Strategies for Reducing Calf Losses: Western Canadian Veterinary Insights
Are you struggling with calf losses? This 90-minute webinar features Western Canadian veterinarians discussing what is actually working on the ground to help prevent the most common causes of calf losses.
This webinar is available for one continuing education (CE) credit for veterinarians and registered veterinary technologists and technicians across Canada. After watching the entire webinar recording, you may take this quiz and score 80% or higher to receive a CE credit.
speakers
- Dr. Katie Waine, University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine Diagnostic Services
- Dr. Allison Pylypjuk, Beausejour Animal Hospital
Key Messages
- Preparation before calving is critical—nutrition, body condition, vaccination timing and environmental conditions all influence calf survival.
- Cow body condition at calving matters, with thin cows at higher risk of weak calves, dystocia, poor colostrum quality and delayed milk production.
- Even more important in extensive grazing systems where calving intervention opportunities may be limited.
- Colostrum intake is one of the most important factors impacting calf survival, disease resistance and long‑term performance.
- Timing is everything—calves should receive adequate colostrum as soon as possible after birth, ideally within the first four hours.
- Dystocia (calving difficulty) significantly increases calf loss, not only immediately but also through higher rates of illness in surviving calves.
- Knowing when to intervene—and when not to—is critical.
- Clean, dry and well‑bedded calving areas lower the risk of scours, navel infections and environmental exposure.
- Weather exposure is a major risk factor in both Western and Eastern Canada, particularly cold stress combined with wet or windy conditions.
- Shelter and site selection matter, as windbreaks, terrain and bedding can dramatically reduce cold stress in newborn calves.
- Have tools and protocols, such as warming boxes, warm water baths and colostrum supplies, on hand at all times.
- Early identification of weak or compromised calves allows for faster intervention and higher survival rates.
- Calf VIGOR scoring helps prioritize which calves need immediate attention.
- Scours prevention starts with the cow, through vaccination and proper nutrition.
- Record‑keeping helps identify patterns of loss, allowing producers and veterinarians to target the most significant risks.
Learn More
- Calving and Calf Management (BCRC topic page)
- Calf 911 Resources (BCRC resource)
- Full Transcript
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Note: This transcript was generated using AI. It has been reviewed for accuracy, but occasional errors may remain. Please refer to the original webinar recording for the most accurate content.
Kristin Thompson
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the final webinar of the BCRC’s 2026 webinar series. Today, we’re going to focus on strategies to reduce calf losses, Western Canadian veterinary insights. My name is Kristin Thompson, and I’m going to be your moderator this evening.
We are happy to be able to put these webinars on through the BCRC’s knowledge mobilization work funded by the Canadian Beef Cattle Checkoff and Canada’s Beef Science Cluster.
Before we get started, I’m going to go through a couple of housekeeping rules. So you will be able to see and hear myself as well as our speakers, but we cannot see or hear you. We ask if you do have any questions, please submit them as they come up through the Q&A tab at the bottom of your screen and we will have a Q&A session at the end of the webinar where these questions will be addressed live.
The webinar is being recorded, and we will be sending out the recording to everyone that registered in about 5 to 7 business days. You can find recordings of all of our past webinars and other great videos on our website, beefresearch.ca, or on our YouTube channel.
This webinar is also available for CE credits for veterinarians and registered veterinary technologists across Canada. So if you identified yourself as a vet or RVT when registering for the webinar, you should receive your certificate via e-mail in the next five to seven days. Remember, you do have to stay for the entire webinar to be eligible for the credit. Credits are also available for past webinars, which are listed on our website. And you can obtain credit by watching the webinar recording and receiving 80% or higher on the associated quiz. For more information on CE credits, please visit beefresearch.ca/ce-credit. This page provides details on how to receive credit for both live and recorded events, as well as some frequently asked questions.
If you have any further questions or have not received your certificate within a week of the live webinar or completion of the quiz, you can contact Dana Parker, the BCRC’s Veterinary Collaboration Specialist, whose contact information is up on the screen.
On our website, we have a number of different resources to assist Canadian beef producers with calving season. It includes A detailed calving and calf management topic page, which has everything from preparing for calving, managing calving seasons, cow care before and after calving, as well as newborn calf care and management of calf hood diseases.
Other resources include or range from written articles and infographics to videos and how-to guides.
One of our most popular resources is the Calf 911 series. This series includes videos, articles, and guides covering topics from tube feeding practices, colostrum management, calf resuscitation, dehydration, calf vigor scoring, respiratory acidosis, and how and when to intervene with a difficult calving.
We are very excited to soon be releasing a video and guide on managing hypothermia as well.
To remain updated on these and learn about other new resources, you can subscribe to our mailing lists, and there is a link that I’ll put into the chat shortly.
Now, without further ado, we have two very exciting speakers for you this evening who are ready to share their thoughts and to answer your questions.
I’m going to introduce our first speaker, Dr. Katie Waine, and invite her to share her screen while I introduce her.
Dr. Waine grew up in southern England, where her family raised dairy beef calves. She graduated as a veterinarian from the University of Bristol and spent five years working in clinical veterinary practice before completing a PhD and further training in farm animal pathology at the University of Nottingham. In 2023, she moved to Canada and currently works as an associate professor in veterinary pathology at the University of Calgary.
With that, I will turn it over to you, Katie.
Dr. Katie Waine
00:04:11
Thank you, Kristin. Good evening, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us today.
So I’m going to start the talk on strategies for reducing calf losses with a Western Canadian insight. Big thank you to BCRC for hosting these webinars and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you all today. The plan for this evening, I’m going to start off by talking about what calf losses look like today and what’s considered normal. I’m then going to go through a little bit about abortions and the most common causes of pregnancy loss. I’m going to talk briefly on how pre-calving nutrition, especially under drought, sets calves up for success or failure. I’m also going to talk a little bit about the impacts of dystocia on calf survivability. And finally, I’ll finish with the role of cow vaccination programs in reducing losses.
And then I’m going to pass over to Dr. Pylypjuk, who is going to talk about tips to improve calf survival and also some case studies.
Calf losses can obviously occur at any point, whether that’s from failing to get the cow and calf in the 1st place all the way through to those unfortunate losses of animals the day before they head off to the auction mart. But this evening we’re going to be focusing on those early stages, so through from time of conception through to dealing with those newborn calves.
Some of this information will hopefully be useful this calving season, but some of the things might be things for you to consider as you prepare for next year.
So what are normal losses?
I’m sure many of you have either very kindly taken part in the Canadian Cow-Calf Survey or seen some of the results. And these figures that I’ve got considered to be kind of normal loss are average figures from across Canada taken from the Canadian Cow Calf Survey 22-23.
Open rates in cows average across the country is about 7.5% for cows and 11% for heifers. Abortion rates, 1% in cows and about 1.5% in heifers. Calf loss within those first 24 hours of life, cows sit at around 2.2% while heifers are closer to 3%. And the calf losses after 24 hours for cows about 2.5% and heifers get closer to 3%. And that total calf loss from birth to weaning for cows is just under 5% as a Canadian average and for heifers is just over 6.4%.
There are quite a few different suggested benchmarks out there, and I’ve taken these from a study by Dr. Waldner. These benchmarks are based on the top 25% of herds from this study in Western Canada. So if you want to aim for some good levels at 25% of producers are achieving, you want to be aiming for less than 5% of cows and heifers to be open at preg check stage. Less than 1% of calf losses within that first 24 hours of life, and that’s for cows and heifers. And less than 2% calf loss after 24 hours for cows and less than 1% loss for heifers. So these are some of the things that you can start to aim towards.
Risk factors for losses in Western Canada, obviously, there are some extreme weather conditions that can happen, whether that’s the heat in the summer that might have the potential for heat stress in cows, or the cold and snow in the winter. We also see some very dramatic storms moving through here. And there’s obviously also a big risk of ongoing drought.
That’s before we even get on to things like predation, infectious diseases, which are obviously going to be a risk for any cattle herds in any part of the world, and the same for the risk factors associated with the difference between calving heifers or calving cows.
So, take home messages for normal losses. Keep good records. It doesn’t matter how you keep them if you’re able to record what you need to record and you can go back and access them. And that might not just be this week or next week, it might be in three years’ time or five years’ time. So find a way that works for you and then you can work on improving what you’re doing. Some losses are expected and these are likely to be higher following droughts. And of course, consult your veterinarian if you want to talk about how your figures look this year and what you might want to aim for in the future.
Moving on to talk about abortion and stillbirth. There’s a huge number of causes of abortion and stillbirth in cattle. So here I’ve got listed on the left-hand side infectious causes, and these include a range of bacteria, viruses, and parasitic causes. But there’s also non-infectious causes, so things like stress, nutritional deficiencies. We see occasional sporadic genetic or congenital abnormalities. And then a major cause of stillbirth in cattle is going to be problems at calving with calves getting stuck during dystocia.
So just to share some of the data from the Diagnostic Services Unit lab here at the University of Calgary, we do see a range of those causes that I listed on the previous slide, including the bacterial causes, viral causes, and congenital abnormalities.
You’ll notice that the bar for abortion undetermined is quite high, and this is fairly common across diagnostic labs. We usually see about 50% of samples submitted for abortion or stillbirth. We don’t manage to make a definitive diagnosis. And there’s a number of reasons for that I’ll discuss a bit later. But when we haven’t been able to make a diagnosis after extensive testing, it can still be really useful because it can help us rule out possibilities.
Risk factors for abortion and stillbirth. Again, some of this is taken from information from a study that Dr. Waldner did.
So, if you’re a replacement heifer, if you’re an older cow, a thin cow, or carrying twins, there’s a higher risk that the calf might be lost before calving. The same is also true if you are a cow that had severe dystocia last year.
So, problems with calving, if there was prolapse of the uterus, retained placenta, aborted last year, or if the calf died within an hour of birth. If cows have had a problem the previous year, they’re at a higher risk for losing the calf the next year.
Other more general causes can include buying in cattle or poor security, which might increase your risk of infectious diseases, which can lead to calf losses.
If there are wildlife around, poor feed quality, leading to poor nutrition and poor body condition score of these cows.
Lack of vaccination, so again, less protection against some of these infectious diseases that might cause abortion.
Any cause of management or environmental stress on the herds.
And then the risk factors for stillbirth are going to include things like poor bull selection. So, if these calves are too big, if the heifers are bred too small, or if there’s late intervention at calving. So, if a calf does get stuck and it’s a little while before anybody can get there to assist, that’s going to increase the risk of stillbirth losses.
What can we do if we see an increased number of abortion or stillbirth cases in your herd?
We can certainly do some investigations and it’s worth talking to your veterinarian to send some samples off to the lab. The first thing that’s really important to remember is that some of the diseases that can cause abortion in cattle can also cause disease in people. So just handle these samples really carefully. Make sure you wear gloves, wash your hands properly. These types of samples shouldn’t be handled by immunosuppressed people or pregnant people. Just be really careful with them because usually at the point that you’re handling them, we’re not going to know what the cause is if you’re submitting samples to the lab,
Ideally, the fetus and the placenta is going to give us the best chance of trying to get a diagnosis, and ideally as fresh as possible. And I appreciate sometimes that can be really tricky, but having both of those things in as good a condition as possible is going to massively increase the chance that we’re going to be able to get a diagnosis out of those samples for you.
So I mentioned before that in about 50% of cases, abortion samples or stillbirth samples submitted to the lab, we don’t manage to reach a diagnosis. Sometimes this is because we don’t have all the samples that we need, so we really commonly get samples where the placenta hasn’t been included, and that can massively reduce the chance of us getting a diagnosis. Often these samples have been eaten by something. If they’ve taken out all the organs of the calf, that’s going to leave us with less things to look out and less things to test.
Sometimes the testing’s incomplete, so whether we haven’t got the correct samples that we need, or perhaps we’ve done all the initial necropsy and histopathology, and people are maybe less keen to send off additional testing that’s going to come with additional cost.
And sometimes there’ll be causes of abortion or stillbirth that we can’t identify on the necropsy or on the additional testing.
Take home messages for abortion. There are things that we can do to help prevent or reduce the risk of these calf losses at this stage.
Vaccination can be used in cows to prevent certain causes of abortion.
Keeping a close eye on body condition score, trying to make sure that cows are not too thin and not too fat.
Reducing stress on the herd in general.
And making sure that you are on top of things like biosecurity, quarantining and testing new animals to reduce the chance of you bringing in a disease that might lead to abortion losses.
There’s a couple of different figures out there for when to consider investigating. So when more than 1% of cows are bought is a figure that’s commonly used. Some people prefer to investigate any abortion. So they like to get in there early on when things start happening to start trying to get a diagnosis and or to rule out some of the possible causes.
And please just remember to take care when you’re handling these tissues and these materials because some of the diseases that cause abortion in cattle can cause disease in people. So please just remember to wear gloves, wash your hands and try to wear protective clothing.
I’m very quickly going to talk about pre-calving nutrition. I certainly don’t have time to go into this in detail, and I would likely be the wrong person anyway. But I did want to talk about pre-calving nutrition, like for example, as we might see during drought years. And I’m going to start by talking about it in slightly broader terms and use it as an example of stress on the developing calf.
Poor nutrition of the cow is a stress on the fetus, so on that calf that’s inside the uterus. And any stress on the cow can affect the development of the placenta and of the calf. So, it certainly can have those very short-term effects while that calf’s in the uterus and at the point that calf is born. But maternal stress around breeding and pregnancy can also have much longer-term effects on calf health, production and reproductive performance way off into the future.
There is a large amount of research happening at the moment across multiple places, looking at something called fetal programming. This is the idea that the environment that the calf experiences when it’s in the womb can program how its organs, metabolism, immune function, and physiology function throughout life.
This diagram is from Dr. Hernandez, who is a beef veterinarian researching fetal programming here at University of Calgary. If we take poor nutrition, for example, like we might see during a drought year, as an example of a stressor, we can see that it can impact the organ development of the calf, so the liver, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the body composition, so the bone, muscle and fat, all those things that are going to be really important at the point that animal comes to being slaughtered and the immunity and metabolism of the developing calf.
This not only affects, for example, the organ development and birth weight and size of the calf, but it can go on to have much longer-term impacts on that animal throughout its life. And having a calf born a normal weight doesn’t mean that everything has been fine throughout the whole pregnancy. So, if there’s stress on the cow in very early pregnancy or around conception, it might affect the organ development of the calf, but that calf might subsequently go on to be born at a perfectly normal weight.
It’s not even possible to tell at that stage that everything was fine throughout pregnancy. So, stress during pregnancy can reduce the time the gut of the newborn calf is open to absorb cholesterol antibodies. At that point, we’ve got a newborn calf, we want to make sure we’re getting enough colostrum into it, which is going to be talked about a little bit later on.
It might be that we’ve already got some things that are hindering how much colostrum can be absorbed by that calf. In terms of the longer term impacts, this stress on the cow during pregnancy can affect the age of puberty of both bulls and heifers.
So those calves are in the uterus, those much longer term effects what age, the age those animals reach puberty, but also it can reduce the sperm quality and also egg quantity in bulls and heifers. It can also impact the ability of a heifer to get in calf and she might go on to produce less calves and therefore might end up being culled earlier. So all these really long-term impacts that might not be seen for two, three, 4, five years can be associated with stress of the cow during pregnancy and the effect that has on the calf. It can also affect the meat quality of the calf at slaughter.
We talked about how the body composition develops with the muscles and the bones. And if this is affected during pregnancy, it might then go on to affect the quality of the meat of that calf once it gets to slaughter.
So more generally, nutrition is often the most important factor influencing reproductive performance. There’s obviously, it’s a huge topic that I don’t have time to go into tonight, but it is going to cover all those important factors, energy, protein, vitamins and minerals, but also don’t forget about water supplies.
In Western Canada, drought is obviously a big concern. And I’ve just pulled up a map from the Canadian Drought Monitor that was from September of last year, just for anybody that hadn’t seen it and make so people can be aware of it. There is also quite a high rate of copper deficiency in beef cows in Canada. So that’s another thing to consider.
Things like vitamin A and vitamin E deficiency can also be more of a problem during drought years. So monitoring is important when we’re talking about nutrition, body condition scoring of cows, not only looking at them from a distance, but also getting hands-on to really have an idea of where they are. Weighing cattle can also be useful, especially in years where feeding is tight, to know how much feed these animals need and be able to make the most out of what you’ve got.
Water and feed analysis is useful and important and is going to give you an idea of what’s happening. Again, it is especially important during drought years when things like sulfur levels can increase in water supplies. And as well as analyzing feed and water, we can also sample the cows so that we know what they’re doing with the feed that they’re taking in.
Blood testing is possible. Liver biopsies can also give us some ideas and taking samples from any stock that you have. So a piece of liver that can be frozen and then sent off in batches to look at trace element levels can also be really useful and just start to build the picture of what’s happening on your property. And then additional feeding and supplementation where needed. And we would always advise discussing that with your nutritionist.
So take home messages.
Poor pre-calving nutrition is a stress on the calf, but it can also have long-term effects on the future reproductive performance and carcass quality of that calf.
It’s not just about the weight of the calf when it’s born, but it’s about things that can happen way off into the future. So plan ahead, monitor body condition scores, weigh cows, analyze feed and water, have a plan for when you’re going to do that and what you’re going to do with that information.
Think about looking at what’s happening within the cow, so blood samples, liver biopsies, livers from dead stock, and you can talk to your veterinarian about that. Consider when you might need to supplement and always consult your veterinarian and your nutritionist.
I’m only going to talk very briefly about the impact of dystocia on calf viability. So everything’s gone well through pregnancy and now we’re at the point of calving.
Kristin pointed to these a little bit earlier, just again to remind you that there’s a huge number of resources online from BCRC. If the calf gets stuck, hopefully you shouldn’t need to get stuck too. There’s lots of things that you can go and look at for help and assistance.
So, the reasons we want to avoid dystocia is because it can have a really negative impact on calf viability.
3 main things can happen if a calf gets stuck.
Firstly, there can be a lack of oxygen, it’s not able to breathe properly.
We can also see metabolic acidosis, which is where the pH of the blood changes, and this can impair the organ function of the newborn calf, which obviously we want to try and avoid.
And finally, we’ve got trauma, so bruising and injury, and all of these things are going to lead to a weak calf. And the problem with a weak calf is it’s going to struggle to stand, it’s going to struggle to feed, and it’s going to struggle to keep warm. And this is going to result in poor colostrum absorption, which is going to increase the risk of disease.
So you’re going to be having to spend more time on these calves if they’ve got stuck at the point that they’re born, but also in those first few weeks of life and possibly beyond. Early intervention is going to lead to better outcomes.
A stuck calf is going to need more attention at the time and into the future.
And think about trying to reduce the possibility of dystocia as far as possible. So thinking about bull choice to make sure that these calves are not going to be too big. Maintaining cow body condition score so that they’re not too thin or too fat. And thinking about how you’re going to observe these animals at calving. So whether that’s moving them in closer, how often they’re going to be checked, whether you can use cameras or drones to check these animals so that they’re not left too long if they do need any assistance.
And finally, I’m going to talk a little bit about vaccination programs. Vaccinations are really useful because they can provide protection against diseases that make the cow or the bull sick at any time. They can also give protection against infectious diseases that prevent the cow getting in calf or cause embryonic loss, abortion or stillbirth, so loss of the calf during pregnancy. They can help to prevent diseases in the newborn calf. And one of the things that’s going to be really important is if we’re trying to prevent diseases in the newborn calf, it’s going to get that protection from the cow.
So the cow needs to be vaccinated at the correct stage. The calf will need to take in enough colostrum, and then the colostrum can provide that protection until the calf is able to protect itself with its own immune system. We’ve also got the possibility of intranasal vaccines at birth for some diseases. And then we can consider vaccination of calves as they get older with a calf vaccination program.
These are just some of the diseases that we can think about for vaccination. So from clostridial diseases, respiratory diseases in the cow and calf, infectious diseases like BVD and IBR, and vaccinations against calf scours as well. And these are not going to be the same programs for every single herd, for every single group of cows. What you do might be different to what your neighbor does, might be different to what their neighbor does.
So the key, I think, with all of this is there is a huge amount of information out there on which vaccines are available.
There is a published core list of vaccines produced by BCRC and others suggesting which diseases should hopefully most definitely be vaccinated against. But again, as always, consult your veterinarian so that you can make sure that you’re picking the right products, the right vaccines, and the right program for your cows and your herd.
And then just a little bit more information from a study. This was done by the vet schools at WCVM and UCVM. This was an expert consensus study where they asked Western Canadian veterinarians for their opinions on which management practices were important. So just in case you needed a bit more convincing about the value of vaccines, there was a lot of agreement that administering these vaccines at various times and various stages and various types of vaccines were either always useful for all herds or very much useful for most herds. So vaccination can provide protection against adult disease, calf disease and diseases that affect the ability of the cow to get in calf and stay in calf.
They can be extremely cost effective in preventing losses, whether that’s during pregnancy or in the early stages of calf life.
Timing is important to make sure you’ve got full protection of the animals that you’re trying to protect, but also some vaccines are not safe for use in the pregnant cow, so please make sure that you have consulted your veterinarian before starting these vaccine programs or if you’re considering making changes.
And that’s the end of my part of this webinar. I just wanted to list some extra information. Of course, the website from BCRC, which has a huge number of resources. And then a huge number of research papers which are available, and I’ve really listed them just to highlight how much research is done in Western Canada on cow calf and beef cattle.
And I’m sure many of you have contributed to these, so thank you for that. And if anybody wants to read a little bit more into these things, the information is either there in the research papers or on the BCRC website.
So with that, I will pass over to on next speaker.
Kristin Thompson
00:27:44
Wonderful. Thank you for that presentation, Katie. Just a reminder to the audience that if you do have any questions, please enter them into the Q&A tab at the bottom of your screen, and we will answer them live at the end of the webinar.
I’m now excited to introduce our next speaker, Dr. Allison Pylypjuk, and invite her to share her screen as I introduce her.
Dr. Pylypjuk grew up on a cattle farm in southern Manitoba and graduated from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in 2011. She practices bovine medicine with a primary focus on herd health and prevention practices at Beausejour Animal Hospital. Currently, she resides in Woodlands, Manitoba, on a 300-head cow-calf operation and an 80-head dairy farm with her husband and three children.
With that, I will turn it over to you, Allison.
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
00:28:36
Thanks, Kristin, and thanks, Katie, for your presentation. I’m excited to share with you guys tonight. Some things that I’ve learned along the way as being a veterinarian, but also as a cow-calf producer myself, just some strategies to help improve calf health success.
When I think about calves and how I’m going to raise strong, healthy calves, there’s three core principles that come to mind. One of them is through maternal factors, the other one is through the calf itself, and then finally through the environment.
And so looking at these with a little bit more depth, when these are all in unison and everything’s working perfectly, we have a healthy, strong calf. Looking specifically at maternal factors, I’d really like to focus on the calving process itself, as well as a bit on nutrition and overall colostrum.
Calf factors that we can improve include the vigor score, which we’ll go into a little bit more, optimizing the immune system as well as nutrition, which mostly comes from mum.
And then finally, with the environment, I don’t know where you guys are located in Canada right now, but in Manitoba, it’s snowing again. So we’ll look a little bit at what we can do in terms of stocking density, weather, and exposure to other diseases.
When I look at those three factors, I want to think about the beef-calf cycle and see when can we intervene.
So, the four core pieces to most cow-calf farms include calving, pasture turnout, weaning, and then finally preg check.
When I think about calving and preg check, those are the two most common areas that we can intervene or have a bigger impact on calf health success.
When I think about calving, we’re going to look at how that calf’s doing when it’s born. We’re going to talk a little bit about colostrum. Udder scoring is one thing that comes to mind that we can probably learn from. And then overall calving area and vaccinations.
When I think about preg check during that time, body condition scoring, as Katie already alluded to, nutrition, a vaccine plan, and as well as a calving plan.
So let’s look at calving.
Why does this matter?
We know just as a refresher that stage one of calving is going to last two to six hours, maybe a little bit longer in heifers. And that’s when she’s preparing to calve. She’s off on her own, that tail’s up, there might be a little bit of mucosal discharge.
Stage 2 is where we have active calving, that cervix is dilated and she’s beginning to push. This should, I know in studies it says two to five hours. I’d like that not to be longer than two hours actually after that appearance of the water bag. And this is the calf is being delivered during this time.
And then finally we have stage 3, which she drops her placenta.
Things to keep in mind, if there is no active process, if that cow is in active labor and there has been no progression for 20 to 30 minutes, or there’s been no progression from stage one, it’s important to reach in and see what’s going on.
If you have a cow that’s in stage one or two labor, I’d recommend checking on her, especially stage two every 15 minutes. But we actually don’t want her to see us doing that because that in and of itself can interrupt. But if there’s been active labor and no progress after 20 minutes or she’s not really progressing out of stage one, it’s important to reach in and have a feel.
Keeping in mind the rule of three, we want to have two front legs and a head or two hind legs and a tail in order for us to be able to pull that cow.
So why does intervening with dystocia matter?
Well, we know when we have a difficult calving and we have low oxygen to that calf, potential for metabolic acidosis or any sort of trauma, it leads to a weak calf. With weak calves, we see poor colostrum intake and absorption as well. This can result in low blood sugars. We can get hypothermia and dehydration, which leads to disease, especially if there’s a reduction in passive transfer. They’re at more risk of scours and pneumonia later on.
So when we look at the calf vigor score, anything less than 20, that calf requires intervention. If that calf is marginal or poor, we need to do something about it. And this can include getting this calf breathing properly. Let’s get it into the recovery position where we’re stretching out those hind legs, reaching ahead those front legs to expand the chest cavity and get it to breathe. This can also include, you know, putting a piece of straw or something up its nose to stimulate a gas.
These calves can be cold and we need to get them warmed up. That can be with a hot box. We can use warm water in a wheelbarrow, something like that, or in a heated room.
And then finally, we need to dry this calf off with a towel. If you’re going to be using calf jackets, those calves need to be dry before that jacket goes on.
And then feeding some nice warm colostrum will also help.
So now that we have this calf, we’ve done the vigorous score and we’ve assisted with any calving troubles that there might be.
How do we optimize this naive immune system? So there’s two major ways. One is through colostrum and the other one is through vaccination.
So why do calves need colostrum?
And I’m sure most of you know this, but just as a refresher, calves are born with a naive immune system. We do not have antibody transfer from the cow to the calf through the placenta. And so what happens is there’s little openings in the small intestine that allow for these large antibodies that have been built by mom, put into the colostrum, into that first milk, that get absorbed lower in the GI tract directly into the bloodstream. And what’s unique about this is these openings aren’t open forever. They’re just open for a short amount of time after that calf is born.
And this goes on to act as passive immunity until that calf can start building its own immune system as it grows older.
So what is colostrum?
We think a lot about the antibody portion, the passive transfer immune system that it receives from mom. But there’s a lot of other things that we can look at as well. So, there’s a really high content of energy and fat that’s in there that helps it. There’s also other things like insulin and other hormones that help with intestinal development.
When I look at that compared to what mature milk looks like, it doesn’t go from colostrum to regular milk just overnight, that takes a few days. So we have, with colostrum, we see, 100 more grams roughly per liter of protein. We see a really high amount of gross energy and fat, and all of these things will help that calf for those first few days of life. So don’t just think as colostrum as its primary immune system, which it is, it also helps with a lot of other things that will help that calf do well later in life.
When it comes to colostrum, there’s three things that we need to keep in mind. We need to make sure it’s getting enough, it’s getting the right quality, and it’s getting it quick enough. And there’s a few reasons why.
So, if we want to look at the y-axis over here, this is serum IgG. This is the amount of antibody that’s going to enter the bloodstream of the calf and act as passive transfer. Over on the x-axis, we have time or hours of birth. So we can see here that as the calf gets older, there’s a decrease in absorption for the amount of antibodies that can go into the bloodstream. So the sooner we get that colostrum in, the better chances that we can have successful passive transfer. This arrow probably drastically decreases even more if you have a calf that’s struggling to stand up and start drinking, has any sort of hypothermia. Those things can also reduce the time that those openings are available in the small intestine to have colostrum antibody absorption.
So, I wish that all cows would be like this and allow calves to nurse this easily. This is a picture of my youngest son with his cow that calved and of course she had twins. So just making sure that they were latching and getting their colostrum.
So in terms of colostrum rules, first feeding we need to see within two hours. And that second feeding ideally within 12.
How do we tell though if a calf sucks? We’ll get into that. If a cow doesn’t have great colostrum or you think that calf’s not sucked, we need to have other colostrum options available.
Okay, so we can have colostrum replacement. This comes in a dried powdered form. The bags look similar, but they actually have different quantities of IgG or protein, that’s antibody that’s in there. And we expect 100 grams for a full feeding. The smaller bags are about 60 grams and those we consider to supplement. So if that calf maybe had some, but not quite enough, that’s when we would supplement with a little bit more.
The key with this is just to watch the water temperature that you’re mixing with. Use according to bag directions. It can be tempting sometimes to use a little bit warmer water because the stuff can be quite thick and maybe doesn’t pass through a tube feeder as well. But we don’t want to use too hot of water because that can actually denature or kill those antibodies.
So again, the three Qs, quantity, 2 liters and two liters at 2 hours and 12 hours. So those are easy numbers to remember. And we want roughly 100 grams of clean colostrum if you’re needing to replace it or supplement as well.
But what do we do if the calf is sucking?
How do we tell if that calf has drank enough?
For me, three things come to mind. And these are the three things that we look for on our farm. One is that quarter needs to be clean. It needs to look like that calf has tried or has sucked on it. The second thing is that quarter needs to be empty. It needs to have a reduction in size in order for us to be somewhat convinced that calf has sucked. And the third thing is that calf looks full and satiated. So we often look a little bit more on the left side. You can look on the right side as well, but that calf needs to look like that abdomen has expanded since it’s fed and that it’s generally laying down, seems worse, seems satiated. That supports the idea that calf is drank. Obviously, there’s other things you can do as well, like have cameras and stuff like that there. But those are the three things that I always look for to determine if a calf has sucked.
So how do we tell if the calf did or not? So there is one thing that we can do. And interestingly, when we were doing our practice session for this, I had done one that morning on a calf that came into clinic. We can actually look at a total protein. So 2 to 7 days after a calf is born, we can actually pull a blood sample and look at the total protein that’s in the serum. And this is how we can check.
If that calf’s total protein, total serum protein is more than 5.5, and that says percent, but it’s grams per deciliter, that is how we know that calf has received enough colostrum. If that number is lower, we consider that calf to be a fail, okay? And so can we do much about it? Not necessarily. But what we can do is keep an eye on that calf and it’s just more at risk of being sick later on in life. The other reason that I would do this is if there’s a bunch of like mis-mothering or if there’s overcrowding, we can definitely see a decrease in the amount of calves that pass passive transfer. So this is one way we can actually check after the fact to see how successful colostrum delivery was.
The other thing to keep in mind is actually udder scoring. And so this is a little bit of a newer concept, but this should be done within the first 24 hours after a cow freshens. We actually score the weakest quarter, so the poorest kind of quarter of the four. And you can record this data to help determine future herd life. So we can use it kind of as a strike against her. If she has a very, you know, balloon shaped or pendulous teeth, those can be often very difficult for calves to latch properly and suck, putting them more at risk of having failure of passive transfer. And we should just have a consistent person scoring these udders. And you can use this again as a trait that you want to select for in your herd just to have udders that are easy for those calves to latch to.
And then finally, calf vaccine. So we said, colostrum is super important. It’s the best vaccine that a calf can get, but we can actually use intranasal vaccines as well to stimulate a different kind of Ig antibody in the calves. So we can use mucosal immunity to protect against things like pneumonia. And this I often just time with tagging. So when you head out to tag, you can do that to prevent pneumonia.
Now if we look at reducing environmental risk. So like I said, depending on when you calve and where you calve in Canada, we want to minimize exposure to the elements. We can do this through sheds, through wind fences, you know, trees, bales, any sort of thing that creates a barrier to wind. We want to provide, obviously, fresh air and bedding. The reason I say fresh air is sometimes that calf ventilation isn’t that great. So elevating the back end or, you know, putting some drilling, some holes out the back just to allow air to pass through. And then daily bedding would be suggested.
And then finally, with stocking density, we don’t want more than, we don’t want less than 100 square feet per cow on a bedding pack, ensuring that there’s also enough water and bunk space available for them.
And this kind of leads me into the idea of the Sandhills calving system, which I would like to talk about. So this can be found on the BCRC website. This Sandhills calving strategy shows a drastic decrease in the amount of scours. And it does this by essentially moving cows that have yet to calve to a different pasture. So you would have the group together, anything that calves is left behind, essentially, and you can do this every one, two weeks, roughly, you move that group into the next pen. And then in two weeks, anybody who hasn’t calved moves into the following pen.
What this does is it minimizes the amount of exposure to young calves are in the group, you’re always moving them to clean pasture. This has been shown to decrease the amount of scours drastically, improve overall animal welfare and decrease treatments.
Some of the things to keep in mind, though, is that it does require several pastures, and perhaps more labor and planning as you’re doing it, but it is an option for farms.
So when we look at turnout, as another touch point for cows, Katie already showed this poor vaccine list. And it’s important that we do this to prevent any sort of abnormalities or potential abortions in those, in the cows and in the calves. And so some of those poor vaccines are for BVD, herpes virus that can cause abortion or potential congenital defects as well as PI calves, which again, we could spend probably a whole night talking about.
But it’s important that we also consider the bulls. We sometimes forget to vaccinate those guys and they can be a carrier of disease as well. And just keeping in mind, this is our shoot from home. Typically, if it’s cold out, we’ll have a cooler, keeping the vaccines, preventing them from freezing. Or on the flip side, when it’s spring turnout and it’s really, really warm out, we want to make sure those vaccines are staying the proper temperature as well.
But again, looking at the core vaccine list and also looking at what diseases your farms might have and what we need to vaccinate against.
So now on to preg check time. So peg checking is a really fun time for everybody. And I often enjoy this being shoot side and talking about all the things going on the farm and fielding some good questions while you’re behind the cow. But body condition scoring is a huge part of preg checking for me.
So we like to know who’s open and who’s pregnant. This is an example of a farm that sorts off anybody who is low body condition score, as you can see in this first pen over here. So coming onto the preg checking chute, anybody who might be open obviously gets sorted off, but anybody who might be lame, lower body condition score.
So 5 out of nine, but less than two really on the five scale.
Anybody who’s an older cow, any replacement heifer, previous concerns or diagnosed with twins, these cows are more at risk and need more support throughout the winter months through extra feeding. So that’s why those animals will go into their own sort pen. And you can see over here, it’s a pretty simple. You don’t need anything fancy to keep these sort of records. And again, you can use them as a reference.
But just looking here, cow number, pregnant or open, and then with her body condition score. So I know Katie discussed it briefly, but just the nutrition requirements I too will touch on just briefly. It’s always really interesting to me to see how much increase a pregnant animal has, a pregnant cow or heifer has in those last trimesters. So I just want to point out here, I’ve highlighted the net energy category as well as the crude protein.
This top group of three, it’s for cows, in the bottom group, it’s for heifers. But I would just like to point out that there’s about a 50% increase in need for net energy for both cows and heifers moving in from the first to the third trimester. And the same thing, almost a 50% increase in crude protein need in pounds per day from first trimester to the third trimester. And we consider the third trimester, the last kind of 90 days before she calves, the last three months. And that’s when we see a huge demand for energy need by the calf. That calf’s growing rapidly and requires a lot of energy.
So this is where I would like to discuss feed testing. And I’m, again, I’m not a nutritionist, but highly recommend feed testing. So I’d like to show you guys here. There are two feed samples. This is the same farm. These feed samples were taken fairly close by. So the fields were close by and they’re both listed as alfalfa grass hay first cut and they were sampled about a week apart. So similar fields, similar type of forage, but we have a 13% protein in one of the feed samples and a 7% in the other. Even though those samples might look the same to the naked eye, they’re definitely delivering a very different nutrition profile. And that’s why it’s really important to test so we can balance rations properly.
Here’s another example of how we can look for it. And I know Katie had mentioned it as well. So this is just a blood sample from a cow. This was actually part of one of the WCVM farms that’s on one of the studies. So the farmer was given this information. We did some blood tests at preg check. And it’s just interesting to see here that this animal was copper deficient and a few of them were. So making a plan for that.
So when it comes to overall nutrition, obviously understand there’s an increased need of demand for energy and protein later in the pregnancy. And it’s important to feed sample. So be aware of what you’re feeding.
TMR minimizes sorting and can deliver perhaps a more balanced nutrition profile. It does come with limitations. Obviously, you should, you probably need to be a certain cow-calf operation size-wise to maybe justify some of the equipment costs. But it’s something that’s an option to keep in mind. You can also preload with minerals. So if you know that you’re going to be low, it’s an option if you talk to your nutritionist to try and maybe preload a little bit in the winter months, because if your pastures are deficient, that’s one way you can maybe carry over them into the fall. And then obviously water sources. I’ll show you a picture later on of severe drought in Manitoba. But essentially understanding what your water sources are, having it checked, if you can have pumped water rather than dugouts is probably preferable, but also a cost to that. So, keep those things in mind.
Scour vaccines often occur at the preg check time. And I just want to talk a little bit about it because I said before, we actually have to give calves colostrum because their moms don’t give them antibodies in utero. So I always want to bring up that, even though…we are vaccinating mom for scours, vaccinating the cow for scours, that vaccine doesn’t actually go into the calf.
What happens though is the cow mounts the immune response to the scours vaccine. She makes it and it goes into the colostrum and then the calf suckles and gets the colostrum in order to receive the scours vaccine. So I think that that’s a really important concept. And that’s why we need to do scour vaccinating far enough in advance of calving, because that cow needs time to mount the immune response and dump it into her colostrum in order for it to be successfully transferred to the calf.
So we’ve kind of gone through those four stages of touch points, I would like to say in the cow calf cycle. Again, with calving, looking at the overall vigor and intervening with dystocia. Colostrum, I can’t stress enough, is probably the most important thing when it comes to calf success. Udder scoring, vaccinating, and really keeping in mind that calving area and what it looks like using, you know, a lot of bedding, having windbreaks, potentially implementing that Sandhills calving system as well to minimize disease. At turnout, we want to vaccinate for those things that are going to potentially cause abortion and minimize that exposure in utero. At weaning, obviously we’re going to be vaccinating too. But finally at preg check, we want to be doing body condition scores along with diagnosing open cows.
It’s important to keep in mind that nutrition and calving plan headed into calving season and then performing any final vaccines that you need. So this is a little bit of my farmer hat on here now as well as well as the vet. But if I just had some tips to give during calving season or leading up to calving season, these would be the main ones that come to mind. So if you are comfortable tube feeding, BCRC has a lot of good information on their website about it.
I would have two tube feeders. I would actually have one that’s designated just for colostrum and I would have one that’s designated for sick cattle. There’s less risk of cross-contamination. Make sure you wash well in between. And having a really, really good tubing technique is very important. There’s calves that I see almost every season that come in with a bit of an esophagitis just because somebody hasn’t quite done it properly. So keep that in mind.
Calving timing. So one strategy is to calve hovers first, just because they’re more at risk potentially of dystocia or mis-mothering or might have a little bit issues with milk production or colostrum. And then it also reduces the exposure to those animals if we use something like a sandhills or a modified sandhills. So depending on what your system looks like, that could be adapted. Nutrition, obviously, like I showed you, feed tests are key. Hay can look the exact same, forage can look the exact same and have totally different nutrition content. Get a thermometer.
That’s really important. So even in older calves to figure out if they have a fever, but in these young guys, diagnosing hypothermia early can help prevent further stress. Appropriate calving intervention. So again, using the resources that we have on BCRC’s website and deciding on when to intervene and how to do so appropriately.
And then have a colostrum plan. So if you are going to start really monitoring if those calves are sucking and getting good transfer and perhaps doing some total proteins, it’s really good to have a backup in place by having some powder on hand in case you’re unsure and need to supplement. Vaccinating both both maternally and providing calf protection.
And then quarantine new arrivals. So this bottom picture over here is actually a bunch of cows that we had purchased on our farm. And I had made my husband quarantine them for three weeks. And we’re lucky we did because they actually were an unvaccinated herd and all broke with pneumonia about a week after. And I shouldn’t say it was bad, but snotty noses and coughing. And we’re sure glad that they didn’t enter our main herd at that time. So if you can quarantine new arrivals.
And then keep vaccine or keep records in general, whether it’s a notebook or you have an Excel file for it, can always be reviewed later on.
And even when everything goes well, this is a picture here of me testing a calf. Sometimes things happen on farms, as everybody knows, and you can do everything right, and you still have to cast a broken leg.
So I’m going to quickly run through one case study. This is back from 2020, but I think had a lot of key points that we can learn from and grow from as producers. So this farm had purchased a bunch of new animals in February of that calving season. So, if similar, maybe out west everywhere, but in Manitoba, we had a severe drought and people were looking to get rid of animals, realizing they did not have enough feed for the winter. This owner was looking to take advantage of some low prices.
Calving began in March and they had the same facilities as the previous year, despite having about 50% more animals. There was a severe scour outbreak in April, early April. About 22% of calves were getting diarrhea between seven days and a month old and were having fairly poor response to treatment. There were vet diagnostics run kind of mid-April, sampled A variety of things and began supportive therapy to the ones in need. And we executed a plan at the end of April where we created based on some of the resources and the results that we had moving forward.
So here’s some pictures of severe drought. Obviously, you can see not a lot of grass growing. Whatever was left, the grasshoppers kind of ate by the end of summer. Dugouts were very low and people were moving cattle quickly because they did not have enough feed to support them. So this is what it looked like in Manitoba kind of mid-summer.
And this is the herd that was struggling. So as you can see here in this picture, they were very overcrowded. That was the main thing that was concerning to me when I came. Cows were dirty. Obviously, not enough bedding was being used. There was a huge variation in body condition score. And like I said, there was not enough bunk space or water space during that time. Animals were very overcrowded. And on diagnostics, this is what we found.
So this is just a microscopic view, but it was actually cryptosporidium was the main culprit in the diarrhea samples. Crypto was a parasite so made sense that they had lower response to antibiotic treatment, but that’s what we were finding. So it was a severe crypto outbreak and a bunch of these calves.
What do we do?
These were the key recommendations. As much as I would like to say it was just one magical thing that we gave them, it absolutely wasn’t. It was a combination of things that we needed to do to get these, to get this herd back in a successful situation.
The first thing was to minimize overcrowding and pen contamination. So I understand not all cases can we just make more space, but we can definitely reduce pen contamination. So they were actually getting cattle out. Anything that was old enough was just leaving that pen. They were going into a bigger area because they didn’t have any other sort of shelter. So they were actually the ones that could handle it.
They moved out of the calving area. And they actually made a second calving site for the ones that were yet to calve just to minimize mis-mothering.
So the one thing I did mention on the previous slide is we were taking total proteins on these calves and lots of them were failing. Therefore, we knew that there was an issue with colostrum. Create a colostrum plan and improve immunity. So we were making sure now calves were actually, that they had to make sure calves were being sucked. And supplementing when necessary. So if there is any uncertainty, those calves are being tubed with replacement colostrum.
And they’re also starting to introduce an oral antibodies. So they’re actually giving first offense boluses at that time just to help.
Increased bedding frequency because we were still limited on space, reducing the exposure was done so just by increasing the distance from the bottom of the pack to the top, and that was done through more vigorous bedding.
And then there had to be communication with all the staff that this is a zoonotic disease. So people can also get sick from it. So we discussed the disease implications with people.
And that’s where we really led into biosecurity. So, you know, disinfecting boots, clean clothes, wearing gloves, especially when treating sick calves became really important. And no more new cows. We told them they couldn’t be buying any more cows that calving season and hygiene, overall hygiene.
So again, separate tube feeders for the colostrum and the sick calves and using actually chlorine dioxide as a disinfectant. That’s one thing that can kill cryptosporidium.
And then finally, for future purchases that they were needing to quarantine anything before being reintroduced to the herd. So it was an unfortunate case, but lots of good learning opportunities through it and just showing that it’s a variety of things that need to happen with correct precision in order to have a successful calving season.
So with that, I will turn it back to Kristin and look forward to the question and answer session.
Kristin Thompson
00:59:50
Thank you, Allison, for that presentation. Lots of great information.
We will start into the Q&A session right away here. So we’ve had a number of questions come in, so I’ll kind of go through those questions for answering.
So the first question that we have is what do you think about Bovi Shield and what happens if we use it every year?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:00:24
Yeah, I can answer this.
So Bovi Shield is a modified live vaccine that protects against BVD and a few other things like BRSV and IVR and that sort of stuff. Some of those core vaccines that Katie had or some of the key antigens that Katie had talked about that we want to prevent against. So it’s a great choice.
There are lots of modified fetal protection vaccines on the market. The important thing to keep in mind with a modified live is that it can cause abortion in a naive animal who hasn’t been exposed to it first, but it is something that we recommend to do for sure every single year.
You want to make sure your modified lives, if you’re vaccine, have that FP claim, the fetal protection, because that really protects them against the BVD exposure in utero. But yes, that’s, we recommend giving that every year.
Kristin Thompson
01:01:16
Thank you.
The next question is, what time frame, or no, sorry, can nasal vaccines be given to calves within hours of birth or should they be done older?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:01:33
Yeah, so that’s also a great question. So yeah, most of the labels say that you can give it at birth. Lots of intranasal, you can actually give it any time. So, but yes, you can give it at birth. We typically just time it with tagging, because that’s kind of when we’re handling them anyway, but it’s not wrong to give it at birth or a few days later. That’s totally fine.
In the event of an outbreak, so say you have an outbreak of pneumonia at some point, you can actually give it to at any time and you can give it to older animals. We’ve done it in, you know, feedlot outbreaks before, stuff like that. You can actually use it. So yeah, it’s a it’s effective.
Kristin Thompson
01:02:15
What timeframe can colostrum be absorbed after the delivery? And I think you had put a graph up there in your presentation.
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:02:19
Yeah, I did. So again, after 24 hours, there’s probably very little to zero absorption left. That said, probably after six would be ideal. That’s the ideal kind of time. The sooner the better. After two, it’s even better. So I would like to say that first one kind of within six is ideal. There’s probably nothing after 24.
But again, if we have compromised animals for any reason, they’re hypothermic, you know, the colostrum is dirty, that sort of thing, it’ll also decrease absorption rates.
Kristin Thompson
01:02:57
Thank you for that.
Another question just on colostrum for you, Allison, is what are your thoughts on frozen colostrum?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:03:05
Yeah, so that is a great question.
So frozen colostrum, if I had to rank how good colostrum was, fresh is always gold standard, then I would say would be frozen and then would be baked. The problem with frozen colostrum, my concern is where are you getting it from?
So I have a couple of beef farms who actually milk out some of their cows to keep and have on hand. They have an old cow, she produces lots of milk, and so they do that. If you are getting frozen colostrum from a dairy farm or something like that, it is critical that you know their disease status. Things like leucosis and Johnes can be spread through colostrum, and so you would hate to introduce that to your farm.
One thing you can do to test the colostrum to see the quality of it, the amount of antibodies, is actually use a Brix test. And so it’s a simple little machine. You can put a drop of colostrum on it and you want it above 24%. Essentially, the higher, the better. That means that’s how concentrated it is.
So sometimes the problem if you’re getting it from, say, a dairy farm is that they give lots of colostrum and that the dilution effect might be there and you might not be getting as much antibody. So I would avoid getting colostrum from other farms, especially if you don’t know their disease status. But frozen colostrum is a good option.
Kristin Thompson
01:04:27
A follow up on that is how long can it be frozen for?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:04:30
Yeah, it can be frozen for quite a while, actually. That’s fine. I would like to point out though, if you’re using frozen classroom, the thawing process is really important. So again, similar to when we were mixing powdered, like I said before, we want to make sure that it’s being thawed slowly over time. And this is you would just put it in a warm water bath, but it shouldn’t be thawed instantly. Never put it in a microwave or anything like that.
Kristin Thompson
01:04:54
Thank you. I’ve got a quick question for you, Katie.
In your presentation, when you were talking about pre-calving nutrition, you mentioned that with drought in Western Canada, vitamin E and A deficiency is quite common in cows.
What impact does this have on the calf or can we tell from the calf whether that cow has a vitamin A or E deficiency?
Dr. Katie Waine
01:05:21
So I guess the problem with drought is that both vitamin A and vitamin E are found in highest levels in kind of green lush pastures. When you get a drought year, you get poor quality forage and the content is not high enough.
So the things that we tend to see with both of them, we can see the birth of sort of weak calves, so calves that are kind of slow to start, slow to stand up, slow to do. We can get things like retained placenta in the cows with vitamin E. We can get neurological signs and things in calves if the vitamin A deficiency is really severe. So it can be a range of presentations. It’s something that we can test both cows and calves for.
So if we are being presented with these weak calves, calves that aren’t surviving, calves that are coming down with things like pneumonia and scour and we might be wanting to look for underlying deficiencies, then we can test for vitamin A and vitamin E and that can give us a clue as to what might be happening. So we can see a range of different things and they can certainly be kind of their immune system can be less, can be not quite as good. And so they’re going to be more prone to secondary things. So it’s something that we’ll often consider when we see other presentations as well as they get a little bit older.
And both vitamin A and vitamin E are found in colostrum. So again, drinking colostrum, absorbing the colostrum is really, really important in these young calves.
Kristin Thompson
01:06:59
Great, thank you.
Question for you, Allison. Could you expand a bit more on preloading minerals pre-pasture turnout?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:07:09
Sure, yep. This would be a concept usually with like TMR fed herds that you might suspect are deficient or have been shown to be deficient on blood or biopsy, liver biopsy samples.
Again, you’d have to work with your nutritionist depending on what your forage levels are, but you would actually feed potentially a little bit more during that time, obviously not wanting to get in a toxic situation or anything like that, but you’d actually kind of give them a little bit more knowing that they’re going to slowly deplete on pasture. So it’s just it’s just a concept.
Kristin Thompson
01:07:51
Next question is, should you consider calving in different pastures each year to reduce disease control? If either one of you wanted to comment on that.
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:08:00
Yeah, sure. You definitely, capping on different pastures would decrease the exposure that you had from the pasture the previous year. So it’s not a bad idea, I suppose, if you have all the space and that sort of thing.
Kristin Thompson
01:08:19
Great, thank you.
And next question is, so you both talked a bit about quarantining and biosecurity practices. And I’m just wondering if one of you could expand on some of the kind of beneficial practices when considering quarantine, you know, how long do you quarantine for? What are you watching for monitoring that kind of information?
Dr. Katie Waine
01:08:46
Yeah, I guess I can start a little bit. Alison can give us a bit more detail about how long people do it here for, but I think it depends on which diseases you might be particularly concerned about.
I think 2 to 4 weeks for quarantine is often the recommended duration, but also it’s really important if you can have the information about where these animals are coming from. So ideally you want to be purchasing animals from, places that where their disease status, where their vaccination status, and then hopefully it means you just have a little bit of an idea about what some of your risks are going to be alongside what you might vaccinate for within your herd and how you can, I guess, deal with those animals on your property. In terms of the ease of quarantining, whether you can have them ideally, you don’t want them in a pen next to your animals, like you want them separate so they can’t have nose to nose contact.
And sometimes that can be quite tricky, but the benefits of quarantining, Alison demonstrated it with her example a little bit earlier, is that if you get those animals in and they go down with disease, you want them to be separate so they’re not introducing it to your herd and then creating a really massive problem. But I’m sure Alison can add a little bit.
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:10:05
That was a great answer, Katie. Yeah, I typically say around three weeks. That’s what I say. Ideal is 4 weeks. If I say four weeks, producers might not do it. So then if I say three and they do two, that’s better than zero. But it’s very challenging. You need the space for it. You need no direct contact with your existing herd.
As previously mentioned, getting a vaccine status on the farm that you’re purchasing from, for sure if they’re coming from an auction yard where they’ve been co-mingled, that’s for sure when you want to do at least the three weeks. And you’d be looking for similar symptoms that you would in any other animals. So snotty noses, coughing, any of that sort of stuff. If they are pregnant, just yeah, watch if there’s any abortions, obviously anything like that.
But just the common things, I don’t expect anybody to be going around taking temperatures on any of these animals. If they’re out in a, in a field or something like that, but watching, you know, are they coming up to eat and are they aggressive at the bunk like everyone else?
Kristin Thompson
01:11:08
Great, thank you for that. Another question is how are you treating newborn acidosis or that metabolic acidosis? Maybe Allison, if you wanted to touch on that.
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:11:23
Yeah, so you can, it depends on the severity. So again, like the vigor score, there’s different levels depending on if they have a supple reflex and that sort of thing. IV fluids, obviously, if they’re really severe, but oral electrolytes is an option as well as sodium bicarbonate, so giving that.
But again, you can work with your vet to come up with a plan with those things. The biggest thing is to decide on how severe it is, but there is oral options that you can use. You don’t have to necessarily go straight to IV if it’s something that’s kind of mid-range, but that’s where you’d look into, you know, obviously oral, like bicarb, something like that.
Kristin Thompson
01:12:01
Thank you.
The next question is, does powdered colostrum have sufficient antibodies?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:12:09
Yeah, so that’s a good question. So, I had shown those couple of pictures where it said like 100 grams on it or like 60 grams. That specifically refers to the antibody level that’s in it. So yes, you can get sufficient antibodies.
The freeze-drying process does change the composition of it a little bit, but it would have sufficient antibody in terms of IgG levels in there as a replacement.
Kristin Thompson
01:12:35
Thank you.
Another follow-up question on that is, what’s the main difference between a colostrum supplement versus a colostrum replacement?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:12:46
Yeah, that’s a good question. And often it’s just the amount of IgG that’s in there. So we know that they need, say, 100 grams for a full feeding. The supplement is if it’s drank and we’re not sure if it had everything, that’s when you do like a 60, just because it’s a little bit less. So, but not too, much. There’s lots of different kinds of colostrum products on the market right now. And so all of them have maybe a little bit of a difference, but the main thing to look at is what is the IgG, what is the antibody level in it?
Kristin Thompson
01:13:16
Thank you.
The next question is, would Triangle be better than Bovi Shield for vaccination?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:13:30
So again, there’s lots of different vaccines on the market. The big thing with modified live vaccines is typically they have better fetal protection. So that’s the one thing you’d be looking for.
But when there’s killed vaccines, if you’re unsure of the vaccine status, or if you have animals that are pregnant, then that’s when we want to use something like a killed vaccine, just so that they have some protection. It doesn’t, depending on the vaccine, maybe doesn’t have as much fetal protection for certain diseases, but we can still use it if we don’t know their vaccine status.
So that I would say, that’s where I would just ask your veterinarian if you can incorporate, you know, modified live versus a killed, there might be a reason that you’re on one rather than another.
Kristin Thompson
01:14:15
Great, thank you.
The next question is going back to vitamin E supplementation. And is there a vitamin E supplement that either of you would recommend?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:14:35
So yeah, vitamins A, D, E, and K are all fat soluble. Typically, if you’re needing to like supplement, that would be done like in an injectable way. Unfortunately, a lot of those vitamins have been hard to come by with some of the drug shortages that we’ve seen. So typically, if that’s how producers are supplementing, it’s usually in an injectable form.
Kristin Thompson
01:15:07
The next question is, dummy calves seem to be, or seem to be becoming more prevalent and seen with fast births. Is there research indicating why, or do you have any thoughts on potentially why that is?
Dr. Katie Waine
01:15:23
This is really interesting, and I don’t know of any research, but it’s not something that I’ve specifically searched for any time recently.
I don’t know, Alison, if you’ve seen anything on this in particular.
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:15:48
Not specifically that it’s like been increasing, I suppose, in terms of just dummy calves in general, kind of like had Katie had said in her presentation, if there’s increased trauma would be a big thing, perhaps if that cow isn’t fully dilated and it was just a tighter pull or something like that.
So, but not specifically that there’s been like an increase recently that I’ve been aware of, I guess.
Kristin Thompson
01:16:02
The next question is, how can you tell if a calf has acidosis?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:16:05
Yep, so that’s a good question. So oftentimes there’s different kinds of acidosis. There’s, you know, respiratory or metabolic.
And so some of those, if they have metabolic acidosis, they’ll have a really, really high respiratory rate. But a lot of those calves will look, they can look similar to dummy calves and be very lethargic and that sort of thing as well.
Kristin Thompson
01:16:27
Thank you.
What are either of your thoughts or experience with dosing of vitamins A, D, and E to cows through their water in the last 60 days before calving?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:16:43
I can’t comment that I have any experience with that.
Kristin Thompson
01:16:53
I’ve got another question here for you, Allison.
So you had mentioned using a kind of warm area for calves. And any thoughts or comments on warm water baths for poor doing calves as well?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:17:11
Yeah, so I, if I wasn’t clear, I think I had mentioned that perhaps I missed that on my slide. But yeah, that’s a great idea if you can do that.
It’s a really good way to get them kind of all-around warm, just keeping in mind to keep them, to get them dry afterwards once you reintroduce them back into the environment, obviously. But I’ve had guys use like large tubs or even like a wheel barrel filled with warm water. Again, just make sure on the temperature. But yeah, that’s a great way that you can that you can warm up calves quickly.
Kristin Thompson
01:17:50
And another question is, I’m wondering if either of you’d be able to comment on some scours prevention strategies pre calving other than vaccination, like are there environment or management aspects that you would recommend for producers?
Dr. Katie Waine
01:18:20
I guess it’s just preparing the environment, thinking about how many animals you’ve got in the space, you want to try and reduce stocking density, make sure you don’t have too many animals all in the same space, that the hygiene is good, that you’ve got plenty of bedding, keeping everything clean and having those calves being calved into a clean carving area.
And I think Alison talked about the moving these animals on when you’ve had a certain amount that have carved so that you’re trying to reduce the kind of contamination of the environment. So then you’re reducing the load on the calf and gives them a better chance of fighting off some of these infections.
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:18:57
I was just going to add, and I guess the cow kind of preparation in terms of good cow nutrition so that she’s going to produce good colostrum. And then if she’s been vaccinated with the scours vaccine, hopefully then you’ve got some good nutrition going into that newborn calf, which is going to help provide the protection.
Kristin Thompson
01:19:17
We’ve got one last question here regarding diatomaceous earth and its use, usability in preventing calf scours.
Any comments on that?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:19:33
I know lots of producers use it and claim that it works and everything like that. Again, I think there’s a lot of other strategies that we can use to also minimize scours.
Kristin Thompson
01:19:47
We’ve actually had one more question come in here on what are your thoughts, or do you have knowledge on feeding baking soda to cattle with salt and mineral?
Dr. Allison Pylypjuk
01:20:00
So the only thing that I would say with baking soda would be like to be giving it to those acidotic calves, but not necessarily adults, adult cattle. Unless there’s, I mean, if they have severe grain overload or something like that, you would probably give them some other things as well, but not as necessarily leading up to like as a preventative or anything.
Kristin Thompson
01:20:20
I think we’ll end off the Q&A session there.
Thank you so much, Katie and Allison, for your wonderful and impactful presentations.
For the audience, if your question wasn’t answered, I would encourage you to reach out to your veterinarian, nutritionist, provincial producer organization, or you can reach out to us on social media.
Thank you again to our incredible speakers and thank you all for spending your evening with us. We hope that you have gained some valuable information that you can bring back to your own operation. This webinar was the final webinar of our 2026 series, and there will be a post-webinar webinar survey link once this webinar is over, and we appreciate all feedback on the webinar as well as for future topics as we plan for the 2027 webinar series.
Again, thank you very much for attending and have a good rest of your evening.