New transition cow care advice and what rumination data can tell us | Ep. 127

The weeks around calving can have a big influence on cow health, production and reproductive performance. In this episode, DairyNZ scientist Dr Stacey Hendriks and dairy cattle vet Ryan Luckman discuss the latest advice on transition cow care, including DairyNZ’s updated feeding guidance for springers at target body condition score. 

They also look at the role of rumination data and wearables — what they can show you, where their limits are, and how they can support better decisions when used alongside good feed management, stockmanship and knowledge of your own herd. 

Read more: Transition cows | DairyNZ

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Transcript

Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Kiora and welcome to Talking Dairy. I'm your host Jack McGowan from DairyNZ. It's great to have you with us. Today we're focusing on a short but demanding part of the season, the weeks either side of carving when cows move from late pregnancy into lactation. Dairy cows go through big physical changes during this time, so transition cow management is one of the most important parts of the season to get right. How cows come through this period shows up quickly in their health, milk in the vat, reproductive performance, and how the rest of the season unfolds. The fundamentals still matter. Setting springers up with the right nutrition, minerals, body condition, and carving environment gives them the best chance to recover well after carving. At the same time, more farmers are now using wearable technology. That gives us more information about what's happening in the herd, including rumination patterns and recovery after carving. But more data doesn't automatically mean better decisions. So today we're joined by DairyZ scientist Dr. Stacy Hendricks and Dairy Cattle vet Ryan Luckman to talk through transition cow care rumination data and what wearables are telling us on farm. Tina Kurua, Stacy and Ryan, so good to have you here.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

Thanks for having us, Jack.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Yeah, good to see you again, Jack. Right, Stacy, you've been on a few times already as one of DairyZ's scientists specialising in animal care and wearables. It's nice to see you again as well. Ryan, this is your first time on Talking Dairy. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became interested in wearable technology?

SPEAKER_02 1:37

So I am based down in Waimati, so down in the South Island. Yeah, I've been a dairy vet for quite a while and really into my data and spreadsheets and geeking out. Back in about 2020, we started to get more and more of these wearables in our practice. And you started to look at what data was available and what you could do with it. And it just got me very, very excited.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Okay.

Setting springers up for a smoother transition

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Stacy, let's start with springers. What are the key things we can do before carving to set cows up for a good transition?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Yeah, so the best outcomes from successful springer and carving management, it really comes down to getting the basics right before carving. So we have a few cost-effective levers that we can pull in a pasture-based system. So the three key levers that we typically would be focusing on would be optimal body condition score at carving, ensuring appropriate pre-carving feeding levels, and mineral supplementation. So yeah, we are recording this episode in June. So hopefully you're already thinking about setting your springers up for success when we're talking about these different levers that we're considering to set cows up. We're really thinking about that two to three weeks before the plan started carving. So depending on where you are in the country, that could be anywhere from about three weeks away, potentially up to six if you're a bit further south. So there's still potentially some time to gain some body condition score, or you might already be sort of focusing on your pre-carving feeding levels and mineral supplementation based on where your animals are sitting. And hopefully they're hitting target body condition score. If not, you know, you just have to work with what you've got effectively. So ideally, if you're hitting your body condition score targets, that looks like a five in mixed age four or older cows, and you're looking at five and a half for the R2s and the R threes in your herd. So typically when we talk about target body condition score, we're thinking about the average, but it's also useful to think about the spread. So, you know, you might have an average of five, for example, in your mixed-age cows, but you might still have some slightly over-conditioned or underconditioned animals. So these are really your at-risk cows. What are the risks of each of those? Yeah. So with a low body condition score animal, these animals are potentially more likely to experience prolonged negative energy balance post-carving. And this can have impacts on things like milk production and potentially it can delay their ability to recover and so potentially delay cycling when it comes to your mating period. So it does really have flow-on effects to the rest of the season. And animals that are very high can end up mobilizing a lot more body fat. And this can actually increase their risk of things like metabolic and infectious disease in that early post-carving period. So yeah, ultimately, you know, your primary target is really getting those body condition score targets hit. And then you've sort of got those additional levers that I mentioned, feeding accordingly and mineral supplementation as additional things that you can be doing. So we'll touch on those a little bit more. So when we talk about feeding accordingly, this is a secondary tool. Like once you've got your cows on track to carve within that target body condition score, those that are at target body condition, the goal is really to feed those cows just right. So we want to feed them enough to meet their energy requirements, but we don't want to feed them so much that they're overfed. So feeding at around 100% of their total energy requirements is what we recommend. If you do have cows that are above target, they may benefit from a more controlled feeding approach where you can feed to about 90% of energy requirements. But if you are doing this, you do really need to allocate that feed well and really manage that feed well to ensure that you're not creating a severe restriction effectively. And in those circumstances, you'd probably be managing a separate herd of those at-risk animals.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Okay. Stacy, that's the feeding. Tell us about mineral supplementation.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Yeah, so the third practical tool for springer management that we typically rely on quite heavily in a pasture-based system is mineral supplementation. So this is a method that we can try and reduce the risk of metabolic disease and milk fever. So magnesium supplementation is quite important pre- and post-carving. This supports calcium absorption from the diet and also mobilization of calcium from the bone. So we typically recommend starting magnesium supplementation two to three weeks before carving. And this can continue into lactation for up to four months post-carving. And then in terms of calcium supplementation, we recommend keeping calcium low pre-carving and then supplementing post-carving, particularly in colostrum cows. So this is quite an effective strategy for milk fever prevention. And it really just supports that massive increase that animals experience as they carve and then have to produce colostrum and milk for the rest of the season. So ultimately, as a cow moves from a dry cow to a lactating animal, their calcium requirements can increase by about 400%. So yeah, you've got a range of options there in terms of how you provide these supplements. And so this goes for both the magnesium and calcium. You've got delivery options like adding it to your dositron, adding minerals to feed or dusting pasture. A lot of farmers often use a combination of approaches. So, you know, trying to get some of those minerals through water and others through dusting, for example.

A more targeted approach to feeding

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Cool. Thank you. Now you've talked about feed allocation being important. Some listeners may remember earlier advice about restricting cows that were already at target body condition score. And Dairy and Z advice has now shifted to feeding cows with a BCS of five at 100% instead of restricting them slightly. Can you talk us through what's changed there?

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Yeah, so the advice around springers has shifted. 20 or more years ago, the common advice was actually to steam up your springers. So the kind of rationale behind this was that if you could increase pre-carving intakes, that could potentially reduce that negative energy balance that cows often experience after carving.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Some listeners may not even know what you mean by steam up.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Yeah. So the idea behind that is trying to effectively feed them ad libertum or overfeed them. So potentially at 120 to 150% of their requirements, for example. And so off the back of this advice, there was a substantial amount of research that was undertaken in housed cows and more recently in grazing cows that did show that overfeeding, so you know, 120% of requirements in the two to three weeks pre-carving can have negative effects and lead to poor metabolic outcomes. That effectively led to the recommendation of feeding at 90% of requirements, where the emphasis was really around avoiding overfeeding off the back of that advice at the time. Whereas the current thinking is more about targeted energy intake. So we don't want cows to be overfed, but we also don't want cows to be underfed. So a lot of that research that I mentioned earlier also looked at underfeeding, particularly in low body condition score cows, that can also have negative effects on their metabolic health and their milk production. So we're really recommending that cows that are at or below our target body condition score should be fed to 100% of their requirements. And so we're really revising the messaging from an intentional restriction to targeted feeding. So the cow is fed just right. And this updated advice also reflects some of the practical challenges that farmers face. So usually they are managing a range of body condition scores within a herd, and then how they practically apply these different feeding strategies on farm can also make it quite difficult sometimes to achieve a really precise 90% of requirements. And I think Ryan's gonna talk a little bit about that. So yeah, it'd be interesting to hear his farmer-facing experience.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Yeah, Ryan. Stacey's just explained the science and the update to that feeding advice. What are you seeing on the ground with farmers?

SPEAKER_02 10:23

Yeah, no, it's been fascinating on the ground. So if we jump forward, so we're gonna talk about the post-carving experience shortly. And that's kind of where we started with this wearables experience. We were looking at how quickly cows were recovering in terms of their rumination rate. And we kept coming upon this like stumbling block where we'd have herds that were doing things that we thought they were doing everything right, everything was going well, but they were just getting a really poor recovery. And it wasn't until we actually started looking backwards and looked pre-carving and realized actually one of the key drivers was they were massively underfeeding these mobs, and they just had no energy in the tank when they hit the ground at carving. They didn't eat for say 24 hours around that carving experience. They had no calcium on board, no energy, and it was like trying to run a marathon on no energy. And so we started doing quite a lot of these energy budgets, and we were very much in the camp of 90% or below as advisors nowadays, and we'd seen it work really well in terms of reducing these metabolic issues, which I think was kind of the intention. But our farmers had taken it very far. You know, if you say don't overfeed your springers, what we were commonly finding was that these farmers were feeding 60% of maintenance.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Intentionally or unintentionally, that's what happened.

SPEAKER_02 11:54

Both. So I think two things happened. Like we kind of lost the concept of what maintenance was for these animals. So we didn't actually have a really good grasp on that. And we knew knew what tight was, and we knew what a tight springer looked like, which was, you know, grass-decked to the grounds and and really pushed quite tight. And so uh the first thing we actually started to do was actually measure and increase that allocation, which in our our South Island herds were often they were feeding some straw as well. It ended up being almost 12 kilos of high quality feed plus straw, which was markedly different to what was probably an eight kilo kind of emphasis. So just changing that has made as much difference as anything else that we're going to talk about for a lot of these herds.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Uh okay. So you've supported farmers to kind of revise their feed budgets. What have they seen as a result of that?

SPEAKER_02 12:51

Well, it's been really good because you get them on this journey, and the great thing about wearables is you get really good feedback on two things. So A, you can see how things are going in the back, how your cows are looking, are they happier, etc. But you also get this numeric feedback every day to say, like, today my rumination figure is 450. I know I feed them well, I calculated that tomorrow it's only 300, and I know I really put the screws on them and didn't feed them. They really responded to this uh feedback, and it if you set it up right with a team, they were kind of self-managing. So you didn't want to be the guy doing the break, going out and underfeeding and coming back to a 300-minute-a-day crash, because yeah, there was no hiding from the data anymore.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Right, yeah. All right, so we've talked about getting springers to the right body condition and then trying to feed them well before the right amount, just right amount before carving. Yeah. Now let's move on to what happens after carving. So how cows recover and how farmers can monitor and respond. You've already started to talk about it a little bit, Ryan.

What rumination data can add to your decisions

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Stacy, one of the big changes in the sector is the rapid uptake of wearable technology, including the ability to monitor rumination, which Ryan was talking about. Can you explain what rumination is, what drives it, and what's typical for a cow after carving?

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Based on the data that we have available from actually mostly older studies, you know, like rumination in itself is a key biological function of the cow. So they do need to chew their card and regurgitate it and re-chew it is a key part of their digestion and it's part of a healthy functioning animal to be ruminating. So, yeah, there's a lot of research dating back to the 90s and earlier, in fact, that had characterized aspects of rumination and what was normal for an animal and how it related to different components of the diet, for example. So, although, you know, having the data available at the scale that we have now with wearables, the concept of understanding rumination isn't new. However, there are lots of questions now that are cropping up in terms of how to use the data for management that we possibly, you know, haven't answered previously. So, based on the data that is available, the average for a herd is typically sitting around seven to eight hours a day based on what's characterized in the literature. The devices do have slight differences between them in terms of the minutes that they'll report, we do expect to see that relatively the changes across time are consistent. But yeah, effectively what that means is that although we would expect an average for a herd between, say, seven to eight hours, there may be some variation in the actual numbers you'll see in the data. And then there's of course individual variation. So for individual cows, you know, that can be anywhere from three to ten hours a day. It's also heavily influenced by lots of external factors and animal-based factors. So, you know, things like breed and the size of the animal can have an impact on rumination time. But I guess at a sort of herd level, the things that we would expect to have an effect are things like feed quality and quantity offered, also the weather, and I guess on an individual level, things like health can have an effect. So what we would expect to see around carving is that rumination usually drops around carving, and then healthy cows will start to ruminate within about 40 minutes to 12 hours, and then they gradually recover over a sort of one to two weeks. But yeah, each cow will recover at her own pace and pattern, and those that are potentially lower or higher pre-carving may also be lower or higher post-carving. So we sort of do see individual cow differences that are consistent across time.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Okay, so what I'm hearing is that you can't kind of compare different rumination technologies directly to each other, and but also that you can't compare cows within a herd directly to each other.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Yeah, you definitely have to like be aware of what's normal for your herd and understand what level of variation is also normal for your herd. I think ultimately too low or too high is potentially not great. And I think we'll probably touch on that a little bit later in terms of like what could drive, for example, a very high or a very low rumination time and how that kind of links to things like cow health and feeding and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Let's bring you in, Ryan. What does this look like in practice?

SPEAKER_02 17:43

What we're trying to achieve is a really fast recovery. So Stacy's already mentioned that there's a long period post-carving when animals are in a negative energy balance. And so that's going to happen. But if we can limit the amount or time in that post-carving period, then we can reduce body condition score loss, and we can reduce the negative effects on endometritis and cycling rates and all those nasty things that come around that transition zone, we can hopefully improve. And there's really good science around that. What's new is kind of using these wearables to help inform those feeding decisions and inform those management decisions. And so what we're trying to do is we've got that dip at the point of carving where rumination drops.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Can that be used as an indication for a cow carving?

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Uh or is it not accurate enough? Kind of. It's the holy grail of all wearable companies to be able to predict carving. Farmers will pay good money for it. So when one finally gets it, no, it's not quite consistent behavioural pattern yet to be a good indicator. But it is pretty consistent that they do drop to some degree. It's just making it consistence tricky. So as we come out of that drop, if we can get the sooner we get to what I call normal for that herd, and the way I think about normal for that herd is if you're feeding a diet to a herd, and eventually after say 10 or 14 days, they'll hit a rumination rate of you know, seven and a half hours or I think in minutes rather than hours, so 450 minutes, then the sooner that we can get to that point on that diet, they're probably eating more energy or taking in more energy. Therefore, they have to mobilize less fat off their back. So that's really what we're trying to do. We don't necessarily have a specific target per herd, but the shape of that curve and that line, you know, the feeding and what you're feeding is so critical to this. And when we I think it was about year one when we were looking at this, we had one farm doing amazingly well. They were the poster child of recovery. And at day 10 they crashed and everything fell apart. And we found out they'd been feeding straw to their colostrum mob. So they had great rumination because rumination is really driven by fibrous feeds and low-quality feeds. Well, you know, you had a five or a six hundred minute, you can look great. But what we're really wanting to get is more energy in. So, yeah, just remembering that is a real important factor.

Practical ways to support cows after calving

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Ryan, if farmers are seeing poor rumination recovery after carving, what should they do?

SPEAKER_02 20:33

So this is the really cool thing about wearables. Whereas historically, what we kind of had to do to a farmer was almost give them cookie-cutter recipes. Go do this. This is what you need to do because this works. Instead, what we now can say is right, here is what you're trying to achieve. You're trying to achieve a fast recovery. You've got your wearables here, and this is how you look at your data to see what your recovery line looks like. And then we've got a whole lot of strategies that actually we've learned from farmers by having these tools in place that we know work on their farms. You don't have to use all of them, but if you use a pot poory of these tools, you'll probably find the ones that work well on your farm that actually work because you're making these changes, you're looking at your rumination data to see if your cows respond and your farm responds. And does it work in with your system and your feeding and your staff on board and make a difference? But obviously, people then still want rules and stuff to follow. So we do have those as well. So, in terms of specifics, I break it down into five main rules. So the first one is day zero is critical, and that's just going back to if you don't get your springers right, it's really hard. You're just fighting an uphill battle in that recovery period. So focus there. That's why that first part of this talk is really hard. So important. The second one is, I mean, sounds very basic, but offer enough feed. So what we found, because we had this daily feedback, is you'd set a farm up or they would be doing really well. The following day, they'd be doing really bad. Three days later, they might be good. Sometimes they'd be bad. And spring is a stressful time. You've got cows carving every day. And often these farms that were having these non-consistent performances didn't have systems set up with their staff to enable the fact that there were 50 more cows carved today. When did you feed that break? How did that happen? Actually doing that was really critical in having systems to make sure you knew what you should be feeding and you're enacting that. And the good thing about the wearables is they give you very good feedback on if you're suddenly doing really good and then you fall behind, there's usually a reason. The third one in that colostrum period is residuals. So it's hard to find a concrete target in terms of what a colostrum residual looks like. There's about one study from Darian Z, I think, which is kind of mentioned in 1800 kgs dry matter per hectare as a residual target. And from our anecdotal feedback, that's kind of where we've landed. So we know that grass quality is critical and we want to hit our targets, but the colostrum mob for that first four days is not the group to look at cleaning up paddocks. So anytime we see cows pushed low, and especially if you hit 1500s, you're having to really put the squeeze on the amount of feed offered to hit that. Because the next point we're about to get to is that cows just simply don't want to eat at this point. They've got all these hormones and negative feedbacks and ketones, and in essence, cows don't want to eat at that point. And so the next one is almost around cow psychology in terms of offering multiple feeding opportunities.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

To entice them?

SPEAKER_02 24:10

To entice them or trick them. So if you think everyone will have seen this with, say, calves or any any mob, you wind up the real, what happens? They go and eat. They stand up from wherever they are, they go and eat. Every time you offer them something new, they go and eat. And so this really came clear to us when we used to have a strategy called drop-in paddocks. So these were cows freshly carved, and you put them in this like paddock with 3,000 cover grass, plenty of food, no excuses. Yeah. No things, they'll go really well. I can almost pick it from the data if people do that now because the cows just don't eat. And so we're actually finding we put them in the claustrum mobs and do all the our other strategies. So that multiple feeding opportunities include things like giving them multiple breaks in a day. So instead of one big break, two or three break feeds in a day. And some of the new wearable technologies are allowing people to really extend that out to seven or eight in some cases. But then the other things around, you know, if you're feeding other feed types, so in-shed feeding, having that available. And one of the big changes that we've had available us, especially in the South Island, is putting baleage or something available 24-7. And typically in a spot where cows will hang out bored. So we know if you go to a paddock, claustrum cows, where do they like to hang out? By the gate. They like to go looking for stuff. So having a feeder with baleage in there really helps, or a PK trailer or something. So all that kind of stuff really helps.

Getting the mob right first

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Okay, so you've been talking about how to manage the colostrum mob well. What about individual cows?

SPEAKER_02 26:01

So I always start at the mob level because I find this is both a huge advantage and a what we call decision fatigue issue with wearables, in that one of the key things that enables you to do is identify sick cows early. And so these are cows which have rumination that's different, activity that's different to their peers or compared to themselves, and they're going early. The issue with them is that the wearables are far, far, far better than us at picking them up. If you look at some of the overseas studies, they're picking up diseases one to two days earlier than humans doing a lot more intensive checks than we're doing. So in spring, if you get a heap of these health alert cows, so these are these algorithms saying this cow is not as healthy. If you draft those and look at those, a lot of those cows will look absolutely normal to you. You'll check them, you'll go, well, this is a waste of time, you'll open the gate and never look at them again. So always start at the herd level, get your feeding right first. If you get your transition right, you'll drop your numbers dramatically. You'll take them from, you know, in our area, we can easily have 50 to 60 cows on a health alert report if we don't have our transition right. If you get ours down to 10 and look at the worst, you know, five, suddenly it's a really valuable tool because you really are picking up properly sick cows who really benefit from the attention. And you can, and it's not just about jabbing them with penicillin, it's about what can we do metabolically? Can we put them preferentially into a mob? Can we put them on once a day, which we'll probably talk about in a second, and stuff like that?

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Yeah. Um if you're saying that the tech can alert us earlier than we can actually see a problem, what does a farmer do with that information? Like how do they decide what they should do if they can't see it yet?

SPEAKER_02 28:11

Yeah. So one of the things we do with our farmers is we have like decision tree algorithms essentially. And a key part of that is we triage off things like uterine infections or lameness, mistitis, the common spring scenarios that are relatively easy to identify and treat. But a lot of what we end up doing is around metabolics and feeding. So we know if you get to these animals early, you try and get more energy into them or get calcium into them. Because a lot of these sick cows won't eat as much. They'll then get further subclinical hypocalcemia. It becomes this catch-22 where they'll stop eating as much. And so if we can get calcium, get them eating, often their own immune system will deal with it and it's a lot better. And that's actually the fifth point is actually around calcium, is that we can literally, if people aren't getting calcium into their colostrum cows, just fixing that point, we'll often see rumination rises of up to 50 minutes a day, just because I think it enables them, drives that appetite and they eat more.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Okay, you mentioned once-a-dailing. Tell us about that.

Once-a-day milking as a transition tool

SPEAKER_01 29:29

How does that fit in? Right. So I loved once-a-day milking for my colostrum.

SPEAKER_02 29:35

Yeah, it's great. I think we have to be upfront with the science and what we're trying to achieve. So the first thing I think is that once-a-day milking post-carving is a tool and it's a fantastic tool, and farmers love it. What we're trying to do in terms of a transition recovery is that we know if we milk them less frequently, two things happen. We take less energy off them, they have more time in the paddock to eat, they walk less. So, overall, massive benefits to a cow that's just carved. If we go to the negatives, we also know from pretty good research and very good New Zealand research, if we do that for too long, we are going to negatively influence their production for the season. They are literally going to produce less for the season. And quite markedly so in some circumstances. And then the third caveat to that is if you milk them once a day and underfeed them, you're really going to be in the hole. So for a lot of our clients, they've found it a really good tool because, you know, if we're on an 800 cow farm in the South Island, you've got 50 plus cows carving a day, having that time in the afternoon to actually do farming work and pick up calves and allocate feeding properly, that is a real lifestyle change and makes their farm system work really well. So it's really good for that. We also find that they have massively improved their feeding and how they were transitioning, and cows are holding body condition score better and they're healthier, and we've got less, you know, endometritis treatments and less mastitis, and so there's all these other flow-on benefits, and then they're hitting a typically a higher peak milk volume and holding that peak for longer. So for them, we have an upfront loss of milk production, but they're picking up that at the back end. The caveat is if in the South Island, that seems to work really well because we've got lots of milk potential in the second half of the season. And if we hold that higher peak, it seems to work. If you are in a situation where you run out of grass in January because you are prone to droughts and stuff, and most of your milk is made in the first half of the season, I think you just have to be careful of when you're going to potentially lose milk up front, potentially not get that peak and not make it up at the end. So and the other side of this is that we also have farmers doing a really good transition job doing twice a day. So it is possible. But what we would say, if you were focusing, if you didn't have to worry about production once a day, it makes it so much easier to achieve, just because everything is in your favour. And if you're doing twice a day, you just have to be doing everything really, really well. You can still do it really well in once a day, obviously, but there is less leeway in a twice-a-day milking to get it right.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Okay.

Rumination links to performance

SPEAKER_01 32:47

Stacy, I want to bring you back in. Talk us through the evidence linking rumination recovery to milk production and reproduction later in the season.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

It does seem from practical experience, and Ryan has touched on it, that potentially there is a link between rumination recovery and things such as milk production and reproductive outcomes and culling risk. So there's some emerging research that's recently come out from Cornell University, and this is in house systems, but they actually found that cows with a slower recovery in their rumination time during the first week after calving, they produce less milk and were less likely to get in calf and more likely to be culled from the herd compared to their herd mates that had either a moderate or a fast recovery rate. And maybe to again, you know, circle back to that point about thinking within herd and kind of like understanding what's normal for your herd, they sort of took this approach when they did this research where they actually used the recovery rate of the herd and placed animals into those slow, moderate, and fast categories based on where they sat in the herd. So they actually took the bottom 25% of cows within the herd and they categorized those animals as slow. They took the middle 50% as the moderate ones, and then the fast cows were those in the top 25%. And so I think it really does demonstrate what Ryan's alluded to in a practical sense that rumination recovery is potentially linked to positive outcomes. And so the real question is going back to some of those levers that he mentioned, you can kind of focus on in terms of, well, how do you actually support good rumination recovery? And I think, you know, you're always going to have potentially animals in your bottom 25%. But can you reduce the number of animals that then go on to have these negative flow on effects, such as reduced milk production and potentially issues with reproduction or um endometritis and things like that. So to bring it back to where we've talked about this at both like an individual level and a mob level, we do expect in healthy cows increasing rumination times. They're on an increasing plane of nutrition post-carving, if they're being fed high-quality spring pasture, we would expect to see the intake capacity increasing. And so I just wanted to add in here, particularly for those farmers that don't have wearables, the kind of fundamental research behind, I guess, some of the ideas that Ryan has touched on around rumination recovery, given there is a link between dry matter intake and rumination time, we do expect to see cows increase their intake across early lactation. So it does actually take cows about 10 to 12 weeks to reach their intake capacity. So essentially, you know, if you're not using wearables, how can you kind of make sure that your animals are getting sufficient high-quality feed? You know, you can go back to ensuring you're actually allocating a sufficient amount and ensuring that they are on an increasing plane of nutrition post-carving. So that accounts for the fact that they could be increasing their weekly intake by up to about a kilo per cow per week in the first six weeks of lactation. And then it slows down slightly and it increases by about just under half a kilo from about week seven to twelve. So it does increase quickly at the beginning and then sort of flattens off. But yeah, it does take about 10 to 12 weeks for them to really reach their peak intake. So rumination rate can really provide useful feedback in terms of how transition cow management's going. But you know, you still need good stockmanship, you still need to manage your feed well, and you need to sort of understand those fundamentals so you can actually get your feed allocations right in the first place to hopefully then support that rumination rate increasing as lactation progresses. But yeah, I don't know, Ryan, if you've got anything else to add to that. But yeah, you've obviously got a lot of that practical experience. I'm not sure how you advise your farmers normally in terms of that increasing plane of nutrition post-carving.

Helpful cow signals if you don’t have wearables

SPEAKER_02 37:25

Yeah, if we go back first of all to this question of if you don't have wearables, like what's the value? And actually it's hugely valuable. And all these learnings from our wearable clients, we've just transferred on to our non-wearable clients. It's been great. In fact, I've got a farm advisor whose whole motto was taking whatever we did, making all his clients do it. And it worked amazingly well. We've had like really good lifts in performance because of it. And um going back to Stacey's point, we can use all these animal signals or cow factors. And so one of the key ones we use in our non-wearable clients around transition is that when they carve, they're going to look like a pear. So they're going to be hollow at the top, they get the bottom because their room is not very full. And we can actually look at how quickly they're recovering by how quickly they increase that room and fill and start to look like an apple. So the apple pear kind of visual is kind of our proxy for rumination in those clients. But they can still do all the same things. So they can still, you know, allocate enough feed, move them multiple times a day, look at residuals and make sure they've got calcium on board. So they're able to do all of that at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

Yeah, so you've been talking about how rumination rate is a sort of an indicator, not the only factor, but it can show us where the transition management's working. Ryan, can you talk us through an example of how that's played out on farm?

SPEAKER_02 38:57

Probably a really good example is a farmer that we struggled with endometritis rates. So they were sitting somewhere between 25 to 30% every year. Yeah, like really high, and we're really struggling to get on top of it. And so they really committed to the cause and kind of hit every part. So they they made sure I think we were feeding 12 kilos and two kilos of straw at the springers. So we had our targets. We had plenty of calcium on board. And they were one of the early ones who adopted, I think they went up to three breaks a day of grass. They put some balage in the corner and followed them through. They also did once-a-day milking for 10 days and then put them out into a twice-a day mob once they were recovered. So they did the full package and we were able to drop the endometritis rates to 10%. And there was obviously, as you could imagine, with dropping that, there were also some really good flow-ons with Repro and they produce more milk and stuff. So, but we've got multiple stories like that. It's it is a cool one because while we say it to farmers, farmers tell other farmers about their success and what they've done. And I mean, there's a reason I think we're almost 70% collar adoption in our practice because farmers talk to farmers about how good it's gonna.

Key take-home messages

SPEAKER_01 40:14

Okay, Stacey, for farmers who don't have wearables and for farmers who do, what are your key take-home messages?

SPEAKER_00 40:21

Yeah, well, I mean, we've covered such a breadth and depth of things today. But I think, yeah, just to kind of go back to what we talked about at the very beginning, you know, if you're trying to set your animals up well for transition, really just thinking about those fundamentals of managing the pre-carving cow. So, you know, focusing on feeding to target body condition score, getting your mineral supplementation right pre-carving. And then obviously as you go into the carving period, focusing on mineral supplementation post-carving, in particular calcium, which Ryan has touched on several times, providing sufficient high-quality feed post-carving. If you are using wearables, they are another tool in the toolbox you can use. And, you know, Ryan's given some really great examples of looking at the data as a feedback tool, but potentially also to support making decisions on farm if things are not quite going as expected, having a look and reflecting and then going back to making sure you're getting those fundamentals right. So ultimately, I guess it really just supports the idea that these tools do not replace good stockmanship. You know, you still need to have that farming know-how, that tacit knowledge of your own farm and your herd. And then I guess, yeah, if your transition car management isn't going to plan or hasn't gone to plan, perhaps that's something you can talk to your farm consultant or vet about. And maybe, you know, as per Ryan's suggestion at the end there, if you've got a farmer in your region who's using wearables and you're not, perhaps, you know, you can learn something from each other. So yeah, I think that's a great little takeaway there too.

SPEAKER_01 42:07

Brilliant. Thank you, Stacey. And thank you, Ryan. So, yeah, key message today: technology can give us useful insights, but it works best when the basics are right and they're used alongside what you already know about your cows and system. Good transition cow management still comes back to body condition, score, feed allocation, minerals, cow comfort. Observation I heard Ryan talk a lot actually about looking at cows and watching what they do and timely decisions. And wearables can help farmers spot trends and respond earlier, but they don't replace good stockmanship. Now we'll link to more information on this topic in the show notes. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time. Matewa.

Episode summary

SPEAKER_01 42:54

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