Hi there, thanks for coming along. My name's Phil Elkins and I'm an independent dairy consultant. I'm gonna be talking to you tonight about transition health monitoring and management.
So, first of all, really important point, we need to discuss what the transition period is. And what we're referring to when we talk about the transition period is the process of taking a late gestation cow to an early lactation cow. So that's going from a, a non-lactating animal onto a, onto a lactating animal and that non-lactating animal that might be primapariso coming up for its first carving, or it might be multiparao having had a previous carvings.
And we've got a number of physiological changes that take place. So we've got lactogenesis, a production of milk. We've got a number of diet changes.
In some cases, if we've got an animal going from a late lactation diet onto a far off dry, close up dry, then a lactating cow diet, we can have 3 diet changes within a 6 to 8 week period. We've got a roughly a doubling of energy requirements, obviously depending on milk production, massive alterations in mineral metabolism. And we've also got some, some large sociophysiological effects, so we've got the, the stress of group changes again, we could have up to 3 or 4 group changes that take place in and around the calving period.
That can have knock-on effects physiologically, and we've got some local and systemic immunological changes. Now you hear a number of different time periods talked about when we talk about the transition period. Some people say 90 days, so 60 days pre-carving to 30 days post- carving, which is roughly what I subscribe to.
Some people talk about 60 days, some people talk about 75. It doesn't really matter how many days we're talking. What we're trying to do is, is smooth the transition and look at those physiological changes that are happening and how, how can we minimise the negative effects of those on a cow.
So why is it so important? So, quick question, what proportion of dairy disease occurs in the transition period? Now, these are numbers that frequently get thrown around when you when you talk to, to, to vets and also to producers about what proportion of their, their cow disease occurs as a result of the transition period.
Large study occurred, Steve Le Blanc and and others, actually showed that 75% of dairy cow diseases related to transition health. Now obviously this represents a major source of our veterinary involvement onto dairy units. We're talking 3/4 of cow disease relating to that 90 day period.
So we've got the major diseases here and and a rough incidence range mastitis, ketosis, DAs, ovarian dysfunction, metritis, retained placenta and milk fevers. And I suppose the first thing to, to point out is when you look at that 75% and you look at the upper numbers of the incidence range, it's fairly clear to see that these diseases don't necessarily happen in isolation, and you do get a large number of animals that are affected by multiple diseases. The other thing to be aware of is there is a very wide incidence range on pretty much every single one of those diseases.
So you have herds that are performing very well, and you have herds that are performing really not very well. And those poorly performing herds really are a great opportunity for us as vets to get involved in the management of transition health for our dairy units. It's a really complicated slide here showing what some of the some of the factors that are going on within the body all the time and what the influence of transition is on these metabolic processes that are happening within the cow.
Don't expect anybody to know this. Obviously some people do know it, but I don't expect anybody to know this. What's really important though, is you can see that this is a massively complex system.
And as much as we try to simplify things. Behind the scenes there are a lot of things that are taking place. So slightly more simplified version of this courtesy of alanco, which does really show some of the, the changes that are taking place.
So if we look at the adipose tissue, so the fat tissue. We've got increased er lysis of the fats and mobilisation of fat as an energy source. We've got a reduction in the synthesis of new fat, reduction in the uptake of fatty acids and a reduction of the reserification of fatty acids.
So all of this is trying to prime that body for increased metabolism and increased energy supplied to the tissues. We've got an increase in size of the rumen, slight increase in absorptive capacity, but an increase in the rate of nutrient absorption as a result, again, because we need more energy going into that animal, we've got a doubling of those energy requirements. Within the mammary gland we've got a slight increase in the number of secretory cells, but the major thing here is a, is a massive increase in the nutrient use from those secretory cells and an associated small increase in in blood supply.
Again, we're looking to produce milk from a, from what was previously a dry udder. Now to process all of that energy, what we need is is the liver to perform all energy metabolism that occurs throughout the cow from the point of ingestion to the point of being in the tissues for metabolization has to occur through the liver. So what we see is a massive increase in the size of the liver, massive increase in the rate of formation of new glucose, massive increase in the rate of protein synthesis, and also an increase in the rate of production of ketone bodies.
Now ketone bodies get a bit of a bad rap because we start talking about ketosis, which is a, is an issue for cows, reduction in, in milk production, reduction in appetite, other clinical signs associated with it. But it's important to remember that the synthesis of ketone bodies is part of the natural metabolism that happens within the cat. It only becomes a problem when the synthesis outstrips the body's ability to be able to utilise those ketone bodies.
Now obviously the muscles become a bit less relevant to the dairy cow, so we see a reduction in glucose utilisation, reduction in protein synthesis and an increase in protein degradation. So we're using those muscles effectively as an energy store and breaking them down to provide more energy for the cow. So when we look at what happens to a dairy cow around transition, we see 3 transition failures.
We see a biological failure of energy metabolism, a biological failure of calcium metabolism, and a biological failure of immunity. And what our jobs what our job is is to try and reduce the quantity of those failures that occur by supporting the carer through this system. So again, quite a complicated slide, but quite an important one.
And what we see is, your milk fever, so your failure of calcium metabolism off to the left. You've got your negative energy balance, so failure of energy metabolism down to the bottom, and you've got immune suppression, so failure of the immunity up at the top. And what you see is these 3 biological failures are associated with a number of diseases.
A solid arrow means we've got really solid evidence to show that these diseases are linked. The dotted arrow shows that we've got evidence that they, they probably are linked, but it's not as solid as the solid arrows. And what we see is not only are these 3 individual biological failures linked.
But also the diseases that occur as a result of them are linked. So what, what we see is, for example, if you take the example of immune suppression, it's associated with mastitis. Well, we know mastitis is associated with an increased death rate and an increased culling rate.
It's also associated with an increase in ketosis. But we've got a a putative link with reproductive disorders as a result of failure of of immunity through mastitis. So we end up with this situation where all of these diseases are interlinked and ultimately represent a failure of that animal to go through the transition period successfully.
Again, same kind of, same kind of thing, but depicted in a slightly different way, just to show taking one example being low blood calcium, failure of calcium metabolism. And that what that induces is a reduced smooth muscle function, which has a number of different knock-on effects, poor teat sphincter closure causing mastitis, low rumour motility associated with ketosis, also associated potentially with displaced abomaism. We've got low uterine motility, so we've got dystosia, retained membranes, slow involution metritis, and, and associated with prolapses as well.
So, all of which ends up with reduced milk production reduced reproductive capacity. So what do these diseases cost dairy farmers? So here, this was an observational study over nearly 160,000 lactations in the US using user defined disease rates.
So the users recorded, so the farmers recorded when diseases occurred. Now we know that underestimates the prevalence of the disease, but it will also lead to an underestimate of the impact of the disease. If there are animals that suffer from a disease but that disease isn't necessarily recorded, that reduces the performance of the unaffected animals relatively and makes the effect look smaller.
So this only looks at objectively accessible data. So milk loss, loss through culling by 60 days post disease, and loss through delayed conception. Has no impact on the costs from disease treatment, their input culling after 60 days, etc.
So they're, they're gross underestimations of the, of the cost of disease, but they, they act as a good talking point. Now all of these have been converted to UK figures, so pounds, but also using UK milk prices, UK production levels, etc. So are incredibly relevant and are stratified by lactation.
And what we see, so again, split into heifers at the top, multiparous animals at the bottom. And what we see is some fairly significant figures there for the cost of disease. And again, remember this is not including any, any costs of treatment, so this is purely milk loss, reproductive loss and culling.
And what we see is a is a range of costs of individual diseases between 120 pounds for metritis in heifers to 362 pounds for DAs in in heifers, . But there's some, some really useful figures there in that table to consider the, the knock-on impact. So if we take the example of early mastitis in heifers, you're losing 712 litres, 712 kg of milk.
So in UK figures, that's 140 pounds worth of milk lost from that early case of mastitis, which by the time you consider that any colds that occur as a result and the knock-on impact of reproductive losses. You're talking 263 pounds per case of early mastites in a in a heifer. And that's a significant figure to a dairy farmer.
Similarly, if you look at metritis, the major cost that's coming through metritis is the reproductive loss as a result. So in, in heifers that's 2/3 of the, of the loss in adult cows, it's about 40% of the loss coming purely from reproductive losses. Similar with retained placenta.
Whereas obviously with your DAs, more significant knock-on effects come from the milk loss and from culling. Instant rate there across a large number of of lactations. I don't think there's, there's a huge amount to say there, other than if you look at the metritis rate, 22% in HFA, 12% in cows, that's probably higher than most UK farmers would be treated, which leads into the fact that there's, there's potentially a high level of underdiagnosis occurring.
So what's the role of the vet in transition care health? Well, it's obviously to treat LDAs, it's to treat milk fevers. Probably to advise if there are too many.
And, and those are, are absolute givens, but I would challenge that actually the role of the vet is, is also to monitor disease incidences. Why are we waiting until there's a problem? But also advise on measures to optimise health, welfare, production and economics.
And this is an area where I think there is a real opportunity for, for veterinary involvement, is to look at why are the herds that we're dealing with experiencing more transition health issues than they should be. And if we can, if we can preempt that and push them towards where they should be, we're gonna end up in a situation where we've got better health, better welfare, better production, more sustainability. So which disease rates should we monitor?
That's, that's the, the obvious easy question. Well, if you look at LDA rate, mastitis rate, retained placenta, ketosis, milk fever, these are all relatively low prevalence diseases, which means that when you get a relatively small herd, an individual case can make a large difference to to the apparent rate of these diseases. So if you take LDAs for instance, target LDA rate somewhere around 2 or 3%.
Now, if you have 200 cows in a herd, you're talking about a target of 4 to 6 LDAs. In a year. Now 4 to 6 LDA's in a year, you're never gonna be able to pick up the trend at an early stage of of LDA's showing that something's gone wrong with the transition.
Similar mastitis rate you target less than 10%. Some herds out there are achieving far lower than that, achieving 23%. Again, you're not gonna pick up a trend in these diseases unless the wheels have properly fallen off.
So, if you have a look at fertility outcomes, so delay to first service, cystic ovarian disease, first service conception rate, things like that, these, these things have a very long lag period. And as a result of having a very long lag period. There's a massive delay between something going wrong and you picking it up as a problem.
Now as a, as an example, as I heard, I do consultancy work for at the moment, we're seeing issues with heifer fertility, and this heifer fertility relates to a period in the summer when the heifers were potentially left out of grass too long, didn't grow appropriately, and as a result weren't in the right right condition when it came through to calving. It's not a huge amount we can necessarily do about that now other than put it right for the future, but using those parameters to monitor transition would lead to too long a lag period. So you've got other ways of monitoring rates of prevalent vaginal disease, so clinical ketosis, postcarbon calcium.
Now these are relatively invasive, relatively labour intensive to, to, to monitor. It's not a case of setting up an alert on a herd computer system. So I, I'm not saying don't do them, but they come with a degree of challenge.
So for me, I think which disease rate should we monitor is the wrong question, and what we should be saying is actually all transition diseases are interrelated. So monitoring individual disease rates becomes less a less useful barometer for success. And what we should be doing is not monitoring transition failure rate, we should be monitoring transition success rate.
Let's, let's monitor the proportion of cows that go through transition without any problem, because that's what we want is transition success. So how do we, how do we define transition success? So I would say a cow's deemed to have successfully transitioned if they've calved without dystosia.
They've lasted 60 days in lactation without being cold, without metritis, paraly vaginal disease, mastotis, high cell count, LDA, 10 placenta hypercalcemia ketosis, basically without any disease. So you have a cow that calves without any calving problems, gets to the 60 days in milk without any disease, has returned to normal cyclicity, so has had estre by 60 days in milk, absence of abnormal ovarian structures, and is also giving a suitable level of milk. And I'll come on to that in a minute.
So when we're looking at milk production, why, why do I say giving a suitable level of milk's really important from transition success? When we look at first milk test, so this is based on monthly milk recordings. When we look at first milk test, so a milk recording in the 1st 30 days, for every extra litre or for every extra kilo of milk that a cow gives.
She will give for a for a heifer 143 litres of extra milk in 305 days. For a second lactation animal 123 for an over second lactation, 124. So you're talking about 130 litres across the herd.
For every extra litre of milk that they give at the first test. Now if you have an animal that's failing to meet what it should be doing by 10 litres, that's 1300 litres of milk. That's a considerable amount of money, that's that's 400, 450 pounds for that cow that she's lost across her her whole lactation, which is almost certainly more than the margin that she's she's making the farmer.
So as a result, if you're not producing the amount of milk that you should be doing at your first test day, so you, your cows haven't transitioned appropriately, the knock-on effects throughout lactation are considerable. So we've got a survival chart here looking at caves that have had some form of fresh cow disease, transition disease, and caves that haven't had some form of fresh cow disease or transition disease. And what we see, and this is just looking at, days open, so, days, days to conception.
And what you see is for those cows that have fresh cow disease, it takes them considerably longer to get back in calf. It's fairly intuitive, but it's, but it's really worth pointing out. So if you look at 100 days, for example, the 100 day in calf rate for those with no no fresh cow disease is 58%.
100 day in calf rate for those with fresh cow disease is about 42%. So a considerable difference there. Just to add a little bit more information here, for those with no fresh cow disease, you're talking 600 litres more milk.
Again, pretty considerable figures there, 600 litres more milk. You're talking about 1% coal by 60 days versus 6% coal by by 30 days. You're talking an average of 22 days more calving to conception, so it's an extra cycle to get in calf.
Now, you can quote any figure really between 3 and 5 pounds a cow a day, and nobody's gonna really argue too hard with you, so that 22 days, that's costing you somewhere between 70 pounds and 100 pounds a cow for every cow that has disease. And you've got a pregnancy rate that is 5% lower. And again, that is, that is considerable.
So. We're coming pretty quickly coming to the conclusion that that transition disease is definitely worth a large amount of care and attention to try and minimise the knock-on effects. So here's a quote from one of my, one of my consultancy clients.
When the cows don't transition well, you remember every factor that contributes, the twin carvings, assisted carvings, those who didn't quite move at the right time. When the herd transition wells, transitions well, you don't notice the cows with the excuses. And that's the point is when we get the management right for transition cow, management, everything goes through smoothly.
When it's slightly wrong, any cow that has any excuse to get a disease will get the disease. So if we get it right for the herd, every cow will perform better and then we can spend our time helping those that need it. Not belittling the requirement to go and do your LDA surgery, get your mastitis protocols right, get your metritis protocols right.
But for me, the key thing that we need to be doing is looking at getting the the management right for the herd so that every cow will perform better. So how do we monitor transition success? Now, if you've got a smallish hood, we can go with an old school method, get a piece of A3 paper, draw up a little table, number of columns, cow ID, cal and date, disease and date.
So any any time the cow gets a disease, you just write down what disease she's got and what date. If they get 60 days and they haven't had any disease, check the milk production. If it's appropriate, you stick a tick on it.
And you just tally them over time. For larger herds, you can set up reporting functions on herd management systems. They do take some time to set up, but they do make it considerably easier.
But the key point is, we need to be monitoring that at every visit. Every time you go on farm, have a look at what the transition success rate is looking like. Because that gives us a really good early warning sign that we need to be looking at doing something differently.
So yeah. Next question, what percentage of cases should transition successfully, now. Before you look too deeply into this, you can easily make a good argument to say, well, surely it should be 100% if we can get it right.
Now the reality is. We need to set targets that are farm specific. Everybody everybody knows a farm that won't be able to achieve what another farm might be able to achieve for reasons that they can't do anything about.
They'd need to stick up a new building, which might be on the agenda. They've got limited amount of space, they're working in old repurposed sheds. And knowing those kind of situations gives you the ability to make sure that targets are farm specific.
But it's always worth knowing that industry the industry targets and understanding them. And the reality is that those herds achieving 70% transition success rate are doing a really good job or not being honest with themselves and not noticing the, the diseases. So even with the best systems, a 30% transition failure rate.
It's kind of acceptable. So yeah, important thing, people talk about smart targets. I, I have substituted the A.
And so those targets should be specific, they should be measurable, they should be nearly achievable, relevant and time limited. You don't want to set a target that, that's gonna be achieved with no effort. Equally, you don't want to set a target that's not achievable.
You want to, to always strive for improvement. So we just monitor transition success rate, right? Well, unfortunately it's not that simple.
Transition success rate's the holistic parameter, so that's looking at everything that's going on, and if that's acceptable, all, all's probably pretty good on the farm. If not, there are problems. But actually, we can add to, to that transition success rate monitoring depending on the farm situation because that transition success rate is an output parameter.
We can monitor the right input parameters to act as an early warning system as well. So if we look at what are our transition period goals, minimise dyosia, stillborns, metabolic disease, immunocompetence, high milk production, minimise loss of body condition, get back to cyclicity and improved fertility, and all of those things will lead to high profitability. And what factors influence those?
Well, genetics does, but the reality is I don't have the time to cover genetics today. It's, it's far more important than, than I can cover in a, in a 40 minute talk. Infectious disease obviously massively does, and again, control of infectious disease is absolutely key, but probably far bigger than I have time to cover today.
So I'm gonna concentrate on two areas where I think vets probably don't get involved quite as much as they could do. Which is dry matter intakes and nutritional competency. Dry matter intake is absolutely key.
So this, this chart, is to me is a bit of a game changer really. So from 2007, it's been out there for a while. It's been the, the work's been repeated and shown effectively the same results.
We've got 3 lines here, the blue is a K that goes through transition healthily. The, the greeny colour is one that ends up with a mild degree of metritis, and the red is one that ends up with a severe degree of metritis. Those clinical signs are not being picked up until 3 to 7 days post calving.
But what we see is if you look back at 7 days pre-carving, there is already a significant difference in dry matter intakes. So those, those cows that end up going healthy are seeing consistent dry matter intakes until a day or two pre-calving, whereas those animals that end up with a mild or severe metritis are showing reductions in dry matter intake. Well, out to 2 weeks pre-carving, but certainly at 7 to 10 days pre-carving.
So these cows have already predicted that they are going to suffer from disease. Pre-carving as a result of that drop in dry matter intake. Now that's, that's an absolutely key thing to remember.
Those dry matter intakes pre-carving are dropping dry matter intakes pre-curving are associated with the disease post carving. The issue doesn't occur at the point of carving, it occurs beforehand. Dry matter intake also pre-carving also predicts yield, so on the X axis you've got predicted 305 mature equivalent milk yield, as predicted by, pre-carving dry matter intake.
And you've got 3 on the Y axis you've got actual 3 or 5 day milk yield. And what you find if you look at the P value is a, is a really high degree of correlation there between predicted milk yield of dry matter intake and actual milk yield. So again.
Those curves that don't yield as they should do, er that is affected by dry matter intake pre-carving. Maximising that dry matter intake in the lead up until the very day pre-carving is absolutely key. Dry matter intake also drives fertility, so we've got two groups here, those cows that ovulate early, so pre 60 days, and those cows that don't, so they ovulate late post 60 days.
And what you see, if you look at the dry matter intake in pounds at 7 days pre-carving is a 7 pounds difference. So a, a 3 kg, 3 and a bit kg difference in dry matter intake, 7 days pre-carving between those cows that come back and cycle normally and those cows that don't. That has a knock-on impact of dry matter intake.
Early lactation, body weight loss, although what you see is that the point at 60 days is the milk yield is. No different. So that milk yield is, is, is equal by 60 days post calving.
But that reduction in dry matter intake leads to a reduction in body weight, leads to a reduction in ovarian quality and therefore ovarian cyclicity. So that dry matter intake pre calving is driving fertility, it's driving milk yield and it's driving disease prevention. So how do we maximise dry matter intake?
Well, nutritional competency is one part of it, but feed availability is absolutely essential. So you've got two dairies here, the triangles and the, and the open circles, running at, varying different, stocking densities and then looking at the dry matter intake, comparison between them. And what you see is a fairly healthy trend that shows that stocking density reduces, dry matter intake.
Fairly intuitive, but how many transition care units are out there are running at 100% occupancy all the time, or even 105 and 110% occupancy. If you look at that average dry matter intake, you're looking at taking. Well, if you run at 105 versus 85, you're looking at taking probably 2.5, 3 pounds a day's worth of dry matter intake, you're pushing more animals towards that area where disease prevention becomes difficult.
And obviously what you find er isn't that all animals have an even dry matter intake. What you find that reduction in average dry matter intake is certain cows reducing their dry matter intake considerably whilst the, the stronger, more socially dominant cows maintain their dry matter intake. Which is kind of shown in this, in this chart here, a bit of a tricky one to get your head around.
This is from Dairy Co. So each marker, is a cow, different shapes and and sizes for different lactations. And along the X axis we've got number of days calved at a certain time point.
And on the Y axis you've got predicted 305 day yield. And what you see to the right hand side is a really diverse spread of predicted 3 or 5 day milk yields. So you've got a really large range of performance.
Now around 110 days ago, which is, round about this point here. What you see is a considerable change in that pattern from a really diverse spread of milk yields to a really tightly consolidated spread of milk yield. And what happened at that point was an additional barn was built on this farm.
So it changed stocking density in the transition carried from 120% to 85%. Stocking density in the post-calving pens from 100% down to 85%. And what you've seen is the high yielding cows still produce as much milk as they were producing before.
But the low yielding cows all of a sudden now their dry matter intake is not restricted, so you're getting less disease, you're getting more production. And overall, your milk production increases, profitability increases, sustainability increases. So similar kind of bit of information here, we've got the first test milk, so again, that first milk recording data, how much milk they're giving versus what their stocking density was at carving.
And you can see that actually up to 100% stocking density, you don't see any difference in milk yield. Once you get above that you see fairly considerable decreases in milk yield. So we're at this situation where for milk yield 100% seems an appropriate cutoff.
You go above that, the milk yield seems to get checked considerably, but actually for disease purposes and also for overall 35 day yield and fertility purposes, you really want to, to drop that stocking density even lower. So what should we measure and monitor? Well, ideally, measure dry matter intake if you can.
Now that requires somebody who's keeps very good records of their feeding, measures what's left, the refusals, what's left in the feed phase, keeps good records to the numbers of cows, monitors the dry matter of the actual feeds to be able to do this. If you can't measure that, and in a lot of cases you can't, and even if you can, it's probably worth doing as well, you should measure the stocking density. So, and this is a really simple thing to do.
Go in your transition yard and calculate the maximum stocking for the shed. It should be based on 10 centimetres of water per head, 90 centimetres of feed space, or 85% occupancy if you've got yoloks, 15 metre squared per cow of loose housing, or 85% occupancy if you've got cubicles. And you go through all of those, work out what the maximum number is for each of those parameters, and whichever is the lowest of those maximums, that's the maximum stocking density of the shed.
And then stick that on a large piece of paper, laminate it somewhere, no more than 24 ks in this shed. And every time you go there, just go and count how many caves there are. And if there's more than 24, that stocking density is too high, and you know you're gonna get a knock-on effect on the disease.
If it's less than that number you're probably gonna be fine. Now doing something about it is, is very different, planning for higher levels of stocking. Is is very difficult because not every farmer has the ability to increase their transition care provisions, but being aware of that restriction and what that's gonna have, knock-on effect that's gonna have on dry matter intakes is absolutely key to having those discussions around transition health.
Just a very quick slide here, because I think it's important looking at dry period length. So we have milk yield, 3 or 5 day milk yield in poundsti, so convert it to kilos, you divide by 2.2.
But effectively what you're seeing is roughly about 80 to 900 litres reduction in milk yield for those cows that have a dry period less than 44 days or less than 45 days. So short dry periods have a knock-on effect on milk yield on the future lactation. And at the other end, those who have extended dry periods, you're looking at a, a more moderate reduction, round about 130, 140 litres.
But these are usually cows with high dry periods are usually dried off either cos they haven't gotten calf in time or their milk production isn't strong enough towards the tail end of lactation. But yeah, just a, a point there to beware of the short lactate short dry periods. So, nutritional competency, the other important input when we're looking at transition code disease.
So a number of important things to be aware of, high energy diets, reduced dry matter intakes. So cows have a pretty good way of saying I don't need any more than this, so I'm not gonna eat anymore. So we reduce that dry matter intake and drive towards disease.
But we also increase overconditioning, which has knock-on effects on fat mobilisation post calving and also on dystosia. Low dry matter intakes as I said, reduced milk yield increased disease. So what we're looking for is a low to moderate energy diet with high palatability for close-ups.
We also need a high requirement for metabolizable protein, particularly in heifers, that you get improvements in milk yield post calving and also, constituent yield post calving all the way up to 1.1 kg a day of metabolizable protein for heifers. With calves, you don't really see the benefit, once you go much above 800 grammes in the diet.
But high yield is, you do get slightly higher milk protein percentage. You don't see the yield, you see the lift in the constituents. So for me, it's really important that we're achieving low to moderate energy, high palatability, high dry matter intakes, high metabolizable protein.
And an absolute game changer that that I've seen is top ground straw inclusion. So it gives you the ability to put 5 to 6 kg of a low energy, 5 to 6 kg, so about 5 kg dry matter of the low energy, feed, high forage, stimulate good bacterial protocell health in the rumen. Feed into that diet through using tub ground straw.
If you try and feed a dairy cow 5 to 6 kg of unchopped straw, they just will not eat it. They physically won't eat it. Whereast ground straw mixed in with, some maize or some whole crop, and maize would be the predominant one, really does lead to a, a, a good start to a dry cow diet.
The other important point with nutritional competency is to control that calcium metabolism. So, we've got a study here looking at 3 different diets for close up dry cows. So this is again from America, they use milli equivalents per 100 grammes of diet to look at the, the decab value.
In the UK we would use milli equivalents per kilo, so it just moves the decimal 0.1 space to the right. And we're looking at DCAD as a way of, of adding a moderate degree of acidification to the, the bloodstream, which increases the, the, and primes the body for increased uptake of calcium through the bones, through, but also through the gut.
So we've got 3 diets, a low potassium, a high DA diet, a medium decad diet, and a low DAD diet. The medium DA diet would be about what, a large number of UK farmers would be doing, looking at a, a partial DAD style system. So between 0 and 100 milli equivalents per kilo.
Your low DCAD, you're looking at -50 to -100 milli equivalents per kilo. And what we've seen, if you look at the charts, is if you look at second lactation in animals, this is looking at blood calcium, your medium decad does a much better job of maintaining those blood calcium levels than your controlled diet. So it, it does a pretty good job in terms of prevention of milk fever.
But nowhere near as good a job as that low DAD value. If you look at your third lactation animals, that's where you really see the benefit of your, of your low DAD versus your, your partial or medium decad. Your, in your third lactation plus animals, your, your partial decad really does know better than a, than a high decad diet.
And what's the knock-on effects on that? Well, dry matter intake postpartum, you're seeing a, a, a lift of about 1 pound and a half, so about 800 grammes, 700 grammes between the high decab, the, the partial and the full decab. And the milk production, you're seeing about 1 kilo.5 to 2 kg lift again in a stepwise fashion between the, the.
High decad, the partial and the full decad. So there's knock-on effects on dry matter intake, there's a knock-on effect on milk production of controlling this calcium metabolism. It's a large number of charts here.
The red here are the heifers, the dotted lines and the blacks are cows. And again, X axis is your DAB value, and as I said, for us, we'd be looking at targeting -50 to -100, and then your Y axis are explained on the charts. And what you see is the lower you go on the deca value, the more milk they give in cows, the the more fat they give, the more dry matter they eat, the higher the fat, the, Well, actually, sorry, protein yield is about the same either way, so protein yield is not affected.
So you can see the benefits here in terms of milk yield and milk production from optimising that deca value at -50 to -100. So, We've talked about monitoring the major input parameters, dry matter intake, nutritional competency, we've talked about monitoring the holistic factor being the transition success rate. If you want to monitor some early outcomes, if you want some early outcome monitors of success, we can have them.
And there are times to use them, and the times to use them really are when performance isn't as as it should be, if you've got fairly large dietary changes going on, if you've got management changes going on, so you know that system has a degree of stress in it. And for me, there are 3 big ones, because you really want to reduce that lag period. There are 3 really good early outcome monitors, which is pre-carving urine pHs, post-carbon calciums, and post-carving PHPs.
Now a word of warning on pre-carving urine pHs before I talk about it. What we're looking for with our pre-carving urine pHs is the body's response to the decad that they're fed. Knowing that diet DAD value accurately is probably more important than monitoring the urine pHs, but coming back to what I was saying about monitoring dry matter intakes, it's quite hard to do.
So monitoring those, those pre-curving DAD values is also quite hard to do at times. Your postcarving calcium you're looking at subclinical milk fever levels and the and the rate of occurrence. Your post-carbon BHBs you're looking at the rate of subclinical ketosis and failure of energy metabolism.
So here, left hand side, we've just got a chart showing the DCAD value as fed on the X axis, UMPH on the Y axis, and you can see there's a really good correlation between what's fed and the urine pH. And if we're targeting that minus 50 to -100, you're looking at trying to get urine pHs around the, the 6.5s, kind of 6 6.2 to 6.7 is about where we want to be on our urine pHs.
Again, on the right hand side you've got urine pH. It's against the risk of milk fever and you can see a pretty strong correlation there, so it kind of ties up. And once you get around that 6.2 to 6.7 urine pH there's not really much benefit in terms of the risk of milk fever.
So that's a pretty whistle stop tour of transition health management and I've hopefully given you a few ideas and things to think about according to the way I think. So let's monitor that transition success rate. Two key factors to look at in terms of what causes transition care issues, stocking density, so dry matter intake, which you can monitor stocking density as well, also nutritional competency.
If you're gonna look at early outcome monitors of success, for me, you've got blood calciums, urine pHs and blood BHBs as your early monitors of success. If you find you've got a problem with a certain disease, monitoring that disease rate is never a bad thing to do. And, just want to point you in the direction of a really good resource.
You've got the Healthy Start Checklist, which is available from Elanco, which you can use as an initial baseline assessment or if you've got any problems, and it drills down into all of the individual parameters that can influence transition success. So, for example. Cubicical dimensions, feed space availability, feed preparation, it's, it's a really good thorough checklist for transition cow health factors.
And yet, for me, the key thing we've got to start doing as, as vets, as farmers, as consultants, as anybody involved with the dairy farm is to start looking at the transition period holistically and look at that success rate. Keep an eye on your pre-curving dry matter intake, stocking density, nutritional competency. Maybe put in some simple monitoring if you have to, and there's a whole range of more stuff you can do.
But most importantly, The transition period's a real key opportunity for our involvement as vets. It, it pays for the farmer to get us out because the consequences are high, and we can make significant improvements as well. Just want to say a quick thanks to Kate Heller and Mike Overton at Ilanco for some of the materials and Mark Mattiano at Boringer for for helping out with this as well.
And that's me. So thank you very much. There's some multiple choice questions that will be coming up afterwards and I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the programme.