University Place Wednesday Nite @ the Lab Nigel Cook, "A Decade of Lameness Research in Dairy Cows at the UW-SVM" 7/7/2010  UP 455   cc >> Thank you for joining me for Wednesday Nite @ the Lab at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. Tonight we welcome Dr. Nigel Cook of the Department of Veterinary Medicine. Nigel Cook is a clinical associate professor in the Food Animal Production Medicine section at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Vet Med. He qualified as a veterinarian in 1992 and worked in a large food animal clinic in southern England for four years before moving to the Royal Veterinary College, where he spent three years as lecturer and head of the large animal ambulatory clinic. Since 1999, he has been in Wisconsin providing milk quality, lameness, and facility troubleshooting services to farmers. He also is teaching veterinary students and developing research related to the influence of the environment on hoof and other health. He is the section head of the Food Animal Production Medicine Group and has previously been the chair of the AABP Bovine Lameness Committee and is currently the vice president of the American Association of Bovine Practitioners. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Nigel Cook to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. (applause) >> Nigel Cook: Thank you much. Thanks for inviting me here to speak to you and taking the time out of your busy schedules to miss Concerts on the Square and learn about some of the things we've been doing with dairy cows. 

I guess I've been here for ten years, so a decade's just about long enough to have some kind of perspective of what you've been doing. So I put a lot of our research into one presentation to share with you this evening. So, a decade of lameness research in Wisconsin. Where are we now? Climb on any hill in Wisconsin and realize as you look around that the dairy industry is a big deal for us. It is a big deal. This is a picture from the top of the Pheasant Branch hill, looking towards where I live in Waunakee and there are little silos and barns scattered all over the place, and this is within five miles of the center of Madison. So we are surrounded by dairy and this is a great place to do research in the dairy industry. The state of Wisconsin is still home to around 1.2 million dairy cows. That's about 14% of the US dairy herd. We're not number one in the number of dairy cows anymore. 

We're second to California, but we're coming back, we're coming back, folks. There's about 13,000 herds, 13,000 separate herds, and those cows in those herds produce 24 billion pounds of milk per year. That's about 13% of the total milk produced in the US. And if you go down to Brennan's, you'll realize that we make a lot of cheese. So I think that we're still America's Dairyland. We still drive around with our number plates and it says that right there on the bottom. So I think this is a great place for me, to come here to the University of Wisconsin to do research on dairy cows, because of the diversity that we have in our industry here. Again, I think sometimes we, perhaps, take that for granted. We're used to the little red barn. We're used to driving around and seeing these little red barns. 

They're predominantly tie-stall barns, so if you look inside them, cows spend much of their day tethered in a stall where they're milked and fed and cared for, and they get to go out into the loafing area for about two or three hours a day, usually. This is actually a cow, top left corner, in our own little 50 cow teaching herd that we have in our veterinary school where our students run and manage those cows. Top right is a grazing herd. We have a grazing herd program. We have many herds in Wisconsin that graze, either partially or year-round. And we certainly like to visit those herds with our students to show that level of diversity. But more and more we're seeing more what we call "free stall" barns, and this is a picture of a 4,000-cow free stall barn. Inside there they have a walkway across the top of the barn so you can take a picture like this. And it's a free stall because the cows are free to roam around the pen. They're free to use any stall that they choose within this pen. 

They graze at a feed bunk where we supply a total mixed ration, where the concentrates and the forages are mixed together. And that's what we are increasingly relying on to house our dairy industry as we move to the future. So my job in the Food Animal Production Medicine group in the vet school is to try to find solutions to the problems that our dairy industry faces. And the fun thing is, we get to do that while we're teaching veterinary students and we're supporting the veterinary profession in the state. So this is what I tell my colleagues is work, when we're out on a grazing herd here on a nice summer's day, perhaps a little less humid than the one today. So this is what we do. We visit farms when they call us, and we try to solve problems. So I like to think of us as a little bit like CSI-Madison. So we go to a farm with our students and we collect a lot of data. Now in the business, I used to do surgery on cows, now I collect data. 

I crunch numbers and I look at disease trends, and we look at the facilities and the nutrition and we try to find solutions to the problems on a farm. A little bit like those Friday night shows. So this evening I'm going to focus on lameness, because lameness is absolutely central to the management of the farm. If we don't get lameness under control, it's such a big disease. It's the number one disease influence in the well being of our dairy cows on farms. It's a chronic cause of pain and it is a cause of huge economic loss to the farmer. If we don't get that under control, then it affects everything a cow does, and it affects everything that happens on that farm. And so that's really been the focus since I've come here from the UK, from someone who used to actually treat lame cows to being a researcher trying to work out why we have lame cows in the first place and trying to do something about it. And we take that into our teaching program. We work with a local hoof trimmer. 

We have one of the best hoof trimmers in the world, up in Baraboo, Wisconsin. He runs Dairyland Hoof Care Institute and we are lucky enough to have him and his colleagues help us teach our veterinary students how to treat cows and make sure that when our vets enter the profession they can treat a lame cow and make sure that we get a good recovery. This is Susan treating a sole ulcer here, one of the severe lesions we get on a cow's feet. And this is a white lime disease. This is a side of the hoof where there's a little bit of pus emerging from the top right corner there, and this is where we trimmed down that lesion, removed all the unhealthy tissue, back to the healthy kind. And this wooden thing is a foot block, and because cows have two digits, we're lucky enough to be able to put a wooden block or a plastic block on the -- core and take weight off that digit. So for those of you who haven't had an opportunity to look inside a cow's claw, I will give you that opportunity this evening so you can take a look at that. So the lesions we're dealing with are nasty. They're painful. And they're every bit as painful as they look. 

For that reason, back when I arrived in Wisconsin, I really wanted to decide and find out and discover, what are the causes of lameness and how lame is our dairy industry? How many cows are lame in our dairy industry? And one of the ways that people were starting to do that at that time was to use a system called locomotion scoring. And ascribe a value to the way that a cow walks. And here we have a five point system, which has become somewhat universal. Back then I used a four point locomotion scoring system. So the top left corner is what we hope all our cows look like. That's a locomotion score 1, a non-lame cow. She walks with a nice, level back, nice even strides, not sure about the ear flicking, but she looks a nice, bright, healthy cow. Locomotion score 2 is a very slightly lame cow. She moves a little slower, she's got a slight arch to her back. But you really can't tell which leg she's lame on. 

That's a slightly lame cow. Over on the right hand side are the things we're trying to avoid. The 3 is the moderately lame cow where you can now identify weight transfer. She's transferring weight off a sore foot, so we can see which leg she's lame on. And then the bottom right is our locomotion score 4, a severely lame cow, where you can really start to see the consequence of the pain and difficulty that this cow is going through. And she's lost weight, she's barely able to bear weight on that foot, and she's having basically problems getting through her day. So I visited 30 farms, both in the summer and the winter, and used that locomotion scoring system. And I said the 3 and 4 score cows were what I'd call "clinically lame." Visibly lame, I'd expect the farmer to be able to tell that that cow had abnormal gait and a difference in the weight transfer on the sore foot. And what we found was that our free stall cows, in general, were a little more lame than our tie stall cows. Tie stalls had a little less lameness, and when I started to look at the bedding surface in the stalls, I realized that both the free stalls and the tie stall barns that were using sand bedding, deep sand in this kind of construction here on the bottom left, had less lameness than their friends that have chosen to use other bedding surfaces. 

And the predominant bedding surface we were comparing to was basically a rubber crumb mattress. These were developed 15 years ago and thought to be just a really great idea. This was going to reduce our bedding costs, and provide a nice, comfortable surface for cows to lie on. But we were founding that these rubber crumb mattresses, the cows were a little more lame than we expected to see. So overall, lameness was a problem. Lameness was a problem in the housing facilities that we were deciding to use as our future, the free stall, and they were a problem with mattress and mat bedding surfaces. So we had a problem. So, why do we house cows in the first place? Let's just go back a little bit and say, why aren't we grazing more? Why don't we put the cows outside? And I think if we'd discuss this with animal welfare associations, or veterinary students, that were concerned about the well being of our dairy cows, they will view this as the ideal. They expect cows to eat grass. That's what they developed rumens for, to convert grass into protein that we could consume as humans. 

And they do a rather great job at that. And there's some good reasons for putting cows outside in pasture. This was a study done in Canada, where they took a group of equally lame cows. This again is a locomotion score, and they all averaged just three at the start of the study. Then they split the group in half and put one group outside on pasture and kept the other group inside in the free stall barn. And over the course of a relatively short period of time, only over four weeks, the cows that had access to the pasture ended up walking better. They improved their gait and they reduced their level of lameness. And they did that while lying down less. And we'll come back to time budgets and the importance of rest. But that improvement was as a result of something other than lying down more. 

However, grazing has its problems and this is a picture from Uruguay, has a very strong grazing industry. And the problem is, well, we can't just leave the cows out on the pasture all the time. We have to get them back to the milking facility and we have to use a track or a path to do that. And sometimes that pathway becomes very difficult to manage. This is an issue here. We've got lots of rocks and mud here that the cows have to walk on. And so the cows get lame because they have to walk long distances to and from the pasture. And if we look at the feet of these cows, these are heifers that have just transitioned from life on grass to suddenly, right at the point of calving, being milked twice a day through a little milking facility, spending maybe five hours standing on this cobblestone area. Very big, dramatic transition, right at the point of calving. And we see these little growth interruptions. 

Where the arrows are, you can see a line across that hoof, and that's a growth interruption that you would potentially get on your fingernail if you caused damage to the quick. And that's telling us there's some major change, major disruption to horn growth at around that transition time. And we see a lot of lameness as a result of toe ulcers and sole ulcers in this dairy industry as well. And then if you follow the path of the carbon footprint story, where we're supposed to be reducing our carbon footprint. How many people are driving Toyota Priuses, or "Pry-uses," as we like to say. (laughter) So we're trying to reduce our carbon footprint. If we look at the carbon footprint of the dairy industry, comparing 1944, predominantly a grazing industry back then, with 2007, where we had certainly a mixed industry, there were a lot more free stall and intensive larger herds. If you look at the CO2 produced per kilo of milk, we're a third less than we used to be. So by using modern diets, by basically having half the number of cows that we used to have in the 1940s and '50s, our carbon footprint for the modern dairy industry is a third what it would potentially be if we went backwards and started to put all the cows out and started to realize we need twice as many cows again. And if you ask the cow where she would like to be, this is again another study where these cows are given free choice between either a pasture or a free stall. 

And we look at the time on pasture, so this is a percentage of time they spent throughout the day at pasture or indoors. We realize that the cows kind of like to be indoors during the day, and they like to be outdoors during the night. So we kind of have a preference for both. Given the choice, they choose each one. I was in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and one of the farmers made this statement. He said that "cows just aren't keen on rain or sunshine." And if anybody's been to the UK, you realize the irony of that statement, because that's about 360 days of the year. And that's our problem. We have this vision, this idea that grazing is the thing that cows are supposed to do, but doing it in practice is rather more challenging. They don't like heat, they don't like bad weather, we have problems with parasitism, we have problems with lameness, we have problems with transfer of the animals to and from the milking center, and we have issues when they transition from their rearing, when they're heifers, to when they're milking as cows. So rather than just open the door and let everybody out, the approach we've taken is to try to learn what it is about housing that we're doing wrong and try to do something about it. 

Try to work with the industry and what it's trying to do as it becomes more efficient and hopefully with a greater economic return for our dairy farmers, but try to understand the issues and look at the risk for lameness and the other production related diseases. So let's look at the grazing cow time budget. By "time budget" I mean what the cow does in a 24-hour day. And typically a grazing cow will lie down for about ten hours a day, spend about one and a half hours going back and forth between the pasture and the milking center. They graze, they have to eat grass, and it takes a lot of time and energy to consume enough grass, so they spend eight hours a day eating grass. That's a lot of time eating. It would make my jaw ache. Two and a half hours milking, typically, and about two hours held off pasture, typically when we're feeding extra concentrate. So that's what a time budget for a grazing cow looks like. Let's look at what we are doing with our cows in our free stall barns, because what I'm going to suggest, and our working hypothesis is, that when we house cattle, they need to rest more than they do when they graze when they're at pasture. 

So this is the free stall cow time budget, based on over 200 cows in 16 free stall barns in Wisconsin. They lie down a little longer, almost 12 hours a day on average. They spend two and a half hours a day in those alleyways, wandering between the stalls and the feeding area and the water and so on. They spend half as much time eating, four and a half hours a day eating, because now we've mixed the forages together. We feed corn silage and haylage. We put concentrate protein in there. So they don't have to work as hard to eat. They spend less time eating. They spend about the same time milking, and they spend some time standing in the stall, rather than lying in it. So that's what a time budget of a free stall cow looks like. 

But bear in mind, when you're a grazing cow, when you're not lying down, you're usually standing on this stuff. You're usually standing on dirt and pasture, a generally softer surface than what the free stall cow has to stand on when she's not lying down. She's generally standing on this stuff. We build our floors of concrete. So time on concrete, and that extra time standing on that surface, we believe is one of the contributing factors to our lameness problem. So if we build barns, we can't deal with ten hours of rest per day. That's okay for a grazing cow, it's not okay for a cow in a free stall barn. What we need to be shooting for is 12 hours a day of rest. We need to make sure that that hardworking, lactating dairy cow spends half the day lying down and resting. She's working harder than Lance Armstrong is currently in the Tour de France. 

She's working at around 3.5 to 4 times maintenance, something humans only approach at their most extremes of exhaustion. And she's doing that every single day. Some cows lie down longer than 12 hours a day. I filmed a cow that lay down for 18 hours a day, and I guess we all like a lie-in sometimes on Saturday morning. So the possible mechanisms. Where are we going wrong in our housing environments? Well, there's two possibilities as you look at cow behavior and the influence in the environment. The first is that if we're not lying down, we're standing up. And if we're standing up, we're putting a lot of weight on the structure of that foot, that claw capsule that encircles the last bone of the digit, the third phalanx. And that third phalanx is suspended inside that claw capsule. As you ask the cow to stand longer and longer, that suspension becomes stressed and so that may cause some of the problems that we see. 

The other possibility is that if  I'm not up here lying on this comfortable surface up here, then I'm down here standing in this alleyway. And because we have a concrete surface, we've got a lot of moisture from urine and manure, and that moisture can weaken the structure of the claw, lead to infectious hoof disease and other breakdowns of the integrity of the claw. So let's get back to this bedding idea, that we can actually influence lameness on a farm by the choice of bedding. And over two studies that we did on a small scale, and a larger study done in Minnesota by some colleagues up there, it constitutes about 80 dairy herds in the Upper Midwest. Overall, if you look at the rate of lameness, the prevalence of lameness, it's 42% lower in the herds that use sand bedding than the herds that use mattresses. That's a big deal. That's a huge difference. If we can go to the industry and pretty much halve the amount of lameness that we're seeing in our dairy industry, we've got a great thing that we could do for animal welfare. And again, this passion of mine dates back to the days of being a student at the University of Bristol in the UK, and this was a paper produced in the late '80s, a study that actually some fourth-year vet students did, where they went to a farm and they just put lots and lots of soft bedding, in this case straw, into these old, horrible cubicle houses in the UK. And I did that on a number of farms as I entered practice and I could see the change in behavior and the improvements that we got from improved rest. 

And that's really stayed with me. So we thought, well, this sand thing, it may well be do to with cow behavior. It may well have something to do with rest and recuperation and so on. And so we set out to try and prove that. We bought some video cameras, some Sony DVR cameras. We spray-painted a whole bunch of cows on a lot of different farms and tracked them for hours on end as they wandered around the pens to work out what they did and what they got up to in their day. And so in the first study, we selected 12 farms, six with mattress, rubber crumb mattress stall beds, and six with deep sand. And we really tried to choose farms with very similar stall dimensions and designs and set up the cameras and filmed these cows. We selected ten cows on each farm, tracked them for a minimum of 24 hours, and here we've got Triple Stripes here, she's in a stall here, and you can see the video flicks. It shoots about a second of video every 30 seconds. 

So you can track the cow through the whole day. And you can make these little diagrams of cow movement. This is Triple X, and she was a little bit of an East Ender. She liked the east end of the barn, and I think cows kind of form gangs in these barns. Some cows like the one end, some the other. Some cows you'll find that they never go in this rear alley, hardly ever go up there. This is where the feed is, so they spend a lot of time out here. You can see the yellow area represents where the stalls are and you can see this cow here has gone into a stall for a lying session. And cows will go through several bouts of standing and lying. So at 4:20 AM, this white cow here just entered this stall and lay down. 

So if we're trying to get about 12 hours of rest in a day, what cows do is, they have lying bouts that last about one hour. And they had about twelve of them in a day. So that's the number of bouts and the duration of a bout is about an hour. And you can see her friends are getting up and doing what comes naturally. Standing, lying, standing and lying. We think it's abnormal for a cow to spend a prolonged period of time standing in a stall. We think that's abnormal, and yet we start to see cows spending more than two or three hours doing that in some of our videos. So at 5:20, did you see our cow? She stood up, did what comes naturally, and lay back down again. You'll also notice, she switched over sides. She was on her left side, she's now on her right hand side. 

So that's what resting behavior looks like. So these are, again, our time budgets. This is from our study. So this is now the cows from those six herds with mattress stalls, the rubber crumb mattresses, and now their time budgets are divided into the locomotion scores 1, 2, and 3. Non-lame, slightly lame, and moderately lame. And what you start to see is that the lying time decreases in the lame cows and the standing time in the stall, that's the very top shaded area in the columns, increases. Such that the moderately lame cows are standing in a stall for six hours a day. Six hours a day, and they're resting for ten hours or so. So quite a difference in behavior between non-lame animals, which are fine, they're lying down for 12 hours a day, they're doing what we hope cows should do in a free stall, but the lame ones aren't. The lame cows have changed their behavior. 

And then if we compare what happens in stand stalls, the six sand herds, what we realized was that the lame cows on sand bedding don't show that change in behavior. They stand in the stall for the same amount of time as the non-lame cows. Two hours a day. And they maintain their rest. If anything, they increase it. If anything, they lie down more when they're lame. And so we started to think about what was happening there, not that mattresses were failing for all cows, but mattresses were failing for lame cows. Consequently, we really annoyed mattress manufacturers around the world. They weren't too happy with that seismic result from our study, and one particular company works out of Ontario, a good company, wanted to do the best for the cows. They challenged us and said, "Look, you didn't have the same buildings. 

You did this on 12 farms, lots of differences in the design. Come and look at the farms that we're building, barns that we're building, and we have a very uniform design. And you can compare our mattress stalls with a version of a stall with sand." And so we took them up on that offer. So this stall, it's called the Y2K Loop, so you can tell how long it's been out there. But these were very uniform barns. We had two barns with mattress stalls, the rubber crumb mattresses that we'd filmed before, and two barns with a new concept, which was a combination of sand and a mattress. So it actually had a mattress sunk below the surface, which allows you to keep about two inches of sand bedding on top, rather than have a deep sand bed of about 12 inches or so. And you can notice again, all the stall dimensions are the same, the design is very, very similar between these farms, and so we repeated that study just to be on the safe side and make sure that what we'd identified as an issue was really an issue. So here we have our non-lame, slightly lame, and moderately lame cows on the pack mats. That's what we called this sunken mattress with sand on top. 

And you can see that we found what we found before. That lame cows maintain their rest on the sand surfaces. And while their standing in stall time increases a little bit, we virtually got it down to a half an hour a day in the non-lame animals. So again, this is an abnormal behavior. Normal behavior is, cows don't stand in the stall very long. And when we compared the same stall design with the mattress surfaces, we found exactly what we'd found before, that the lame cows rest less and they stand more in the stalls, six hours a day standing in a stall for our moderately lame cows, and only less than ten hours a day of rest. So we found that it's not the design of the stall, it's the surface. We have to fix the surface if we're going to provide an environment where lame cows can use these facilities and get up and down and rest normally. Overall, as we look at the large population of animals that we've got in our database, cows on mattresses lie down for about an hour less than cows on sand in our industry. But they do it in quite a different way. 

They, on sand, have fewer lying bouts per day. Nine versus 13. So they take fewer bouts and the bouts are longer, 1.3 hours rather than an hour. And this is the Tempur-Pedic versus the futon comparison here. (laughter) You fidget less on that nice, cushioned surface. Cows are kind of big, bony creatures and they've got lots of bony prominences. They're going to get uncomfortable. They can go longer without changing position on sand than they do on these rubber crumb mattresses. And that's important because it's a problem for our lame cows. It's a problem for a our lame cows. 

So we're going to watch a lame cow get up in her stall, and it's not pretty. It's not nice to watch this, and I can do this, because this is a great farm, and I know this cow was treated very soon after being filmed. But she can't put weight on her right rear foot. And because she can't put her weight on that right rear foot, she can't extend her front leg easily. She's got to negotiate a brisket locator and a -- clipper bar here. You can start to se the muscles quiver, and it takes a heck of a lot of effort to get up in that stall. I don't blame that cow, that lame cow in a mattress stall, for standing for quite a period of time in that stall, recovering from the exhaustion of getting up and plucking up the courage to lie back down again. Because I don't like to say lame cows in stalls lie down. They fall down. It's difficult getting up, and it's difficult lying down. 

This cow actually has to go and get milked, so she has to back off a 10-inch curb. She's got to negotiate the divider. Going in reverse on three good feet isn't easy. It's not as easy as on four good ones, is it? So that's tough to watch. Tough to watch, and I get all my farmers to watch lame cows get up and down in their stalls. It's amazing how they'll change stall design after that. This is a freeze frame. This foot is not weight-bearing, and all the weight at the back end of the cow is being channeled through a very small cross-sectional area. That's what happens on a mattress as a cow gets up. It's absolutely fine for a non-lame animal. 

She gets up and down 12, 13 times a day, every hour, not a problem. Young animals, not a problem. Lame cow? Older cow? Sore foot? This is a problem. And what the sand gives us, sand gives us the cushion, traction, and support that enables cows, even with sore feet, to get up and down and maintain their rest and recover from things like lameness, those lesions that we saw. So resting behavior is different on a loose bedding system such as sand than on the rubber crumb mattress that we thought were the future of our dairy industry. The act of rising and lying down is hard when you're lame. And we ask a cow in a mattress barn to do that more, do it more frequently than in a sand barn. So we've got a problem here. And what we think is the problem, is that once you get lame in a mattress barn, you stay lame. You don't rest and recuperate and we believe that's the case. 

Here's some data from Finland to help support that. And this is actually a comparison of sand bedding with straw in free stalls, rather than a mattress. But these cows at the start of this 21-week period were equally lame. This is, again, a number that reflects a lesion score. And after 21 weeks on sand, the cows on the sand bedding had recovered. The hoof lesions had improved, the score was lower, and on straw, they were the same. They were just as lame as they were before. So we think sand helps cows rest and recuperate. We've taken that message to the dairy industry and in 2010, I can say that we've reversed the trend. That we now have more sand bedded facilities going in than we have mattresses. 

And with our old mattress barns, what's been phenomenal is to be able to take this information to the US dairy farmer and for them to embrace it and say, "Okay, I can change this." And we can take mattresses off platforms and we can put fiberglass pipes with bedding retainers, or we can put angle irons. This is a -- angle iron bolted to the back of the stall with sand on there. Or we can just plain old landscape timber bolted on the back of the platform and putting sand over the top. Some farmers have got cutting blades and actually cut the concrete platform out. So they've taken the mattress, cut a platform, and filled the area with sand. And in some cases, they've taken the whole structure apart. This is a six year old facility with 2500 cows in it, 2500 stalls. And they were sick of dealing with lame cows, sick of dealing with cows that weren't doing well. They'd put rubber on floors, they'd done everything except the stalls, and so they took these old stalls, they got rid of the loops, they got rid of the mattress, they dug out the platforms, they re-poured the curbs, they put deep sand in. They changed the loop design, they made the stalls bigger to accommodate larger cows, and you can see this area here has been remodeled. 

As we go outside the barn, you can see in the overhang area here they've built out so our bigger cows can have more lunge space as they get up and down, so they can lunge more easily. And the results have been nothing short of phenomenal. This is the blue line of the rolling herd average milk, the average milk that a cow produces in a year on a typical farm. This is one of the farms that we remodeled back in the start of 2007, end of 2006. They were a phenomenal farm back then. This is a 2000 cow dairy, averaging 29,000 pounds of milk per cow. We've gone up from 29,500 to 32,500. We put 3,000 pounds of milk on the same cows. 3,000 pounds of milk per cow per year. And the story is even more interesting than that because these are what we call mature equivalents. 

The red line and the black line are meant to be comparable between age groups. And the black line are the young cows, the first lactation heifers. And the red line is the older cows, the mature cows. They should be equal. And what we found is, before the remodel, that there's a huge disparity. The younger animals are doing far better than the older cows. And what we're suggesting is that the older cows aren't doing very well because they're lame. And as this barn transitioned to sand, as we've seen over this period, as they put 3,000 pounds of milk on, that milk has come from the older cows. The older cows that stay in the herd, that stay healthy, that aren't lame, and now look where the red line is. It's better than the first lactation heifers. 

It's exceeded where the heifers were. So we call that the lameness gap. We're closing the lameness gap with improved stall design. And overall, if we look at the economics of that kind of conversion, if we look at milk and lameness prevalence and somatic cell count, which is a measure of other health, turnover rate, which is the proportion of the herd removed each year, and mastitis. That's worth $400 per cow per year on average. Some people get more, some people a little less. But $400 per cow per year is a big deal. That's a lot of money. Other aspects of cow comfort. We really focused in on stall surface, and they've done a lot of improvements in our industry to push more towards sand bedding. 

But let's take a look at a few other things that we've looked at over the years. We're in the summer and you may have noticed it's a little warm outside. And what we've noticed is that hoof trimmers and veterinarians see a lot of sore footed cows in September and October. We see a lot of lame cows in the late summer months. And there seems to be a seasonality to that. So we extracted data from a farm that we visit regularly, a 450 cow dairy, and we got the mean ambient temperature from the local weather station for a 5-year period. No evidence of global warming here, looks pretty much the same, hotter in the summer, cooler in the winter. But what we also notice is that the red dotted line is the incidence of lameness, of lesions developing on the foot. And you can see it kind of tracks with that black temperature line, that there's a seasonality with this. And there's actually a two month lag. 

The peak in temperature is typically in July. The peak in lameness is September. And as you look at the structure of the claw, it actually takes two months to grow a sole from the -- to the surface of that sole, takes about two months, so there's a sort of biological reason why there might be a lag between something happening in the peak of the summer when cows get very hot and the lameness that results. And if you graph that out, this is mean ambient THI, which is a temperature humidity index, adjusted for humidity, and look at the rate of claw lesion development. There's a very nice relationship. As the temperature goes up, two months later we see more lameness. And so on the very same farm, we got our video cameras out and we said, maybe there is a behavioral reason for this change. And we tracked the same cows through a whole summer period, filming in cool weather and then hot weather to compare their time budgets through the course of the summer. And so I've flipped these time budgets over, and they go from the coolest session we filmed to the hottest session, and so the top area now is lying time and everything else in the stack is the total standing time. And you can see that when cows get hot, they stand more. 

They stand longer. And at the hottest session that we filmed, these cows are now lying down less than nine hours a day, 8.4 hours a day of rest. That is not enough to keep these animals healthy. So when cows are heat stressed, they end up standing more and we can tell that they end up standing more in the alleyways. That's that 4.2 hours there compared to 2.6 in the coolest session. And that's where the fans are and the soakers that we use for heat abatement, to try to cool our cows. They're standing below those cooling devices, they're not lying down. That's more time standing on the structure of that claw, creating the lameness problems that we see later on. Not only that, but when we look at where we fail, where cows heat up when we fail to cool them down, we look no further than the holding area on many of these farms. Where we group cows together in the milking facility. 

We put them all together. They're heat generators. These cows are huge fermentation vats, they're generating lots of heat, and what John Scheffers found, as he did a trial looking at body temperature, relative humidity in the barns in just under 30 herds in California and the Upper Midwest, was that fan capacity in this holding area, parlor throughput, pen stocking density, and fans over the resting area were these key steps that we needed to make sure that we had in place to limit the heating up effect that was occurring on these farms to minimize the heat stress and improve heat abatement. The other thing I want to mention is that we often look at the fresh cow, a recently calved cow, and focus on diseases like matritis, related to the uterus after calving, or milk fever, which is a metabolic condition caused by the dramatic production of milk at the time of calving. We view those as fresh cow diseases. What we haven't done up until now is viewed lameness as a fresh cow disease, and that's one of the messages that we're trying to put forward now. And so we've taken our behavioral work and looked at the transition period, which is a period three weeks before and three weeks after calving. A very critical time in the life of a dairy cow. And we've looked at locomotion scores, and we've captured those 16 days before to 16 days after calving to 37 to 60 to 89 days, on a farm near us in Dane County, an 800-cow dairy with mattress free stalls, and we tracked 57 cows, and we looked at their behavior, we looked at their lameness, and we looked at their metabolic status through that period. And what we found, that in the first lactation heifers, they started off pretty good before calving. 

Over 80% of them have a locomotion score of 1. They walk really nicely, very well, no sign of lameness. But by 37 days in milk, half of them show some degree of abnormality. So lameness is a fresh cow disease for a first lactation heifer because there are some structural changes occurring around calving time that influence the structural integrity of the hoof. And that predisposes them to lameness in early lactation. But lameness is a fresh cow disease for another reason, and that's because when we look at the mature cows, the older cows, 80% of them are walking abnormally. 80% of them have some structural problem with the foot, some degree of lameness. Half of them on this farm were noticeably lame, had a limp. And these cows have to get through the transition period, too. It's not surprising that they might have some more challenges than a cow that is healthy and not lame. 

So technology has moved on over the last few years, and now instead of watching videos, we can strap a little mercury switch to the leg of the cow and track lying and resting behavior remotely and download that information into a computer and summarize a lot of the data without spending hours and hours watching video. Now, that's fun, but when you want to do research and speed the process up a little bit, these things are rather much more fun. So I'll put this slide up to measure normal transition behavior. So this is 16 days before calving to 16 days afterwards, and the center dotted line is the point of calving. Now, what we see is, the blue line is the resting time, and the cow rests for just under 14 hours a day as she approaches calving and loses about three hours. She lies down less as she approaches calving with a little bit of a recovery after calving for about a week, and then she settles down to baseline. And you can see the baseline on this farm is only ten hours a day. It's not enough. It's not enough. Why does that resting time decrease? Well, cows are getting ready for giving birth. 

It's an uncomfortable experience, and what they're doing is they're having shorter lying bouts. You can see the bouts change from about 70 minutes down to 40 or so, 45 minutes. So they're having shorter bouts and more of them. It's the green line. You can see the number of bouts is increasing. So they're having more shorter bouts as they show this discomfort around the time of parturition. That's what we believed to be normal behavior for our dairy cows. They're on a maternity pen with a spacious, bedded pack and straw for the four days around calving time. And on this farm, they're on mattress stalls on either side of that period. But we, again, looked at lame cow behavior. 

So now the colors aren't different behaviors, they're locomotion scores again. So the blue line is our normal non-lame cows, and the green line are our lame cows, moderately lame cows with sore enough feet that you should be able to see which leg is lame. And so what we noticed through the transition period, which was different than what we'd seen previously in lactating cows, is that when we don't take cows out of the pen and milk them, the lame cows actually lie down more. They were resting for longer, for two to three hours longer than the non-lame cows. And there's a bigger blip afterwards. For that week after calving, they really go through a very impressive recovery period where they're doing an awful lot of resting, these lame cows, in that postpartum period. So that's lying time. That's the total hours a day. Let's look at the number of bouts that they take. And what we see here is that compared to the blue line, which is the normal, non-lame animals, the lame cows have a dramatic increase in the number of bouts. 

So that normal behavior that we saw is actually lame cow behavior. It's the lame cows that are taking more bouts. It's the non-lame cows that, well, they show a slight increase, but not as dramatic as we see in a sore-footed cow. These animals are really uncomfortable. They're getting up and down a lot, 25 times a day. Double the normal number of bouts that we see in lactating cow behavior. And that got us to thinking about the physiological processes of pain. There's a concept called wind-up, or hypersensitivity, or hyperalgesia, where a source of pain in one area increases the response to pain in another. And so I'm suggesting that cows with a sore foot that already have a focus of pain, feel the pain of birth more than the non-lame animal. And we perhaps should be looking at how we're housing and managing non-lame and lame cows around the time of parturition a little bit more closely, and perhaps using nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories as pain controllers and different facility designs to cope with that difference in behavior. 

Does it have an effect on the cow other than behavior? Yes, it does. If we monitor beta hydroxy butarate, which is a metabolite which shows how much fat the cow is mobilizing in early lactation, and too much BHBA is a sign of ketosis, which is a metabolic disease that puts the cow at risk for twisted stomachs, displaced abomasum, and other production related diseases. We found that our moderately lame cows had much higher levels of BHBAs in their blood than the non-lame cows. These cows are lying down recovering when they should be eating. When they should be at the bunk eating, they're resting and recovering more, and getting themselves into further trouble, getting themselves into metabolic disease problems. So that's the science. Science is fun, but without communication you can't do a lot with it, and what we've really focused on is working with some commercial partnerships. I can't get big USDA grants to look at lameness in dairy cows, to do the kinds of things that we've done with video cameras and data loggers and so on. So what we've done is got a lot of commercial companies interested in what we were doing, and given them something in return for helping us fund our program. So we worked with a local dairy herd improvement association to improve record analysis for farms, and we have reports that dairy farmers receive that we've designed. 

4,000 dairies in the state of Wisconsin. We've worked with Alta Genetics to provide troubleshooting tools to look at reproductive problems. With Pfizer to look at transition problems. With Vita Plus, a local nutrition company to help them service their clients. And with regard to lameness, we've worked for about seven years now with Zinpro corporation, which is a trace element company, but we've developed a program called FirstStep, which is an information resource for farm consultants and farmers where you can print out, it's a searchable database, so you can learn about lameness. But it's also a database that you can investigate a herd, record information, enter the data into a computer, and get a printed-out report that shows where the farm is failing relative to the standards in the industry. And so that's freely available in our industry now. Most recently, we're developing a program to improve housing. We called it the Dairyland Initiative, for obvious reasons. It's centered around a website where we store a lot of the information, but it's really a process that we're trying to include not only the farmers, but also the builders and the lenders and the other consultants in the industry so that we can develop a program whereby everybody's on the same page. 

We're moving forward, building better facilities, and insuring the well being of the cows in them. And so we've just received funding form the Goldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, so we're pretty excited about this going forward. In one place, we're developing not engineering standards, but biological standards for what cows need out of the environments that we put them in to improve their production and well being. We're putting partial budget tools to help the lenders understand the payback of what we're trying to do with design that may in some cases cost more money up front. But if we save cows and improve productivity in the future, those loans get paid back, rather than default. Farmers can look at floor plans and look at virtual tours of other farmers' improvements, of other facilities that have done it. This is a brand new facility in Dane County, a new pre-fresh area where cows are housed prior to calving. And this is one near Fond du Lac, where we've created comfortable sand stalls and socially stable groups where we reduce the movement of animals through different groups as they go through the transition period. And hopefully we've got places where cows are clean, dry, and comfortable, lie down for at least 12 hours a day, not only the non-lame cows, but the lame cows as well. Where cows can rest and recuperate. 

So I'm going to leave you in a few moments with some performance characteristics of three different herds. And as we move forward in the industry, as we deal with animal activism and concerns over well being, these are the kinds of arguments that we're starting to face. Herd A is a smaller herd, 140 cows, that has good control over culling strategies. Very few cows die on the farm, they remove cows because they're perhaps not milking as well as another cow, and their fertility is good, their breeding management is good. Their calf health is good. Their lameness prevalence is excellent, they have good control of lameness. But their fresh cow health, this is a transition cow index, this is an index we've created on our group to measure the performance of the cow in early lactation, that isn't so good. The average is about zero, so it's just slightly negative. And overall, this herd averages 46 pounds per cow per day. So that's herd A. 

Pretty good, pretty good on health and well being, has one startling problem, and that's the somatic cell count. They've had a problem with other health for a number of years. Their cell count is pretty high. Herd B is what we would call a CAFO, a concentrated animal feeding operation. It's a large free stall, it's 2500 cows, and if you're an animal activist, you could visit this herd and find reasons why you would be concerned about the way we're managing cows. This herd has a higher turnover rate. They're certainly losing more animals on the farm than we would like to see. Has a slightly higher death rate. Reproductive performance isn't as good. Calf health isn't as good. 

Somatic cell count's better on this farm, but lameness is horrible. 28% of the cows are noticeably lame. We've got to do better than that. The fresh cow health is also not very good, and yet these cows average 83 pounds of milk per cow per day. 83 pounds of milk per cow, that's a lot of milk. A lot of gallons of milk. So they're being successful in terms of production, but we can raise questions about how those animals are performing on the farm and the well being of those animals in that facility. Herd C is an example of the kind of herd that we hope we're creating here in Wisconsin. This is not your idea of a family farm, even though all three herds here are family farms. So I kind of hate that terminology. 

They have 550 cows, so a medium sized free stall barn. They have excellent control of culling, they have a good breeding program. Their calf health is good, their other health is good, their lameness prevalence is excellent, 6% lame is an elite level. Their fresh cow health is fantastic. They rarely get problems in early lactation. And this herd is averaging 98 pounds of milk per cow per day. It's actually over 100 now. In simple terms, that herd is producing twice as much milk as herd A with the same level of well being, care, in most of the ways that I can look and monitor and say, "We're being successful." Herd A is a grazing herd. It's an organic herd. Herd B is a larger free stall herd. 

And herd C is a sand bedded medium sized free stall barn. Those are the types of herd we're dealing with. And so the question is, should we graze our cattle? Well, can we provide an environment where we remove the barriers and allow these cows, which are amazing creatures, to perform to the level that we've bred them to? And do it in such a way that they're not burning out, they're not lame, they're not suffering, but they don't go out. They don't go outside. I like to think they're lying on a beach with a roof over it. That's the concept that we're putting forth. There are 24 herds currently in the state of Wisconsin that belong to what I call the 30/30 club. They average more than 30,000 pounds of milk per cow per year. That's a lot of milk, folks. And they do it with a turnover rate of 39% or less, basically in the 30s. 

So they have control over the animals they're removing from the farm. They're generally healthy cows. They have spectacular fresh cow health plus 1,000 on TCIs, plus 1,000 points, which is pounds of milk, basically, better than the average. Their somatic cell count is good, their fertility is good. Their cyogenetic mode is very high, so they're breeding using all the technology we have available. And the herd sizes range from 30 cows to 2700 cows. The 30/30 club. And there's a whole bunch of other farms that are just below this group, and they're doing it. And we can visit these herds with our students and they're different. These herds have, I hate to use the term, "happy cows." These cows are confident, they're not lame, they're healthy, and they're fun to go and visit. 

I've remodeled or been directly involved in the top five of the top eight herds. I know they have sand bedded stalls, and stall dimensions and designs that we put forward. And it's been fun to see this as what I believe is our future for the Wisconsin dairy industry. Very good farms that look after their cows that have high production, good economics. But for the most part housed. They have housed facilities. But we do it in a way that ensures that we get it right. That we don't make the same mistakes that we made a decade ago. That we do it to focus on the well being of the animal and improve that going forward. So with that I thank you. 

And many thanks for coming and listening. Hopefully I've managed to entertain you for the last hour. I'd be happy to take any questions. (applause)