Again, welcome to our Cow College
program for 2016.
This session we're going to lead off
with my colleague Zen Miller from Outagamie County.
Zen has been the dairy and livestock agent
there now for 20 years and Zen is going
to share with us a research project
that he's been involved with and he's going
to lead off talking about dehorning and the work
that they've done over the last couple of years
regarding dehorning and then he's going
to have his intern also share some information
with us so Zen, all yours.
- Hey, thank you.
So I'm gonna kick us off today
and we have all our equipment that we use laid out here
and usually I'm kind of all over, but we'll start
with this first demonstration today.
I have two skulls here, hopefully you can see them.
Some of you have seen these before.
These are European mounts.
My taxidermist had never done this before
but the bugs worked great.
So you can see that this head, this calf got euthanized
and this actually we're guessing,
I got these at Kroll's,
so this calf I'm guessing is less than a week old,
maybe only a couple days old.
And this calf, I have a veterinarian here,
he probably could tell me how to do this,
but I'm guessing two to four months old,
maybe a little bit longer, and blunt trauma
is what they use to euthanize this calf.
So now my next question is, well,
what's the difference besides size?
And in the back, I don't know if you can see this
or not, but this one has horn buds,
and they're ossified and they're connected
to the skull, and this one doesn't.
And so it's pretty visual, you can see that,
and my guess is and I'm not a veterinarian.
I have a son that is, so maybe we can ask Gordie
when he gets up here, but it's a little more
intrusive when you're taking those horn buds
off when they're already ossified
to the skull and attached.
And they attach between 30 and 60 days,
so last summer I had the opportunity to have
a summer intern, I got the smartest
and the best and the most driven person
I could, Bethany Marks, and we picked
of several things that she did, we picked dehorning,
and one of the reasons why and most of you
are in the National Dairy Farm program,
and if you say no, then I need to ask you where you ship
because about 90 percent of the milk gets shipped
into processors that use this program.
On page eight, you get asked this question.
Calves are disbudded at eight weeks
of age or earlier with appropriate use
of analgesic or anesthetics, yes or no?
And then it says don't know, so that's possible.
All other planned medical procedures are performed
at the earliest age possible
with appropriate use of medication.
So this is becoming an issue, you have a few more
years before they say this, but now they've implemented
a plan of continual improvement,
which means that if you say no to this,
they want to know some type of plan
of how you'll get to do this.
And then finally to introduce our topic,
and I don't know if any of you get this magazine,
Progressive Dairymen, but there's an article in here,
and my survey work hasn't been this good
but they say that 55 percent of the dairies report
using pain relief at dehorning
and my work hasn't been that way yet
so I don't know if I'm not talking to the right people
or if we're just not the same people they're talking to.
So we want to talk a little bit about disbudding
or dehorning, Bethany's going to come up
and I'll tell you a little bit about Bethany.
Every time I meet her, she's gotten a new award,
and now she's won some holstein award
for outstanding young holstein youth, I guess.
Bethany is a very brilliant student.
She has very good grades and she's taking
a class online in between semesters.
She was one of four people accepted
in the school of veterinary medicine at Madison
on the early in program, so she just has
to maintain her grade point average
and take the right courses and get the right grades
and she's going to be a vet, so someday
she may be on your farm.
So we devised a plan that would say,
Bethany, you're very smart, now let's learn
some of these veterinarian skills
because dad wasn't letting her do this
before she worked at the Extension office,
and then getting her on farms
and this is an old Iowa term, so she could
learn how to roll the cob, talk cows a little bit
and talk about farming a little bit you know.
So Bethany's going to give the presentation
and when she's done, if there's anything else
I'll add to it but I'm sure she won't miss anything.
I'm kind of her prop person now,
so Bethany, come on up.
- So as Zen said, I was the summer intern
last summer for Onagamie County Extension
and we did a dehorning project,
so what we did is we went to farms,
we visited 46 farms over the summer,
and dehorning was performed at 22 of those farms.
At the other farms, they maybe just had dehorning protocols
already set so that we didn't need
to do any demonstrations there.
We trained a total of 50 people over the summer,
and dehorned a total of 179 calves.
This is the breakdown of how we dehorned calves
on the farm, 39 calves were dehorned
with Dr. Naylor's paste, and I'll talk
about that a little later.
41 of those calves were dehorned with Dr.,
excuse me, the first one was Dr. Larson's,
and the second one was Dr. Naylor's.
16 calves were burned with the dehorner
with no pain medication.
31 we used lidocaine to dehorn those calves.
Four calves were dehorned with just meloxicam
and 48 calves were dehorned with meloxicam and lidocaine.
So a little bit about how we did
these demonstrations on the farm.
First with the caustic paste, there's two types of paste.
We have Dr. Naylor's paste, and Dr. Larson's.
Each look about the same, they look like paste.
And you take about a quarter size amount
of this paste and put it right on the horn bud
but before you do that, you want to take
a clippers and clip the hairs so that the paste
will work more effectively on that horn bud
and when you do this, this wants to be done
within 24 hours of birth to four days.
You don't want to wait longer than that
because then calves will learn to rub it off
or kick it off with their foot
and then that won't be as effective as if done earlier.
Then we also did hot iron dehorning
with a butane burner that looks just like this.
On some farms we used the pain management
to dehorn calves, we would give lidocaine
just like this, we'd give five CCs on each side.
Right, it's kind of on the calf's skulls.
You would put it right in this lirrlw area here.
If you feel there's a great indent
that you'd be able to see, and you put
the five CCs of lidocaine right in there.
Then we also gave meloxicam to some calves.
That helps with pain later on after the lidocaine
may wear off and we gave three meloxicam
tablets per 100 weight, so a newborn
or a four-week-old calf maybe would use
three or four pills.
To burn the horns off we gave the pain management.
We clipped the hairs well and then burned
them with the burner.
We would also talk about polled genetics
when we were on the farm.
We would ask the farmer if he's used polled bulls
or if not, if you were to use a homozygous bull,
your calves would be 100 percent polled
which would mean they would have no horns
and if you used the heterozygous bull,
then 50 percent of the calves would be polled,
meaning you'd have a 50/50 chance
that your calves would be polled or horned.
The list of polled placings that you guys have
we handed out to 39 farmers so they have
that at their use for using those bulls.
And come to find out that there are some farmers
that already use polled genetics prior to our visit
so that's something good to hear.
So then after we did these visits,
we sent out a survey to all these farms
to see if they had changed any of their
dehorning protocols or things of that nature.
So what we were looking for in the survey
was understanding of a few of the concepts
that we talked about while on their farm.
If they use pain management, we wanted
to find out if they used that before our visit
and if they changed anything and used it
after our visit as well as if their methods
of dehorning has changed and if they
incorporated polled genetics after our visit
and as of yesterday, we have received 14 surveys back
and 12 of those surveys that we've received
have dehorning performed on their farm.
So a little of the results we have,
in our survey we had a table real similar to this in it
and asking farmers of their understanding of these concepts.
Before the visit, the farmers' understanding
of the benefits of pain medication on minimizing
stress responses when dehorning calves
or disbudding calves.
We added values to each of the very high, high,
low, and very low, and so that value
came out to 1.88, and then after our visit
the value increased variably to 3.5.
So the farmers learned that if giving
pain management would help the calf out greatly.
Then we also asked the importance of disbudding
calves at three days of age, or before three days of age,
and that went from 2.11 to 3.86,
so that also increased greatly.
And then we also asked about the availability
of polled dairy genetics, and that also increased
from 2.25 to 3.13, so we learned
that the farmers did learn things from when
we visited their farms, so that's a good thing to hear.
Other things that we got from the survey
were changes on the farms, so of the 14 farms
that we received surveys back, three farms
went from burning to paste, so instead
of burning the horns they changed to the caustic paste.
Three farms increased their use of paste
which maybe before our visit they only pasted half
their calves but now they're pasting all
of their calves after birth.
Three farms continued burning but burned
at earlier ages so that it's less invasive on the calf,
and five farms did not change their methods,
but two of those farms were already using paste.
Two farms increased their use of lidocaine
and meloxicam, which made it easier on the calves
and one farm increased their use of polled genetics
so that they won't have to dehorn those calves.
We also had a spot for comments that we would
like to hear from the farmers.
Farmers said that calves don't fight as much
when given lidocaine, so that's less stress
on them trying to handle the calf.
Also, the paste is a lot easier than I thought,
so some farmers didn't know how to use the paste,
when to use it, how to apply it,
and things of that nature, so they found
that it was a lot easier to use and to apply to the calf.
Some farmers said that they would burn
the horns when they are smaller so that
it is less invasive on the calf and a little easier
for them to recover from and that
with polled genetics that polled bulls
don't have the type of numbers or the type of
traits they're looking for for breeding
so that's something that's still developing
with polled genetics and the recommendations
that we gave while on the farm is to dehorn
calves at an earlier age when burning the horns.
Work with your veterinarian to make dehorning protocol.
Use pain management on older calves
so it's less invasive on them and less stress for them,
and introduce polled genetics into your herd.
You don't have to breed all the cows but you could breed
some of your bottom 10 percent to polled bulls
so that maybe you wouldn't have to dehorn
those calves right when they're born.
And so that's kind of what we did this summer.
I guess we'll hold questions until the end,
so I'll give it back to Zen.
- Thanks, thank you Bethany.
She did a really great job and I saw
a lot growth in Bethany this summer.
First, her whole family's a little quiet,
must be genetic, I must've missed that gene
when I was born, I'm not sure, but...
She just got so, I could say, well go to this farm
and she'd come back and I know that she just stood there
toe to toe with some big grizzly farmer
that said oh, you guys are crazy in the Extension office
but she stuck to her time so let's give
her a round of applause and then we'll take questions.
(audience applauds)