By Dr. Curt Vlietstra
Risk management is nothing new to livestock producers. Whether your primary business involves raising beef cattle, selling milk, or raising replacement animals for your clients… many of your decisions are based on managing risks. Think about it: If you knew that the top bull at a sale would give you 4-5 years of rapid genetic improvement in your herd, that he wouldn’t succumb to any injuries and would remain fertile, it would be easier to justify the purchase. If you knew that milk was going to get back to $23 and stay there for a year, it would be easier to manage your milk contracts or plan an expansion on your dairy. What would be the fun in that? If farming was that easy, everyone would be doing it!
Let’s tighten the circle a little bit for the purposes of this discussion. You know that there are also risks that go along with making management decisions on your farm. Should you add a vaccine to your protocol? Take one out? Change the timing of when it is given? Should you have a breeding soundness exam done on your bulls? Should you use CIDRs on your cows? Should you have your cows preg-checked? What about purchasing a pasteurizer for the colostrum you feed to the calves on your dairy?
The reality is that just about all of us practice risk management in these terms. Let’s focus on vaccines for a moment. I doubt that any of those reading this article vaccinate against every disease exactly according to the labeled directions. Often times, we’ll “cheat” and give it to animals younger than the label says. Maybe the label suggests a booster, but you’re not really having trouble with that disease, so one dose should do the trick.
The bottom line with behavior like this is that the more information you have, the better you’ll understand the risks. What are the symptoms of the diseases that you’re not vaccinating against? If animals get sick, can you treat them? If you have a break in this disease, is it likely to result in many sick animals, or just a few? How likely is it that animals will die from missing or imperfect use of vaccines? Are there ways to monitor the presence of this disease in your herd? Drawing blood from a few animals in the herd can help to detect the presence of diseases that aren’t in the vaccine protocol.
Or take the pasteurizer example. Certainly, milk laden with bacteria can result in a high rate of sick and even dead calves within the first few days of life. If the colostrum was dirty, but note quite bad enough to directly cause severe disease, what would those symptoms look like? Would you know if the colostrum you’re feeding your calves is clean? Routinely testing for the level of bacteria in the colostrum can help you fine tune your cleaning routine or help you determine if a pasteurizer is needed.
It’s almost impossible to collect too much information to be useful. Recording seasonal weather patterns and health and production data can keep you from having to learn the same lesson twice. Should you feed your cows differently during a particularly dry or wet year to reduce the number of sick calves after weaning? Is pinkeye better or worse during dry summers? How long after it gets cold should you switch to your winter teat dip?
Managing risks associated with your livestock is somewhat like buying insurance: In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need insurance, just like you wouldn’t need to vaccinate for diseases or have your bulls tested each year. But it’s definitely not a perfect world. The best management decisions are those made with solid information, not foggy memories or stories from producers in another county. If we can help to provide you with some of this information, be sure to ask!
