race. But really what it is the most intense relay race- Yeah … out there because…
and I think that’s how we have to think of it as a relay race, because there’s so many different start-finish lines in the same journey.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah.
Scott Zehr: There’s so many points where the baton has to be handed off cleanly to make this thing all come together.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yes.
Scott Zehr: And, I think one other question I wanna touch on is back to communication. Now I’m reminded of a friend of ours named Joel, Larry, and Joel used to like to say, “You cannot over-communicate.” And so just wrap us up with, again, there’s a lot of people involved in this relay race.
In your mind, the perfect scenario, maybe going back to that 2,500 cow dairy you referenced, what’s the value in sitting everybody down for an afternoon with coffee and donuts or pizza and wings and just hammering out the game plan? “We- we’ve been putting up corn Larry, on this farm with the same people for 10 years. Everybody knows what they’re doing,” could be the worst thing you’ve ever said.
Dr. Larry Roth: So let’s say we ran into a situation like that. I don’t need to go in to listen to any meeting about how to do corn silage. I’ve been doing this for 50 years. Okay? Let’s bring in some of our corn silage nutrient assay reports from this year. Let’s review those, what’s good about them, what’s not good about them.
Let’s go over what our current crop is this year, what our chopping plan is. We’re gonna start on August 28th with those fields far away, and then finish with those close up. What changes do we need to make during that time? What changes do we need to make as the crop matures and gets drier? What do we need to do if it’s gonna start to rain?
So go through all of these different situations to remind us of our, how we’ve done in the past, what our challenges are, and again, come back to what our objective, what our grand objectives are with this asset
Scott Zehr: I like that. ‘Cause that’s really I like it when you bring it back to what’s the objective? What are we trying to accomplish? Larry, I’m gonna leave the listeners with one final thought on my end, and I’ll leave the door open for you to do the same. This is a crazy time of year that we’re coming into for people that are harvesting corn.
Whether it’s silage, whether it’s grain corn, high moisture, it’s crazy. We tend to not get enough sleep. Be safe. Be mindful when you’re around the bunks. If you’re out there taking samples, there’s tractors, they can’t see everywhere. To the truck drivers, remember those stop signs are there for a reason.
Other cars in the public, they may not feel the need to come to a full stop, but just be safe ’cause it’s… every year, Larry, it seems like in, in the area that I live within a 60, 70-mile radius there’s some horror stories that just don’t need to happen. But I understand it’s a stressful time of year, but safety first, guys. Safety first.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that’s a great one. So what, we put up a tremendous crop, we did a tremendous job of packing, but we lost a guy. We lost a guy for any of the different reasons that you just talked about, be it traffic related, be it rolling a tractor, be it getting run over there while we’re out sampling. We gotta be safe. That- that’s number one. The other thing is communicate to the team the objective with this asset and why it is so important to this business enterprise.
Scott Zehr: There is a lot of meat on that bone, Larry, that we could take a lot of different ways from cow health right down to the paychecks of the people that are scraping manure, and that really great thing to leave people with. I thank you for that, yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth: Yeah
Scott Zehr: So well, folks, if you found value in today’s podcast, share it with a friend. Hit that share button, send it to them. If you have any questions or you’d like to talk about anything with Larry or I about what we discussed today, that is podcast@agrsol.com. And Larry, we do get back to our listeners when they email us. So with that, Larry, thank you for taking time out of your day today to visit with us again. Great conversation, appreciated that, and we’ll be talking to everybody again soon.
Dr. Larry Roth: All right. Thank you, Scott.

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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.

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