Feedstuffs in Focus
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Feedstuffs in Focus
Early-life respiratory disease shapes dairy-beef crossbred cattle performance
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BRD doesn’t always announce itself with a dramatic crash in gain. Sometimes it shows up months later where nobody expects it: on the rail, as lower marbling and a worse carcass grade. That’s the unsettling thread we pull on with Dr. Melissa Cantor of Pennsylvania State University, as we unpack what early-life respiratory disease means for beef on dairy, beef, and crossbred calves.
We start where lifetime health really begins: colostrum management. Dr. Cantor explains how immunoglobulin G (IgG) transfer shapes passive immunity, antibiotic treatment risk, and even survival. From there we dig into why bovine respiratory disease peaks around weaning, what lung consolidation can look like for weeks after milk is removed, and why “they caught up later” can still hide real damage.
Facilities and daily routines become the practical battleground. We talk ventilation targets (including why shutting barns tight in winter backfires), nose-to-nose contact in wire pens, sanitation and bedding removal, and calf housing choices that reduce stress while supporting early grain intake and rumen development. We also get specific about detecting BRD the right way, why coughing alone is a poor trigger for antibiotics, and how free tools like the UC Davis respiratory scoring system can tighten decision-making. Finally, we cover pathogen shedding during stress.
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Big Question On Calf Health
SPEAKER_01Beefing up dairy. What are the cumulative effects of early life respiratory disease in dairy, beef, crossbred cattle? Welcome to Feedstuffs in Focus, our podcast, taking a look at the big issues affecting the livestock, poultry, grain, and animal feed industries. I'm your host, Sarah Meerhead. This episode of Feedstuffs in Focus is sponsored by United Animal Health, a leader in animal health and nutrition. You can learn more about United Animal Health and how they're working to advance animal science worldwide by visiting their website at UnitedANH.com. RNH caught up with Dr. Melissa Cantor of Pennsylvania State University during this week's Midwest Animal Science meeting in Omaha. They talked about the effects of early life respiratory disease on dairy, beef, crossbred cattle.
SPEAKER_02So let's kick off the conversation here by maybe first addressing why beef on dairy cattle health. What are the opportunities we're seeing? What are the challenges?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Well, I think beef on dairy calves, they are coming from a segmented industry, right? They're oftentimes coming out of a dairy farm, going to some sort of razor, then sometimes even switching facilities again. And because of this, there's a lot of opportunities for us to manage the health of these calves better and also understand what the long-term effects of health are, because I think when we're really segmented, we don't always necessarily think about that, right? Like what's the effect from one facility to the next on these calves?
SPEAKER_02So what happens when a calf doesn't get enough immunogoblin G in colostrum?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great question. So typically what we see is that calves that aren't getting enough, meaning that they're failing and not getting 10% of their body weight of colostrum, these calves are going to be 80% more likely to need antibiotic treatment, they're gonna be two times more likely to die. And we even know that calves that get enough colostrum, if they're getting just marginally enough, that actually affects their likelihood of getting disease as well. So the calves that get the most do the best. And so really we have a lot of opportunities for taking advantage of immunoglobulin G's and helping to passively protect that calf from disease through the colostrum that they would get from their dam.
SPEAKER_02So let's talk about the complexities of BRD and how lung consolidation in dairy calves compromises future performance.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so what we've learned from our research is that the most common time that calves are going to get bovine respiratory disease is going to be right around weaning when we take milk away. In this study, we weaned calves around two months of age. When we found is that lung consolidation in those calves was actually compromised for two to three weeks after weaning. But what was really interesting is that growth performance actually compensated. Those calves did eventually catch up to their peers right around that backgrounding phase, around 238 days on the calf ranch, which was kind of surprising. We weren't expecting that to necessarily happen.
Ventilation And Nose Contact
SPEAKER_02You mentioned earlier about facilities. What are some considerations we should be taking in when it comes to our facilities?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so when we're thinking about facilities with bovine respiratory disease, assuming that clausture management's done right, and we're thinking about those facilities, we want to really be thinking about ventilation. That is huge. Oftentimes people are worried about cold stress in young calves. Actually, I see the opposite many times. Barns should not be closed up and walled up in the winter. Actually, calves need about four air exchanges per hour to maintain their lung health. So it's really important we're thinking about getting dirty air out of the barn and bringing fresh air into the barn. Those are huge. Another thing that we'd oftentimes forget about in facilities is that if you're using wire pens, which are very common for beef on care beef on dairy calf raring, those calves, if they can contact each other's noses, they're actually at risk of spreading that disease, that bovine respiratory disease to each other. They actually spread that disease through saliva and through nose contact. So keep in mind that if you're using those, your pen size is as big as the row is with those wire panels, if they're able to touch one another and make that contact.
SPEAKER_02What about when it comes to pen design as far as those babies and those that transition calf group?
Group Housing And Easy Cleaning
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so when we're thinking about pen design, we want to minimize stress. Number one, right? So whatever we're going to do to be able to basically make the impact on that calf as minimal as possible moving group to group is huge. The other thing to keep in mind is the longer we keep calves backgrounded in individual housing, the harder it is for them to socially adjust to being in a group, and cattle are social animals. I always tell folks, believe it or not, housing calves in two doesn't increase the risk of disease and actually promotes early grain intake, which is really important for room and development in these calves. Especially when we're thinking about most calves in the beef and dairy industry are going to be limit fed, meaning they're going to be fed around six liters a day or less. Those calves, it's particularly important that we're thinking about getting them into a group housing sooner rather than later so that they're learning to eat grain from other calves. So when we think about facilities, you want to make sure a skid steer is easy to get in there to clean. And if you happen to be from a Mennonite or Amish and you're not allowed to use that, having a system where you can lift up the pens really easily and be able to get in to clean is huge. Removing bedding is really fundamental for controlling bovine respiratory disease. And again, the more bacteria in the environment, the more opportunities the pathogen has to grow. So we want to minimize those with our facilities.
SPEAKER_02So when it comes to detecting disease, what should we be looking for here?
Hidden Carcass Impacts Of BRD
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So when we're thinking about what we should be looking for disease in our calves, we should be looking for outward signs. So again, coughing is huge, but it's not enough. I see a lot of guys treating just off coughing. It's it's actually not enough. Work with your veterinarian. Coughing is only about 20% sensitive, meaning that of the hundred calves that are labeled as sick, only 20 of them actually have disease that needs to be dealt with with antibiotics. So we should also be looking for head tilt, we should be looking for eardroop, we should be looking for nasal discharge, cloudy. Um, some folks also will use eye discharge. There's two different scoring systems you can use. They're available online, they're free. Um, one is the UC Davis system, just Google that and it will pop right up. It's great. It's really easy to teach folks to use because it's a yes or no system. So either they're they have this or they don't. It also looks at heavy breathing, which is very sensitive for detecting this respiratory disease in calves.
SPEAKER_02So let's go back to lung consolidation. Um, how does it beef on dairy calves when they're raised similarly during pre-weaning?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so so you're essentially asking, like, what are the effects long term? Yeah, so we know that when they're raised similarly pre-weaning, we see this decrease in growth, right? Very temporarily, about two to three weeks after weaning, then they eventually catch up to their peers. However, this is also the phase when we think atopogenesis or fat cell deposition, where we're really kind of setting how many cells can actually do that in life, is happening. And because of that, we also have seen at the carcass level, once these animals are slaughtered at the plant, that they have decreased marbling and they actually are more likely to grade in a lower level than if they were not having this bovine respiratory disease outweaning, which is actually kind of nuts if you think about it. Like you wouldn't expect prime grade to be anywhere correlated with something that happens at 60 days of age, right? But that's what we saw. And so that kind of suggests to us that even if you're not seeing that respiratory disease effect in the feedlot per se with growth, there's still some effects that are carrying over into that animal's lifetime.
Pathogen Shedding During Stress
SPEAKER_02Very interesting. How about pathogen shedding? What should we be looking for there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great question. So typically, so so something that's not always commonly known is that a lot of the things that naturally hang out in the calf's upper nasopharynx, those things actually will migrate down during stress. So if we have a period of castration or movement or things like this, weaning, those are stressful times when the calf's ability to cope with pathogens lower. These opportunistic bacteria that live in the upper pharynx will migrate into the lung and cause an infection. Not always, but it does happen. And so what we have found with pathogen setting is things like pastural multicida, the more common known BRD pathogens, those cause a blip in the calf's growth, the calf gets better, it affects marbling at slaughter. That's what we found. There are worse pathogens out there like Mycoplasma bovis, which has recently been renamed to Mycoplasmopsis bovis, and things like Salmonella Dublin. Those things actually are terrible because they can kill the animal, right? So again, it pathogen does matter, but in our study it was all normal, typical pathogens we see in calves like pastura lumalticida.
SPEAKER_02So, overall from these studies, what are some of the long-term impacts you observed?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so what we've really seen long term with these calves is that marbling is affected. The carcass grade is affected, in fact, they're a lot more likely to go in the select category versus going in the upper choice or the prime, which is huge, that's how farmers are paid. And then what we also saw in this study, which we thought was very interesting, is no liver abscesses. We had one out of 140 some animals have a liver abscess, they're beef on dairy. Why? Um, again in the upper northeast, we feed a lot more forage. We kind of try to go at that 50% of the dry matter basis of the diet at the feedlot stage, which we know in other places like Texas, it's a lot hotter, so maybe that's related. But also keep in mind our calves were managed really well. We had exceptional collastrum management, these calves were fed six liters a day at weaning, blah blah blah. So it kind of begs the question that maybe there's more going on with liver abscesses than just breed. Um, but more to be stay tuned, more to be found out. The last thing I have to add is that lung scarring also was something we saw. So, again, these calves that had that small blip, one centimeter on that ultrasound, those calves tended to also have lung scarring at slaughter, which is crazy because you don't typically think of lung scarring from a baby calf carrying on in its lifetime.
Producer Bottom Line And Stressors
SPEAKER_02So, what would you say is the bottom line here? What should producers be considering when it comes to beef on dairy, cattle health?
SPEAKER_00Now, I know that most of us are stuck buying them from an auction house, but if you can find a dairy to supply your calves, you can man you can track cholesterol management on those calves by testing their blood serum. Huge. That's gonna pay off for you so much, and the farmer's gonna be highly motivated to manage that because he has that relationship with that client. I think that's big, and honestly, not to say there's anything wrong with auction calves, but it just gives that accountability there and that lane of command. If we are buying our calves from an auction house and we can't control that, consider staggering your stressors in your calves. Many times I work in extension, I see farmers all the time, it's convenient to castrate, wean, and disbud on the same day if they happen to have horns. That is a recipe for disaster for respiratory. So be very mindful about when you're doing things to calves and try to take milk away gradually because that really helps promote that lower gut to start eating that grain and develop essentially their rumen, right? Which is what we want at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_02Dr. Melissa Cantor with Penn State, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insight.
Thanks Sponsor And Subscribe
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_01This episode of Feedstuffs in Focus has been sponsored by United Animal Health, a leader in animal health and nutrition. You can learn more about United Animal Health and how they're working to advance animal science worldwide by visiting their website at UnitedANH.com. I'm Sarah Muirhead, and you've been listening to Feedstuffs in Focus. If you would like to hear more conversations about some of the big issues affecting the livestock, poultry, grain, and animal feed industries, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast channel. Until next time, have a great day and thank you for listening.