University Place

cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Nigel Cook. He's with the School of Veterinary Medicine. He was born in Birmingham, England, and went to college at the University of Bristol in England. He's a veterinarian. He spent some time at the Royal Veterinary College in London before coming here to Madison. He'll be talking to us about the Dairyland Initiative across Wisconsin. I think it's always a good idea to keep in mind what Walt Disney said, "Remember, it all began with a mouse." And for us here at UW-Madison, at least for the life sciences, I think it's a good idea to remember almost all of it began with the cows. When you think of the Babcock milk fat test, the discovery of vitamins, cold curing of cheese, vitamin D fortification, artificial insemination, Warfarin, even organ transplantation, all these things came out of studies with cows. So it's a long tradition here of doing research to figure out what we can do to make cows more comfortable and more productive. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this. Please join me in welcoming Nigel Cook to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

APPLAUSE

>> Well, thank you so much. Welcome. Thank you for spending your evening with me for the next hour talking about cows. And, as Tom said, one of the main reasons that I'm here today is because of cows. It's still a great place for dairy research. We still have around 1.2 million dairy cows, and we make a lot of cheese in this state. This evening we're going to talk a little bit about some of the advancements that we've been involved in improving dairy cattle well-being and overall herd performance. But as the introduction said, I'm a professor in food animal production medicine. A particular focus on, obviously, dairy cattle, working in the veterinary school, and as I consider what we do, we have a highly integrated program which at the core involves educating the next generation of veterinary students. Our particular job is to make sure that we have a good supply of food animal interested students ready to go and serve the dairy industry. Our involvement really is in herd medicine and going out to farms, and that teaching experience also puts us in ready contact with our dairy producers that ask us a lot of questions that frequently we don't know the answers to. And that feeds our research program and the kinds of questions we try to answer with some field based research. And, really, the focus of the evening is really our outreach efforts. The best science published in the best journals will do little to improve things unless we tell folks about what we're learning and facilitate change. And I think as you look at the roots of the University of Wisconsin with the Wisconsin Idea, I think sometimes we forget that, that outreach is an extraordinarily important part of what we do in the university, and I think we do it well in our group and I'm really delighted for this opportunity to share that with you. I'll talk a little bit about the partnerships that we've been able to create and the impact that we've had on our industry. I work in an industry that's under close scrutiny. Really never in the history of food production in the US has so much attention been paid to the way that we produce food. A number of novels, films, editorial pieces, and there will be grains of truths in many of these things, but there will be distortions as well. And I think it behooves someone like me who works with the industry and works within the industry to try to understand people's concerns and try to work to meet those concerns. And in some places just better explain what we're doing, but in others realize that we have to fess up and own up to some of the practices that we need to take a closer look at and change. I think when we read these kinds of pieces or watch movies about food production and you look at dairy cattle, the expectation is this is a cow that was built to graze. And so the concerns very much stem from our perception that this is a grazing cow and this is its natural state. This was a picture I took out in New Zealand. This is a mob of 400 cattle munching grass, and it is a very pleasurable experience just to sit in a field and just listen to the cows munching away on grass. That's an amazing thing that a dairy cow does that turns something that's almost completely useless to a human being and generates in a large fermentation vat nutrients in the form of milk that is still a wonderful food for our consumption. However, as the dairy industry develops, really across the world, and we see facilities like this, I think as the general public arrives on a farm that looks somewhat like this, they believe that that's a very unnatural state. And this confinement housed dairy system certainly comes under scrutiny, and it's beyond our expectations and it makes people feel uncomfortable when they have little experience of it. I think if you look at the literature, if you look at people's concerns, if you look at the data, you can find good reason for some concern. And a focus of mine over the last few years has been the lame cow, lameness. Animals with sore feet, with a trauma to the hock and hip area here. You can see this animal doesn't look very good. This is a major welfare problem for us, and some surveys suggest that lameness rates are increasing as we move towards larger confinement housed dairying systems. As cows produce more milk, we see more cows like this, and that's not a particularly good sight or a good situation for either the cow or anybody else involved in the dairy industry. And I think that's coupled with the realization that although we drive around and we see lots of those little red barns, you also realize that there are large buildings outside those little red barns. So here's one. This is my hood in Waunakee, just at the top of Pheasant Branch Hill looking out here. A lot of friends farming here. So there's a free stall barn and has the little red tie stall facility. And free stall barns are generally larger. They generally involve milking cows in parlors rather than in the stall that we've traditionally seen. And the cows are free to move between stalls in a feed bunk. And the realization from this 2010 survey is that although there's a lot of little red barns, 77% of our cows actually live in free stall facilities now, not in those little tie stall facilities. So just moving on to our outreach efforts, we made a commitment, actually when I last did one of these evening meetings we just launched the Dairyland Initiative program, and we saw the need to try and improve housing and provide better information for farmers. That had been the focus of 10 years of research and really drove a significant outreach effort. So we created this program, the Dairyland Initiative, and it's just survived its fourth birthday. So I'm glad to say it's growing. It's never had more users, and one of the folks that helps run the program, Courtney Halbach, is in the audience tonight. So our commitment was basically to make sure that every farmer building a new facility had access to the best information possible to make the most informed decisions. Ultimately, producers can build what they like, builders can build what they like, but I wanted to make sure they do it with full disclosure and full information. So this is a restricted access website. You have to sign on to utilize it. We chose the title the Dairyland Initiative for obvious reasons. This is America's Dairyland. And that commitment was really with the realization that intensive agriculture is likely here to stay. I don't see that we're going back to the pastoral times of the '50s because the gorilla in the room is really this. This is the stuff that kind of keeps me awake at night. That we passed seven billion people on the planet just last year, I believe, and we're heading inexorably towards nine billion people. And those people on this planet are going to need to be fed, and somehow we're going to have to produce the feed necessary to do that. And I believe we will. I believe those of us that will be around in 2050 will see that because the same arguments were made in 1950 when there were three billion people on the planet, and we couldn't possibly imagine ever feeding six billion. And the efficiencies of agriculture and the steps we utilize, utilizing science and the best available information we have, I believe will meet that goal. I also do it because we're also right now better able to understand the needs of the cow. And this is a study done in 2009 by colleagues in British Columbia basically looking at the preference of the cow. They gave the cow a free stall barn with comfortable stalls to lie in, but they also gave them pasture access and then basically studied those cows over several weeks over a variety of range of temperatures and environmental conditions, and really asked the cow, what do you prefer? And this graphic shows you an average day and the percentage time on pasture. And we really shouldn't have been surprised that dairy cattle are fickle things and they chose to do both. They chose to be outside during the night, and you see 80% to 100% of cows out at pasture during the nighttime hours. But equally they very strongly preferred to be inside during the day. So they utilized the housing facility during the daylight hours. And that's been repeated multiple times now, and even when we've made the inside area somewhat uncomfortable by overstocking it, so making animals actually compete for those resting places, they still prefer to be inside the facility during the day and outside at nigh. So I think where I see a future is that I hope what we end up with is that we end up with utilizing the remarkable abilities of the dairy cow to adapt to a variety of different environmental circumstances. And wherever we are, if grazing is a great thing to do and if you're certainly in the south island of New Zealand, it's a perfect place to graze cattle, as are places in Uruguay and Chile and so on. If you're a Wisconsinite, I still hope that we get to visit little red barns and we have cows in comfortable tie stall facilities. But realize that in many climates the free stall facility, a large one that you see there, may be the best form of housing. And in most of these systems, even grazing herds, you can't get around without housing the cows at some time during the year. And grazing systems themselves are also challenging, particularly in our climate where it gets very hot during the summer and very cold during the winter, because grazing cattle are exposed to heat stress and flies in situations where shade is lacking at pasture. And in these grazing herds, we do have challenges getting the cows to and from the milking center from the pasture. This is an Uruguayan herd where the cows are walking along a particularly rough track that was difficult for them to negotiate because of a lot of rains. So, with that commitment, we set out to help our dairy industry build better facilities. And part of the Dairyland Initiative was a resource living on a website, but also a lot of experiences around a table with the producer team, a nutritionist, the builder, the veterinarian with vested interest in making this facility a success and being able to have those experiences and realize new facilities. We've also taken it upon ourselves to give opportunities to others to learn some of the things that we've learned, and we've set up a workshop series. We've had over 400 people trained through this program, the Dairyland Initiative workshops. Smaller groups, 30-40 people in a room given the task of designing calf facilities, dairy cattle facilities, and we have a presence on social media as well, as everybody else does. So the question for this evening is, can we build and manage confinement housed free stall dairy systems that achieve high performance and excellent well being? Can we get the milk production we need to feed the population and look after the cow? And as a veterinarian, I guess I'm used to looking at patients, and over the course of my years, I've gone from cows being my patients to herds being my patients and now the building is the patient. And one of my friends, the owner of this facility, always reminds me that there are exactly the same number of cows in each one of these barns. One was built in the late '90s, and the other was built around 2006 using our recommendations and designs. You have to have some principles when you set out. So our principles were up on our website. We wanted to try to keep groups of cattle stable. So we don't want to regroup animals a lot. We want to keep them socially stable. We're going to use natural light and ventilation wherever possible, but understand that in certain situations we would want to use mechanical ventilation systems to improve air hygiene. Essential, really, is a comfortable place to rest for all of our cows and enough food and water space for optimal health. And then minimizing the time away from those critical areas during the milking process. And ultimately reducing the risk and spread of disease. So we put those plans into play, and four years later we had a chance to just take a look at our industry. And really, prior to that, we were working with dairies across Wisconsin to try to make these improvements as part of our research and outreach program before the Dairyland Initiative. And what we did here was take the Dairy Herd Improvement Association monthly collected data that the AgSource Cooperative Services collect from over 3,000 dairies in the upper Midwest. And we really focused on those larger herds, the herds above 200 cows, free stall housed. And then we did some nifty analysis, computer analysis, using principle components to look at variables and then perform what's called a cluster analysis which looks at, basically, a 16-dimensional view in this case, something that's hard to get your human mind around, and cluster herds by similar performance in these characteristics. And the cluster analysis created six groups, and I'll show you some of the information from those six groups. But ultimately, we telephoned those 557 herds, and fortunately 201 picked up the phone and responded to our questions. So we learned a little bit about those herds. At the end of the talk I'll show what we found when we visited a few of those herds. If you know Wisconsin, the larger herds basically start in Madison. You drive up to Green Bay and across to Minneapolis and back down to Madison, you'll drive past the vast majority of the larger confinement housed free stall facilities with dairy cattle in the state. These are the production data for these six clusters. And I'll just, rather than focus on individual numbers, I'll just pick out some characteristics. Clusters one and two were characterized by excellent milk production. 88 and 92 pounds of milk per cow per day is a phenomenal level of production. And excellent health. By all of these measures, fresh cow health is excellent. Udder health is very good indeed. There's reproductive performance is very good. And overall, these herds seem to be doing a wonderful job. Cluster one averaged 500 cows, and cluster two 276 cows. And a big difference between these two clusters was that cluster one milked three times a day and cluster two twice a day. With the understanding that we believe milking more frequently enhances production, and certainly did to a degree in this case. Let's zip over to cluster six right now because cluster six also did very well in terms of overall production. But these represented our largest herds. These herds averaged 1,130 cows. So these are larger herds, but they're characterized by a higher turnover rate. So a higher removal of cattle and a higher proportion of animals in their first lactation, what we call primiparous cows. Their udder health was okay, good reproductive performance, and, as I've said, good milk production, but fresh cow health, the term TCI refers to transition cow index. I'll explain a little bit more about that in a moment. But a negative number would suggest somewhat average performance. Certainly not as good as clusters one or two. Cluster four, what we'll jump to because they were our lowest production group, averaging 75 pounds of energy corrected milk. So, significantly lower milk performance than these other three clusters we've mentioned so far. Again, a little smaller herd, 279 cows. And really not very good health. As we look at the numbers, I'm going to suggest that udder health isn't particularly good. Fresh cow health, you can see that large negative number there represents the early lactation performance isn't particularly good in these herds. And then jump to cluster five. A little higher production but still lower than clusters one, two, and six. But this herd was really identified by larger herds with very poor fresh cow health, poor udder health, and quite a high death rate. You'll see that death rate percent, 12.4% which was significantly high. So those herds were really having a job trying to keep cows healthy. Cluster three we won't mention at all because they seem to be a catchall for everybody else. They did pretty well overall, but really they were distinguished by being undistinguished. So that's where I think the computers dumped everybody else. You can see from the end the numbers of herds, the vast majority of herds were in clusters, cluster one was the most common, two was 86 herds, and there were 74 herds in cluster six. So when we look at those herds later on, they will represent the majority of the herds that we see. Well, as I mentioned, we called those herds up, and these are just some of the responses that we got from those dairies, and just to highlight some of those things. While the performance of clusters one and two were almost the same overall in terms of how we measured health and performance, they seemed to be doing things in quite different ways. Cluster two were those smaller herds, milking twice a day. They had more two-row pens, which means the cows had more bunk space but didn't separate young animals from older animals. In smaller herds they tend to have to commingle the younger animals and older animals together. And we argue that that may be better to separate those animals to provide less competition for our first lactation heifers. So they were less able to do that. And then we come down to production enhancements. rBST, bovine somatotropin or growth hormone, only 33% of group two herds were using BST compared to 73% of cluster one. So there was a big difference in the use of production enhancing technologies between those two. So it really suggested that while the end game was almost the same, there were really two very different approaches to production being utilized in those herds. Cluster six, anybody knows Hoard's Dairyman is a Wisconsin based farming press magazine, tells everybody how to do things, and I call cluster six the Hoard's Dairyman readers because pretty much anything that appears in there, these guys are doing. They're really in the earlier adopter group. So they're utilizing two group, dry cow rations, what we call just-in-time calving, which is an approach to managing the cow at the calving time. They've got those dedicated first lactation heifer pens. They're using synchronization programs to help breed cows. 84% are using BST. 84% monensin, which is an infeed ionophore that facilitates rumen fermentation and makes the cow more efficient. And you see they have the most cows per FTE, full-time equivalent worker. So they were a very efficient, production enhancing group of farms, but remember they weren't doing quite so well on the fresh cow health side of things. A few clues on cluster five as to what may be happening. These were the lowest percentage of sand bedding users, and I'll talk about that more in a moment. Didn't use head locks to manage cows, which makes capturing them and examining them more challenging, and a slightly different approach to managing the cow at calving time, suggestive that that might be the reasoning behind relatively poor fresh cow health and performance and that high death rate. And then you can see the boxes on cluster four. Really, that was the lowest production, not because these people aren't busy. They're rearing their own heifers, they're doing lots of things, but not a particularly good attention to hoof care. They're not trimming cows. They're not using sink programs. They're aren't using production enhancing technologies. And remember, their health and overall performance was relatively poor. So we got some clues, really, to management, overall management within this database. And, again, as we look at this confinement housed dairy industry and think of the things that concern us, we come down here, 61% of the herds overall using BST. 82% using monensin. And these are production enhancing technologies that folks have concerns about. And you get back to, again, this global demand for food. What are we going to do? Are we going to use these technologies if we believe them to be safe and meet the challenges of providing this food, or are we going to do something else? And clearly there are some farms that choose to do something else, and there are others that choose to go down this road. But when you look at the FAO's report and try to work out how those nine billion people on the planet are going to be fed, 70% of the food that will require they state will come from the safe efficacious technology to increase productivity. And, really, that's the reason I think our dairy industry continues to go down that road. And overall, this is a study taken from taking milk samples out of grocery stores and looking for those things the general public gets concerned about, the bovine growth hormone in milk, insulin-like growth factor one, progesterone and estradiol, and looked at conventional milk that utilizes those enhancements. Labeled BST-free milk coming from herds that suggest they don't use those enhancements. And then organic dairies that clearly don't use antibiotics and hormones to enhance production. And what you see here is really not very much. It really is the overall answer. Yes, there's hormones in every milk sample that you purchase from a grocery store. That's inevitable. Cows have hormones going through them. Actually, the highest concentrations of things like progesterone and estradiol are going to be found in organic milk, and there's some reasons for that. And while the concentrations of bovine somatotropin and insulin like growth factor were higher in the conventional milk, they were in the nanograms per mil. Very, very tiny amounts and really not significant in a human being that breaks down protein when we ingest it. These are non-significant issues. I think what we also saw, though, was differences in the numbers of cows per worker, full-time equivalent worker. 15 cows per worker difference between cluster one with very excellent performance and cluster six with the larger herds with greater efficiencies but also had these little warning signs where fresh cow health may not have been quite so good. I absolutely believe we need enough qualified people on our farms. And as our herds get larger, it becomes more challenging to find these qualified people. Where we see mercy for animals videos and terrible exposes of animal cruelty on our farms, it's largely related to poor animal handling by people that are poorly trained, have little idea of what to do in difficult circumstances and make very poor decisions. Low stress handling, and the ability of the people on our farms really is an important factor and should be the priority number one in our ordering of welfare. We have to have enough people to find the sick cows in pens of fresh cows. We have to have people to identify lame cows and cows with mastitis and cows in heat. And this is challenging on these farms. However, there are great examples of people doing a good job. Here's a farm we work with regularly. A 2,000-cow dairy. Where this milker has been taught how to load cows into a parlor. Milkers do not naturally know how to do this. You have to teach them. This guy knows the pressure point on a farm. He stepped into a pressure zone, the cows moves past him, he walks towards the cows, they walk past him. Untrained people will walk in the same direction as the cows, and you'll move the one cow and stop everybody else. Loading the parlor becomes a nightmare, and then we start to make bad decisions. You can see he just puts a little pressure on that cow, she moves into place, stops, looks in her eyes, she moves on and so on. Very simple ways of decreasing stress on our farms, and we need to teach that on small and large farms alike. We've really been at the center of a lot of behavioral research over the last few years, trying to improve basic comfort for our cows. You saw about two-thirds of our dairy industry in Wisconsin now lives on sand bedding like this. They call this life on the beach. You see this big white cow go into the stall here, and we've learned a lot about cow behavior just by being able to put video cameras up in cow barns. And we know that we should be shooting for about 12 hours of rest per day for our dairy cows. So about half of the day. They need to sleep longer than we do. And they get that rest in bouts of about one hour. So they stay resting in the same position for about an hour. They stand up, they change position, and they'll generally lie back down again. So that big white cow into the

stall about 4

20 AM. This is peak sleep time for cows. So she's going to come up in an hour, we're going to watch what she does. So she stands and lies back down again. Changes positions. She's now on her other side. That's perfectly normal. She's been lying on one side, she's shifting cheeks, she's going on the other side, and she's down for another bout. And what we realized with cows on sand was that they have longer bouts on a softer, more forgiving surface, a surface that conforms to the bony skeleton of the cow. So one hour, 20 minutes long versus the mattresses that we're seeing with these rubber crumb pads where the resting bout was only one hour. Ultimately, the cows, as I've said, are trying to get 12 hours of rest, so what we see is that cows on sand get up and down less frequently and take fewer bouts per day than cows on mattresses where they get up and down more frequently and have to go through that rising and lying movement more often. That's of little consequence to a healthy, young animal without sore feet, but it is a challenge for our older cows that become lame. Sand, because of its ability to conform, gives that cow that cushion and traction and support as she gets up and down, and those lame cows are able to maintain normal resting behaviors. And so we've been able to put designs together utilizing sand bedding and larger stalls with more space to provide for the needs of the cow and facilitate her rising and lying motions. This is a nasty slide that I hesitate to put up, but I'm going to do it anyway. This is a frequency distribution of 200 cows. A hundred lame cows and a hundred non-lame cows, and they're spread out by their lying time. So we've got lying times from three hours a day all the way up to 18 hours a day. If I can get you to squint at the narrow bars first. So the narrow columns represent non-lame cows. And this is what we call a normal distribution. There's a relatively equal number of cows here, we peak at about 12-13 hours, and then we go down here and there's a relatively equal number here. So normal animals have a normal distribution of resting time. What you see when you squint, well, stop squinting and look at the wider bars. Those are the lame cows. And what we see with lame cows is that isn't a normal distribution. It's skewed this end and this end. So we've got these long tails either side. And what we have are lame cows that are lying down too long, and they are just stuck lying down and can't stand up because it's hard and difficult for them to do that. And so when you've got cows resting for 17-18 hours a day, that sounds good, but cows are busy creatures. They have to eat for about five hours, they're milking for three, and the math really simply doesn't add up. These cows are not going to do particularly well. Likewise, on the other side, we've got animals here that are standing, and particularly they're standing in the stall fearful of lying down. They struggle to carry out the process of lying. So they're stuck standing in the stall, putting weight on their feet for a protracted period of time. You've got cows here lying down for six hours a day. That's not a good thing for a dairy cow either. So we want a bedded surface, a lying area, is something that normalizes behavior and allows the cow to rest for 12 hours. Excuse me. If we just look at the inside of a cow's claw cut open so you can see the distal skeleton. We've got here what we call the pedal bone, which is the last bone of your skeleton, inside the claw capsule. You've got the wall of the claw here. This would be the nail surrounding the pedal bone. This pedal bone, in a healthy animal, lives on a nice digital fat pad, which is like your Nike cushioned sneakers, and is suspended by a solid connective tissue band. And so that's really the shock absorbing structure. As you get older and as you stand longer and you don't get those 12 hours of rest, that structure starts to break down. Those connections break down. You can see the shallow end of the claw and this fat pad kind of disappears, and we get these contusions. It's hard to see but there's actually a little hemorrhage in the cross-section there, and that's a damaged corium that's actually been bleeding into the horn produced. And again, another cross-section here. We've got the healthy claw on this side with that healthy fat pad, healthy bone, and then we've got something that looks very bad, and that is indeed a sole ulcer, which is basically a contusion, a damage of the corium, the tissues that create that nail, that horn structure, and basically a full thickness defect going through the sole. An intensely painful lesion that results from inadequate rest and too much standing time. Overall, as we look at that transition, the good things about two-thirds of our dairy industry being on sand bedding is that they're getting less lame cows, and those cows produce more milk when that happens. Over here when we compare our sand herds with mattress herds, that's equivalent to seven pounds of milk per cow per day, or 2.5 thousand pounds of milk over the course of a year's lactation. So a dramatic difference in health and productivity by being able to reduce the effects of lameness, particularly in our older cows. A little better fresh cow health, a little lower somatic cell count, a little better turnover rate as well, but the predominant thing is the effect on milk production. Here's another nasty picture. This is one of the most common infectious diseases in our dairy herds today. This is a disease called digital dermatitis. It's a treponema type bacteria, a spirochete that you'll be familiar with with things like Lyme disease. But in this situation, these treponema species are a little different group, and they create these nasty ulcerative granuloma proliferative lesions, painful lesions on the heel of the cow. And we have the arrival of Dr. -- into our group about five or six years ago. We've spent a lot of intense effort, both on the farm and in the laboratory, developing a control plan for this disease. Utilizing treatments of infected individuals. Realizing that there's a genetic component to this disease that we're working on isolating. That there are anatomical changes that occur to the hoof as the disease takes place that makes cows more susceptible to recurrence. Working with companies on feed supplements, particularly during the rearing period of our heifers, that we're able to reduce the severity of this disease. Improving hygiene and then also realizing that it's very important to manage the chronically infected cows that have this disease on our farm, principally through footbath management. And so just to break down the scoring system that we use into two simple scores, the M2 and the M4, which represent the acute and chronic phases of this disease. What we've really been selling to the industry was something we weren't doing before, and that is active identification of animals as soon as they get these lesions. Prior to that, we were just waiting for these cows to become lame, and that's really too late. We want to be able to find those lesions very quickly even before the cow is lame, and treat those lesions to stop them becoming these chronic infections. And likewise, footbaths that have been used over the years to try to manage this condition, we're going to use those to keep the chronic disease in check and stop it becoming an acute problem once more. And that's really very typical of the field based research that we perform. People come to us with ideas. We're challenged by a problem. We come up with a concept. We test that concept and put it out there. And we came to the realization that the footbaths we were using were too short. Used and wasted too much chemical, so we made them long and narrow. A very simple solution which increased the number of immersions the back feet get as the cows walk through the chemical, improves the efficacy while using much less product and much less of the chemical on the farm. And we see these long, narrow footbaths now on a large number of dairies that we visit. I think we've seen significant improvements over the last few years in fresh cow health and performance. Really from the realization that we just needed to do a better job with facility design. We'd improved rations. We'd improved our caregiving, but we were still challenged by bunk space and comfort and so on. And this represents one of, I call this the cow cathedral. These are socially stable groups of dry cows that live for the 50-60 day dry period when they're non-lactating in the same social group with their friends. And they're provided a comfortable place to lie down and sufficient bunk space to eat. And that's really been our approach is not to provide one design and say, hey, this is the solution for everyone, but just to provide a framework around which different farms can create different solutions that are best fitting for them. So we've asked for 30 inches of bunk space for each cow 21 days before to 21 days after calving. So all the cows can eat at the same time. We've asked for a sand bedded, comfortable place to lie down or a bedded pack, whatever we wish to choose, and sufficient space for cows to use that. Social stability to try to remove that risk of regrouping animals, particularly in the critical week prior to calving when their dry matter intakes are already dropping and they're at risk of that creating a negative energy balance and postparturient disease issues. And reminding ourselves that the facility isn't everything. That we still need excellent feeds and feeding. We still need great caregivers that can identify sick cows, but also understanding that in the industry where we're working in, the facility was really the limiting factor. And one thing that really helped us create those facilities was creating this index of fresh cow performance, this transition cow index. With my colleagues Ken Nordlund, Gary Oetzel, Tom Bennett, and Murray Clayton, we put together an equation that predicted how much milk a cow should produce at the first test in the next lactation. And if she beat that prediction, she got a positive number, and if she didn't meet that prediction, she got a negative number. And we created and marketed that from AgSource Cooperative Services, patented it through WARF, and it's now available in not only the US but Canada and Switzerland. And it really enabled us to put together a partial budget plan where we could build a new facility and not put a single lactating cow in it. Put all of our dry cows and our special needs cows in this barn and show the lenders that the enhanced health and productivity would pay for these facilities. And that was a remarkable turnaround. A decade ago we could not get these facilities built. We could build lactating cow barns; we could not build these transition facilities for our dry cows. We simply couldn't justify the costs. Now we can. And we've provided the farmer tools to provide the necessary space for the cow, predictions for the number of stalls and the feed of bunk space that we need. And armed with those tools, we've seen farmers create their own solutions and sometimes surprised us because we didn't even think of the solution that they would come up with, and it was really neat. This is one of our new transition facilities that was at Farm Progress Days a few years ago. Comfortable heifers prior to calving and cows in separate pens, plenty of bunk space. You can see the fans providing cooling and the remarkable environment for healthy cattle. This is our own UW-Arlington facility. Here we have a series of bedded packs where cows stay together in groups of 10 for their dry period and get to relax and calve in calm and peace in this comfortable environment. And what we really noticed at this facility was the remarkable difference in performance in early lactation. This is the cows leaving in the first 60 days after calving. And we went from a very poor facility, very challenging to manage where a lot of those animals were leaving, and now we're down to about 2% of cows leaving in the first 60 days of milk, which is industry leading. We are a remarkable turnaround. We've also turned our attention more recently to cooling and ventilation systems. Things apart from this summer, we've had some hot summers, and heat really challenges our dairy cows. And you see these big, blue tubes. The story with those actually starts with this poor little fellow here. This represents a failure to understand how to ventilate calf facilities that we've also tackled. This is Dr. Alfonso Largo, a resident of ours who, under Ken Nordlund's leadership, basically identified micro environments in calf facilities but very contaminated air that put these baby calves at risk of developing respiratory disease. And respiratory disease is very difficult to pick up because these calves are typically fed a milk replacer, and even calves with pretty significant lung disease will still come up and eat. And this is one of the main ways our caregivers identify sick animals is when they don't get up and eat. And Dr. Sheila McGuirk was able to do was develop a scoring system to help us identify these animals, simple picture based scoring, and we're in the process of building an app to facilitate that in the field. So what happened from that were these ventilation tubes. These positive pressure tubes that bring fresh air into the calf barn and pipe it down on the baby calves without creating a draft but they're able to create a minimum ventilation system because we realized that little baby calves simply don't generate enough heat to help naturally ventilate a barn like this. So you see this and you wonder, well, that looks fine, but when we tested the air, we could find these micro environments with very still, recontaminated air. And by providing these ventilation systems with individual pens, in this case natural ventilation with a supplemental positive pressure system bringing in fresh air constantly and generating air movement in between the pens, we've been able to really improve calf health and decrease the risk of respiratory disease. This is one of the newer barns that we've seen. Recent research shows we were always battling as to whether to keep our calves in groups or individual pens, and now we know that if we can keep two calves together a lot of the benefits of group housing, of creating social grouping can happen with a pair. So you'll see these new facilities, multiple facilities so if a disease occurs, we can handle that. Positive pressure tube up in the corner here producing nice, fresh air, and then opening up these pens eventually so we can keep these pairs of calves together. That same positive pressure concept, we realized we needed something new to tackle heat stress in our adult cattle. And heat stress impacts many things that our cows have to do. It reduces feed intake, impacts their rumination and their rumen function, and we see reduced production and increased disease as a result of that. This is a larger herd that we tracked over a six-year period. The black line represents monthly average temperature. You can see here it fluctuates as you'd expect here in Wisconsin. But you can also see the red line is the disease rate for lameness. These are lesions on the feet, and you can see there's a cyclicity to the development of these lesions that almost looks as if it's in sync with those changes in temperature. There's actually a two-month lag, and that's because it takes two months to grow a sole from the corium to the surface of the claw. And so what we're really seeing are issues related to changes in animal behavior during the summer. In the peak of summer when the cows are hot in July we see lameness problems in September. This is an individual cow that we were able to put data loggers on and watch what happens to her body temperature. This is the temperature in the blue line, and this orange bar tells us whether the cow was lying down or standing up. Lying down or standing up. And you can see that when the cow lies down, her temperature increases, and when she stands up, her temperature decreases. I didn't know it fluctuated that much until I did this study. And it really was an eye-opener to me because when we coupled that with some data from 30 cows that we filmed last summer when we had that week of 90-plus degrees weather, here are just two example cows with their graphs. These are those lying bouts. Remember that big, white cow lying in the stall? Some of these bouts were as long as 120 minutes, and others are as short as eight minutes. And what we have here on the Y axis for each cow is body temperature. And so you can see here, for two cows, and I could show you 30, it's the same thing, that as the internal body temperature of the cow increases, her ability to lie down for any length of time is dramatically reduced. These cows simply can't stay lying down when their body temperatures are above 104-105 degrees. That's life threatening temperatures. And with those shorter bouts, we see that lying times absolutely plummet when the cows are hot. So this is ambient temperature humidity index down here in the barn, and these kinds of temperatures, combination of temperature and humidity, the cows are resting for as little as six hours a day. Remember, I asked for 12. So now we're at half of that. And the simple reason is these cows have to stand and pant. They have to dissipate this heat through what we call thermal panting. They don't sweat particularly well and they have to dissipate that heat through the mouth. So when we're trying to help this cow rest, trying to help her cool, we have to facilitate the cooling when that cow is standing and try to reduce the rate of accumulation of heat when the cow is lying down. So these big tubes that I showed you earlier are bringing fresh outside air at high speed and piping it down on every single cow. Here we have a holding area where cows wait to be milked. This is a Dane County dairy, one of the first adopters of this technology, delighted with this system. The cows are proving to be difficult, however, because they like it in the holding area so much, they go and be milked, then they come back again for a second time and we can't get them back to the pens. This is a farm Courtney and my colleague Ken Nordlund were just at in Ohio. They've just installed this positive pressure system not only in the holding area where the cows are enjoying fast moving fresh air but also in the parlor where there's a ring of tubes system running around the entire rotary facility there. Right back home in Arlington, this is the test facility. We're testing these tubes in the lying areas in our farms to try and deliver that fresh air into the resting space. And in the future, we're trying to use water more carefully and trying to use these optic sensors to soak cows when they want to be soaked and use water carefully but assist cooling using very targeted application of water. I mentioned that I'd talk about these partnerships, and I'd say the number one partnership that we've been able to have over the years are the farmers themselves. They've allowed us to do research on their farms. They've been brave enough to listen to the crazy ideas that we've had and implement them even. And what they've really turned into is partners in crime of really being able to tell everybody else what we've done. And so we've been able to put these hundred-pound diary tours on. Farms that are averaging a hundred pounds of milk per cow per day. Phenomenal dairy herds where we're achieving excellent health, excellent performance, great well being. And we've packed people on busloads and taken them to these dairies, and the realization is that the best salesman in this situation is the farmer himself. He can really tell people what they did, what worked, what didn't work, and then people can go and see the cows, and people really need to see the cows. Our Dairyland Initiative program is not funded by state revenues. It's privately funded by sponsors. We've had really longstanding partnerships with these companies over the years. I think the average is about eight years for our program funded various efforts. And I said it was a registration process to get on the website. Zoetis has sponsored access for all veterinarians around the world. Dean Foods Foundation over the last two years has allowed our dairy producers in Wisconsin access. We've partnered with PDPW, Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin. Zinpro sponsors access for nutritionists, and Save Cows Symposium, all the hoof trimmers in the US. And so we've just had these wonderful relationships, and I believe without them, without those partners, without the dairy industry that we work with, we wouldn't have had the impact we've been able to have. It's been a delight to visit new facilities that we didn't even know were being created because somebody had read something on our website and then put it into play. And we get to go out and be surprised on a pretty regular basis. But I said we did visit some of the herds that we'd included in that cluster analysis. And really the question we were asking, we certainly identified clusters that were high performing herds, but we also saw some ones that weren't doing very well. But really the question we wanted to ask here was, can we have our cake and eat it? Can we have this high milk performance because there are a lot of people that suggest that we can't. We can't have this nirvana where we have these confinement house facilities where cows are producing all this milk and have great welfare and well being. So we visited the 22 herds in each one of the high performing clusters, one, two, and six, and looked at the things we could measure. The physical well being. Things like lameness using locomotion scores. Looked at traumas and injuries and so on. And we evaluated the highest producing cows on the farm. And what really pleased me was that, overall, the lameness prevalence, cows that you could find walking with a limp was overall 13%. That still sounds a little high, but I will say that includes cows that many of you, you wouldn't be able to identify as lame. And so I'm going to drill down and say 2.5% was the average severe lameness prevalence, and that really was the cow that we are significantly concerned about. That picture of that poor, lame cow that I showed you earlier, that would be a typical severely lame cow, barely able to bear weight, and we really can't tolerate many of those in our industry. These herds are averaging 2.5%. And to put that in perspective, these numbers would match any survey of any grazing herd anywhere in the world in terms of overall lameness prevalence. These herds are producing twice as much milk as any grazing herd that we know as well. The sand herds are pictured in the blue dots. And you can see most of the sand herds cluster at lower levels of lameness, and actually the average for those herds was about 10%. And the mattress herds, those rubber pad herds, they tend to be over on the right-hand side with the higher levels of lameness. They average about 17%. But you can also see this wonderful little cluster of mattress herds down here. There's three doing an absolutely wonderful job. And these are the folks that we really learn from because they're working with a system that creates some challenges, and you start to understand that there are other things that we can do other than sand. Just having sand doesn't mean you're going to have low levels of lameness. There are a few up here that you can see have significant issues. So when we put this data into a multivariate model to try to explain lameness, stall surface obviously comes out. That deep bedded sand stall is advantageous. I point to cows per worker. The benefit of fewer cows per worker. And I spent some time earlier in the talk suggesting that we need to make sure we have enough qualified people on our farms to identify sick cows, to identify lame cows. But the one in the middle there, pasture access, to come full circle, to meet the concerns of this animal that we thought was a grazing animal, there is a benefit in some herds, and particularly in that little cluster of three herds there's some magic involved that we can manage herds with housing facilities but also with pasture access. And there was an advantage in this data to doing that, and several other studies have found that. And so what we're seeing now, about almost 10% of our herds have a pasture that we allow the cows out. They prefer to be out at night. We're not going to allow them out in the driving rain and the freezing cold and the extreme heat, but some area of access outside. A pasture surface seems to be beneficial for our cows for preventing lameness. And our dairy industry, where possible, is embracing that as an option to help prevent lameness. And even in housed dairy herds, again, we're seeing dairies take on this approach. So overall, I work within our industry to improve it. We have to realize that we've got some challenges, some areas that we need to improve upon, and we've made significant strides in improving upon those things. And when you visit a herd that doesn't have lame cows, you realize how bad it was visiting herds with lots of lame cows because these animals have swagger. They come up to you, they're confident, they look happy, to use a much overused term. And so these are great places to work. These are great places to visit with our students. The farmers enjoy going to work, the people on their farms enjoy going to work, and that's really the message that I have to end with. That hopefully we've had a little bit to do with some of the improvements that we're seeing with our industry, locally in Wisconsin but also nationally and internationally, as the realization is that we need to do a better job when we put cattle in confinement house facilities. And we'll continue with our Dairyland Initiative and see where it takes us over the coming years. Thank you for listening.

APPLAUSE