Drying Off Cows, The Truth About Milk and a Surprise Bull!

[00:00:12]7-Eleven right there because she is a he.

[00:00:16]>> They are unhealthy cows. They are not living in healthy conditions.

[00:00:20]>> We are drying up cows today. One time my daughter asked if we have the dry cows, where are the wet cows?

[00:00:26]I don't want to say I don't enjoy, but I don't enjoy. is trying to make hay in between forecasts cuz the forecasts change every stinking day. But this I feel like for summer fieldwork, this is by far the most stressful part is just trying to catch the weather windows cuz hay can be very finicky and we have to feed this. So if we let it get too mature, we won't get as much milk. So there's some stress involved there. And this first time we are going to have to pump some manure on the hay fields which like is great fertilizer but adds another layer of stress that you don't want the field to be too wet where the tankers cause damage. After this cutting, we'll have our new manure pit built so we won't have to do any more summer cutting, summer manure applications between cutings. But all we can do is hurry up and wait because I think if we cut now when the first cutting is anywhere from 20 to 23 in, ideally we want that to be above 25.

[00:01:22]That sets a bad precedent for the rigor of the stand for the rest of the season.

[00:01:27]So, we want to get four maybe five cutings total. So, if we take the first one too soon and it's too immature, that doesn't spell good things for the rest of the season. So, my gut instinct right now is to wait. But, I also don't like the overall unstable weather pattern. So, this is why I don't go to casinos cuz we gamble every day.

[00:01:46]>> Pretty cat. Look at that. Like kind of just light.

[00:01:49]>> You want to set him in the warmer here while we're getting working? This is still a calico technically, right? Or >> I'm pretty sure you can call that with a calico.

[00:01:57]>> Yeah, just Hey, Dad.

[00:02:10]>> Why are we selling 7-Eleven?

[00:02:13]I mistook her mistook him for a heer when uh they went obviously when they're newborn they're sop and wet I lift up the tail I didn't see any sack so assumed it was a heer all along I as you're feeding them you never see the the back end you're bottle feeding them I never caught it till it was way over here that it was actually a bowl I just mistook it for a heer when it was a baby and u Yeah. Not uh >> this is the first time this has ever happened. I mean Yeah.

[00:02:49]>> You know. Yeah.

[00:02:50]>> But you can't tell looking at like these three right here.

[00:02:53]>> Yeah. For >> 711 you said. Yeah.

[00:02:55]>> You can't tell. I mean >> that's why I say look from the front.

[00:02:57]Yeah.

[00:02:58]>> No. Look in the front. You can never tell.

[00:02:59]>> Fortunately, it'll bring good money there because she is a he.

[00:03:07]>> Yeah. She is a he.

[00:03:10]In case anybody points out their bedding is wet, we know the wind blew in like crazy last night. They're getting new bedding this morning.

[00:03:19]So, my brother's hooking up the livestock trailer. It's kind of egregious to have a whole trailer for one calf. But, um the sail barn's just a few miles away and they sell calves, bull calves, livestock every Tuesday morning. And they have a hay auction, too. Hay, straw bedding, everything. So, he's going on the trailer. He's heading up to the auction. Somebody, some other farmer will buy him, finish him up to slaughter age and >> become beef.

[00:03:45]>> Don't go that way. Don't go that way.

[00:04:00]Oh, >> he's doing good.

[00:04:03]I think he's okay.

[00:04:06]All right.

[00:04:11]I got tagged in this video. I haven't watched it. We're going to give you a blind reaction.

[00:04:15]>> This is the real reason milk has to be pasturized as a cow owner.

[00:04:20]>> Okay.

[00:04:20]>> There's these big major dairy farmers who wanted their cows to produce more and more milk. So, the first thing they started to do was they started to feed them lots of grain. And the issue with grain is that it's actually not very good for a cow. A little bit of grain is okay. My cow does have a little bit of grain. She has 2 lbs a day, but she's a big freaking cow, right? But those will start to give Stop there a second. Hold on. 10 12 more pounds of grain.

[00:04:47]>> 10 to 12 more pounds of grain, she says.

[00:04:49]Okay, first of all, here's our first major headache here.

[00:04:54]>> I'm not sure what this has to do with why cows have to be past why milk has to be pasteurized from a major cow farm, maybe like me. Maybe she'll get into that. Let's address that first part about how much corn and corn not being how much corn they get and the idea that corn isn't good for a cow. Okay. She said her cow gets like two pounds of corn and it's this is not a very big cow that looks like a jersey in the background. So in retrospect her cow is only filling a pale milk. That cow's probably only eating 50 lbs of feed a day. My girls are easily eating over 100. Some of them I know my highest producer are eating over 120 to 130 lbs a day. So let's look at this in percentage. Right? If she's if her cow's eating two pounds of corn and it's a and on a 50 lb diet, well, that's 4% of her diet is corn. If we take my cows and they're getting 7 lbs per head per day and they're eating 120 lbs of feed, that's like 5% of their diet. So on a percentage basis, my cows, even though I'm a big, you know, not big, but I'm more of a commercial dairy farm like what she would imagine, I'm getting our cows are getting 1% more corn than her cow. That's not enough to cause a negative consequence. And on that note, if feeding corn to a cow was bad, I wouldn't do it. Use this analogy before we continue here. If you're a weightlifter, can you lift if you eat a bunch of food, is that going to allow you to go lift more weights? No. But if you start lifting more weights, are you going to require more food? Yeah. So, when our cows are comfortable, happy, and wellfed, they're going to have they're going to feel an urge probably to produce more milk. We got to meet that energy demand. And a wonderful way to do that is with corn. Let's see what's next.

[00:06:37]>> So that they produce more and more milk.

[00:06:39]And the issue with this is that when they're producing honey, when they're producing that much milk, they are not a healthy cow anymore.

[00:06:49]Those >> Okay, so when they're producing that much milk, they're not a healthy cow anymore. And then the caption here, >> cows usually only last for 2 or 3 years.

[00:06:55]Only live for like 2 or 3 years. Most cows >> those cows only live 2 to 3 years. Does she realize that my cows don't even cave in until they're 2 years old? So, is she suggesting that my cows cave in and they die? Or they cave in, I keep them one more year and they die. Ellie is standing right across from me over here.

[00:07:12]That cow was born in 2018.

[00:07:15]Do the math. That cow right now is coming up on 10 years old. She's 8 years old today.

[00:07:22]And Ellie there is averaging throughout her last four lactations. Off the top of my head, I know it's over 100 pounds. So if Ellie was not healthy being 8 years old, having had corn, you know, a more too high of amount of corn in her world, in her mind, that's not healthy. Then how is Ellie still here? Okay, let's go to our next point.

[00:07:42]>> Can live for about 10 years if they're healthy. So that's the first thing. The second thing they started doing was they started pumping them with hormones, >> the RBST hormone. I believe it's like a boine supplemental >> RBST. So what it does, >> boine supplemental thing. First of all, our BST stands for re combinant bovine sematotroofen.

[00:08:02]In the cow's body, it's naturally called BST. I can see in the captions here, she's talking about how it makes them produce more milk. Let me see what she says here, and we'll wrap this part up.

[00:08:10]>> What it does is it makes them produce even more milk. So, these cows are being just literally drained.

[00:08:17]>> So, this boine supplemental thing, as she calls it, the correct phrase is boine smatotropen. She says it's making them produce even more milk. Here's what boine smatotropen does. Okay. There's cow, you can't see them, but there's cow 294 and cow 238 right here. Cow 294 produces more milk than 238. I know that. I know these cows. Here's a fun fact. Cow 294 has more BST in her system than cow 238. Did I put it there? No. I have I do not give these cows any BST injections, anything like that. For a lot of dairies, we're not allowed to do that or our pay gets docked or some co-ops won't even pick up our milk anymore. Our co-op is one of those. If I put BSD in my cows, they won't pick up my milk. But guess what? These cows naturally naturally have BST in their system. And part of the reason 294 produces more milk than 238 is because she has more BST in her system. What does it actually do? Does it cause her to produce more milk? No. Over the course of her lactation, she will give more milk for one reason. Her mammal epithelial cells continue to produce milk. So if throughout a cow's lactation, she's given this much milk, this much milk, and eventually she starts to taper off, that's because her body doesn't have as much BST in her system, and so it tells her u to start involuting, to start getting rid of those mammal epithelial cells. Cows that have a higher amount of BST, those she doesn't involute. Her body says, "Yeah, just keep making more milk." But cows that have lower amounts of BST, eventually they say, "Yeah, let's start involuting." So cows that give more milk have more BST in her system. So it's not something we give them. Now let me put an asterisk by that. Historically the dairy industry has given cows a dose of BST which was recon. It's where the R came in but it synthesized in their bodies immediately. It wasn't we weren't giving cows of normal levels. What we would have done 15, 20 years ago when this was more common, like for cow 238, if I wanted her production to match 294s, I would give 290 or 238 RBSD but not 294. Am I asking 238's body to do something that it can't handle? No. I'm asking her body to do something that 294's body is already doing. Just don't involute. So in a 300 day window, she'll give more milk because she her udder did not involute. All right, let's see what she says next to.

[00:10:49]>> For every single penny possible, they are unhealthy cows. They are not living in healthy conditions. They probably have mastitis because God knows if you're producing that much milk, you have mastitis.

[00:11:01]>> And they are just >> So she says, "God knows if you're producing that much milk, you have mastitis."

[00:11:08]I have a four-year degree and I have a bachelor's degree in dairy science.

[00:11:12]Nowhere was I taught that more milk means more mastitis. that that just doesn't comprehend. The more milk you're giving, the healthier that cow probably is, the more nutritionally balanced she is, and the more comfortable she is.

[00:11:23]These are marathon runners. If you're they're burning an insane amount of energy, can Michael Phelps be an Olympic athlete and be unhealthy? Absolutely not. Can you run a marathon and be unhealthy? And look, and and on the on the flip side of that, if I said, "Oh, marathon runner, therefore unhealthy."

[00:11:42]That's the paradigm I'm hearing from this video. giving a lot of milk, therefore unhealthy. That makes no sense.

[00:11:49]>> And they're just they're just living in these really poor conditions.

[00:11:52]>> They're just living in these really poor conditions.

[00:11:56]I not sure how a cow brush, sand bedding, ventilation, sand, all you can eat feed, all you can drink water, and a robot you can milk yourself at any time is a poor condition.

[00:12:08]>> And that is why this milk has to be pasteurized.

[00:12:11]>> Okay, now we're getting to the crux of the issue. All of that is why milk has to be pasturized.

[00:12:15]>> If you are doing all this stuff to your cow, it's not going to be healthy and it's not going to produce healthy, beautiful milk.

[00:12:23]So yeah, that's why they have to pasteurize the milk in stores and it's actually very very important for the people's health. But if you are looking for raw milk, find a raw dairy who is taking care of their few little cows.

[00:12:40]Not thousands of cows. They're few cows.

[00:12:43]Who's making sure they're clean? Who's making sure everything is sanitized and they have the the best healthiest cows?

[00:12:50]Make sure their cows are living on beautiful green pastures. That's She just whipped me in the face. She does not like that I'm talking. Honey, did you see that?

[00:13:02]Anyways, I don't even remember what I was saying, but >> okay, >> I'm going to go. I'm very thrown off now.

[00:13:10]>> So, here's what we'll wrap up. I'm not going to get into all the raw milk discussion right now. We'll do that in another video. But, a couple things I want to point out. She talks about how you can find your milk from somebody who cares for a few cows. You know, it's sanitized. You know, it's clean. I just want to point out an observation from what we're seeing in this video where she's squirting milk from the cow's utter into this pale.

[00:13:31]We don't know what else is in that barn.

[00:13:33]We don't know what else that cow's been laying down in. What kind of stuff, dandruff, might be falling out of this cow's fur into that milk bucket? What organic matter could be falling off of that udder into that milk bucket? What is so unique about like our robots in a parlor system like what some of my other dairy farmer friends have is when that liner is attached to the te that milk physically never sees the light of day until it goes into your glass. Cuz that liner attaches to that te. It goes through the liner through the hose into the milk jar. milk jar fills up. It goes into the bulk tank. The bulk tank gets sucked out into the milk truck. The milk truck at the plant gets emptied into the uh I forget the exact first process, but where the holding tank for the holding area is at the plant, it gets pasteurized. It gets put into the bottles, yada yada yada. It never cease to light a day until you pour it out of your jug.

[00:14:24]What kind of risk and contamination are we looking at there? We still say it's safer for this to be pasteurized because even if it never sees the light a day, even if it never sees organic matter fall into it. Cows are living creatures.

[00:14:37]They're living things and they shed organisms. That's where a lot of people got sick back in the day. It wasn't because of necessarily living conditions. It wasn't because something was getting in their milk. It's because these are living animals and sometimes things get in their milk that we can't control even if we have the best environment. Milk is the safest, most tested, most thoroughly reviewed product that's almost ever existed. And there's no reason not to pasteurize milk.

[00:15:04]>> Bye.

[00:15:08]>> We are drying up cows today. One time my daughter asked, "If we have the dry cows, where are the wet cows?" I'm like, it's actually not a profound question, but I'm like, you're thinking about this the right way. So the milking cows are the wet cows. They're they're giving milk. The dry cows are dry cuz they're not giving milk. So a dry cow is just essentially that we'll let the cows milk anywhere uh from we start kind of trying to get them pregnant around 80 90 days in milk. So they'll stay in milk for you know a year maybe more than a year and then we give them when they're 60 days from cving we stop milking them. We give them 60 days for their udder to go through this process called involution.

[00:15:45]So the old meamary epithelial cells will kind of shrivel up and then we have 60 days for them to rest, get a different diet, but then they go through uh mamogenesis. They start creating new mamary epithelial cells. Say that 10 times fast. So this way they're prepared for their next lactation. They get a lower energy diet, more roughage, more straw to keep their room stoked. But today is the first step for four cows of this dry off process. Today is the day we actually dry them up and they move to their next barn for 60 days. And that's a two group process. We'll go over that when we get there. But over here we have cow 995 right there. 273 and right here 121. So we have those three over here. We have one on the north side. Um I'm going to get my products out here and we'll show you everything they get.

[00:16:34]This is product number one.

[00:16:37]Product number two. So what we do here is this is a two-step process. And there's some interesting things happening in the dairy industry that might change how this looks in the next few years. But essentially, we keep it pretty simple right now. They get an antibiotic. Hear me out a minute cuz that's kind of a dirty word for some people. And they get a te sealant. Why do we do kind of a more I don't want to call it a broad structum antibiotic, but it kind of is.

[00:17:07]In a lot of ways, this is simply cheap insurance. So, one of the most d I shouldn't say one of the most dangerous things, but I mean it's it's one of the things as a dairy farmer we think about the most often is mastitis. We're in the nature of producing milk. Our cows are.

[00:17:22]So, obviously the first thing on the forefront of my mind is to produce high quality milk. Well, mastitis is the exact opposite of high quality milk. So, I got to keep count here. Uh we give them this. it's going to stay in their udder longer than like something I would give a cow who's sick while she's given milk. So, we give them this antibiotic, not because they're sick, not because I know they're going to get sick, but honestly just as an insurance just to make sure they don't get sick. And even if it saves, if I drive up 100 cows a year, if by doing this it prevents two cows from getting sick, I paid for it.

[00:17:55]So, that's why we do the antibiotic. And then our old veterinarian said, "You could eat this and you'd be fine." So, he's a doctor. We'll trust him. Uh, but then we so we have the antibiotic in there. Now, here's another critical thing. And actually, we'll talk about this when we get over there by the cow.

[00:18:09]I'll kind of show you what I'm talking about. But we have the teeth sealant.

[00:18:14]That's what it sounds like. It seals the tea up so that this way nothing gets in there. Uh, but we also want to kind of prevent too much milk from leaking out.

[00:18:23]Now, we'll talk about that here in just a second. So, let me get my tubes here cuz I don't want to lose count. We're going to get these for the three cows loaded up. One, two, three.

[00:18:33]Okay, that should be for the cows. The other thing I need is alcohol pads to sterilize the tits. Sterilize, sanitize, disinfect.

[00:18:42]I used to know the difference between all these words, disinfect, sterilize, sanitize. And I'm sure somebody in the comments can clue me into every little unique difference. Now, one little headache here is they quit sending us alcohol pads with these tubes, and so I'm using up all my extras. So, I may end up doing it the oldfashioned way with iodine and a towel. Where did dad go?

[00:19:08]Hey, Dad.

[00:19:11]You want to see the Norma call? Richard.

[00:19:16]See, that got him. My grandma's name was Norma. She used to just lean out of the house when she lived here and she would just lean out the door and yell Richard just like that. He didn't have cell phones back then. That's how she got a hold of him. But it works. I heard me.

[00:19:29]Anyways, seriously, you could be down by the creek and Norma would lean out the front door and do that and dad would go up there and she'd tell him the milk sample that was good. You know, if he sent a milk sample off to Swiss Valley, he would tell him that was good. See, he knows normal. Um, we're out of alcohol pads. Can you grab the iodine?

[00:19:50]>> The dipper.

[00:19:53]These are the alcohol pads. It's what they sound like. just like what you get after you eat chicken wings at or you know wings at Buffalo Wild Wings. But for some reason they quit sending these.

[00:20:02]I don't know if it's some logistical issue. But we usually will just use iodine just like you would in an old parlor. Get the teeth cleaned off, wipe them off the paper towel, and then we'll administer our product. So dad's grabbing that. I'm going to put some gloves on just to help prevent any crosscontamination.

[00:20:25]This is one downside to the robots is when we up in the parlor, you know, you'd stand down in the pit, so their rudder would be at eye level. Here, it's a lot more bending over. They're also not used to us touching their rudder.

[00:20:38]Back in the parlor, we wiped every cow, prepped every cow. Here, we really don't do that anymore. So, sometimes we need to give them time to warm up a little bit. Let them get that out of their system.

[00:20:50]This is where the saying scared the crap out of you comes from because like when you kind of spook a cow, you literally scare the crap out of them.

[00:20:57]273 is the only one that I know is a little squirly. Sometimes the temperature of the iodine can kind of startle them a little bit.

[00:21:06]And then the next step is to get the iodine off. And the biggest thing I focus on is the teet ends. I want to make sure that there's no organic matter, sand, manure. I mean, especially manure, but just anything on the TED ends cuz that's where the uh antibiotic is going to be administered through.

[00:21:27]So, I grab two antibiotic tubes first.

[00:21:33]Hey girl, find the te orifice one tube.

[00:21:47]two tube and then I grab my TE sealant.

[00:21:56]I kind of pinch the top of the TE so the sealant stays in the canal.

[00:22:06]And there the back two TES are done. You can kind of see they actually get more nervous when I touch their leg cuz they think I'm trying to restrain them or something. See like there my wrist touched her leg a little bit or the sorry the plunger of the other syringe in my hand touched her leg and you can see if she did not want me doing this I'm in a prime position to get my face cococked here.

[00:22:36]And this is actually one of our Oops, I dropped that cap. Flyier cows and she still trust us down here.

[00:22:49]Okay, this girl's done. So, dad is trimming the tails off. Again, this is part of just cleanliness. Like you can see this cow here, her tails. I mean, this one actually could even be trimmed more to be honest, but just prevents manure from sticking to it. And if there's manure on the tail, you can see how close it hangs together. So the manure on the tail gets on the udder. So it's all part of just being clean.

[00:23:11]This is a big girl. She's kind of squirly.

[00:23:18]We probably will.

[00:23:21]Paper towel.

[00:23:25]>> Yeah, I just start with one here. I'll just get all four of them right away. If she doesn't move, that'll work.

[00:23:45]What's that?

[00:23:47]>> Spectra.

[00:23:49]>> Uh, spectrum mass. Actually, I am out now after these four.

[00:23:56]See, it just kind of I don't even know what you would call this. I mean, it's not glue, but it kind of >> like a chalky substance.

[00:24:05]>> Yeah. You want to taste it?

[00:24:06]>> No.

[00:24:08]>> Doc Wolf said it was fine.

[00:24:09]>> Yeah.

[00:24:10]>> Put your money where your mouth is.

[00:24:13]There's actually some new therapies coming out where you give them these pills and they wreak of garlic. like for for two three days if I pled these four cows the whole farm would just weak of garlic but it's supposed to send a signal to their brain to help them just quit producing milk so they dry off faster so the utters create more of a natural te sealant and I think the research is promising I'm just kind of waiting for a little bit more data industrywide to know if it's a great thing but I I like the concept and I think yeah it is really promising But part of our dry cow management here too is people are going to asking, "Well, if we quit milking them, aren't they going to get mastitis?

[00:24:59]Aren't they going to get very, very uncomfortable?" There are times where certain cows will be giving too much milk at dry off. So, what we'll actually do is run them up to the other barn and then bring them back and we'll do that a couple times just to drop them. We actually want to knock them down on production. These girls today are all milking less than like 60 lbs of milk.

[00:25:18]That's a pretty very bare minimal amount of discomfort that they would face for when we just quit milking them. If this cow here was given like 120 lbs of milk a day, it would be very unwise to just quit milking her, move her over there, say, "See you later." But our goal is to knock them down at least under 70, under 60 is ideal. So, sometimes we'll do some things, cut them off of pellets, move them to a new barn, um things like that, just to make sure we're getting them down on milk. So this way they don't have, you know, an uncomfortable amount of pressure on their udder when we quit milking them. So one more cow. Yeah.

[00:25:50]Hold on. I want to check her here quick.

[00:25:53]She has a little bit of pressure to her.

[00:25:56]Not pressure, but a little bit of milking her. I just want to confirm she is low enough here.

[00:26:04]Yeah, that's 373. Yeah, she's right at 70 lb. So she's good to go. I got to I forgot I got to grab a couple more tubes cuz I only put three in for the cows.

[00:26:20]Yep. So, this one te only has three teeths. Sometimes that happens.

[00:26:27]The other's a little bit dirtier.

[00:26:32]>> Oh, no. I'm getting them clean enough.

[00:26:36]Don't really know why you'll get a cow with three teeths.

[00:26:42]could have been something that happened to her as a calf.

[00:26:49]It sometimes can be genetic.

[00:26:52]I think a lot of guys usually think it's mostly environmental. So, something happened as a calf.

[00:27:05]Okay, they're all dried up. Now, we got to vaccinate them. We'll grab some vaccinations in here.

[00:27:14]first because if I don't do it now, I'm not very good at it. I'm going to put my stuff away as I go.

[00:27:23]Now, this is something we've done for a long time is vaccinate our dry cows. So, we have a couple products we use specifically, and these are there's a lot of misconceptions around this. So, you'll hear people who are kind of anti-conventional dairy say, "We do this because our animals are sick and we have to boost their immune system."

[00:27:44]Healthy people get vaccines all the time, right? We don't vaccinate a sick person. You vaccinate a healthy person so they don't get sick. Same concept here. So, this one can help boost against certain pathogens that can increase the risk for mastitis. This one actually helps does some booster for their first milking of colostrum. So if we give them this one, it reduces the risk of them having certain pathogenic bacteria in their colostrum for their calf. So this one actually benefits their calf. This one kind of more benefits the cow. So I got two guns I always use specifically for these. These are also specifically meant to be administered at a certain depth. So this one is subcutaneous, which means we put a little bit shorter needle on. We go at an angle. Subcutaneous means we want to go between the skin and the muscle. This one is IM intramuscular. So we use a slightly longer needle and we go straight in. So these are 16 gauge needles.

[00:28:42]This is the one my wife had when she got an epidural at least.

[00:28:46]So this is the green needles are the ones we use for some other vaccinations that require uh a little bit more like you know intramuscular action but otherwise I use the 16 by1's. So that's just a fun fact. I'm not using these ones here today. So let's give these cows their shot here first. So cows are really really big babies.

[00:29:07]When we get shots, the needles are mildly smaller than this. And we're a lot smaller creatures, but you'll see they they do not really care for this.

[00:29:15]So this one I'm going at a bit of an angle cuz we want it subcutaneously.

[00:29:25]These four girls got to get moved out of this barn and they're going to head over to the dry cow barn. And we actually I do got to clean that later today here too, especially with the rain we've had.

[00:29:34]It kind of made a mess in there. We got everything put away. Don's going to watch one door. Dad is getting the gates ready so that uh we put the gates in a certain place so they run over to the barn. Don will watch this gate. Dad will watch the alleyway. We'll sort them out and run them up there. So they're vaccinated, dry treated, utter singed.

[00:29:53]They've been milked in the last few hours. So that's the whole dry off procedure. The last step is moving them out.

[00:30:44]Uh-huh.