Pneumonia requires antibiotic in 10% of dairy calves

PRESS RELEASE ISSUED ON BEHALF OF PFIZER ANIMAL HEALTH, WALTON OAKS, SURREY, UK

A survey of more than 400 dairy farms has found that 10% of calves required antibiotic treatment for pneumonia last winter. Before accounting for the effect on in-contact calves, Pfizer veterinary manager Carolyn Hogan calculates that losses arising from this incidence are more than £700/year for the average 168-cow herd taking part.[1]

“This would increase substantially if you added the impact on in-contacts,” she says. “A major concern is that 44% of farmers said the issue of treating close contact calves at the same time had not been discussed with their vet.”

However, not all farmers are ignoring the in-contacts, although only 10% of farmers will also treat pen-mates or house-mates in most* cases, a further 8% in some* cases and 26% in a few* cases. (* ‘Most’, ‘some’ and ‘few’ were defined in the survey as ‘75-100%’, about ‘50%’ and ‘about 25%’ of cases respectively).

This “Good Start In Life” calf survey was sponsored by Rispoval® IntraNasal, Pfizer’s single-dose pneumonia vaccine for dairy calves. This sponsorship was not disclosed to farmers at the time the survey was carried out. Among the 443 participating farms, 57% had made changes in the last three years to improve calf health and/or growth rates.

The two improvements in joint top spot were better ventilation and vaccination. Next was allowing more space per calf, which Carolyn Hogan says is obviously a good move if calves are too crowded.

However, she warns that it is also possible for calf density to be too low in housing with a large air space, such that convection currents created by body heat are too weak to drive stale air out through the roof vents. “When this happens, the air circulates inside the building, with the result that calves are breathing stale air rather than fresh,” she says.

During the first three months of life, the survey finds that the second month is regarded by farmers as marginally higher risk for pneumonia than the first or third, possibly because this is when immune protection derived from colostrum is starting to wear off and before immunity derived from the environment has developed.

This would be consistent with the good colostrum practice evident from the survey: 91% of farmers have a golden rule for the timing and quantity of colostrum, the average being 2.98 litres within 5¾ hours of birth. While this is very close to the recommended three litres within six hours, Carolyn Hogan identifies a concern about the range of answers, especially where colostral intake is low.

In the extreme, some farmers said they aimed for nine litres within two hours of birth, whilst others only two litres within 12 hours. To make sure enough colostrum is taken within the target time, 32% of farmers maintain close supervision of suckling and a further 16% give a manual feed by bottle or stomach tube as a matter of routine.

As dairy herds get bigger and the workforce smaller, Carolyn Hogan says it would be easy, but wrong, to jump to the conclusion that calves come quite low down a dairy farm’s pecking order. Among the farmers taking part in the survey, 95% said new-born heifer calves represented their hopes and expectations of the future. She urges farmers to take every opportunity to discuss ways of improving calf health with their veterinary surgeon.

The prevention and treatment of pneumonia will be a feature of the Pfizer stand at the Dairy Event, where vets and livestock advisers will be available to discuss the main issues with farmers.

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Rispoval^R IntraNasal contains modified live BRSV and Pi3V viruses. POM-V. For further information please contact your veterinary surgeon or Pfizer Animal Health, Walton Oaks, Tadworth, Surrey, KT20 7NS

Reference

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[1] Andrews A.H (2000) Cattle Practice Vol 8 Part 2: 109-114. This paper estimates a case of pneumonia in a dairy calf to cost £43 per treated animal on average. In the survey being reported here, the average farm reported 17 cases of pneumonia in the past year requiring antibiotic treatment. Cost estimate = 17 cases x £43/case = £731.

Milking the market for all it’s worth

For this modern day parable, I’m indebted to The Times newspaper’s sports writer of the year Martin Samuel[1]. He was urging football’s Premier League clubs to resist any and all attempts by The Big Four to seek an end to collective negotiation. But the principles also apply to UK dairy farmers if they are to take full advantage of strengthening dairy commodity prices.

Samuel’s parable involves the hit American TV sitcom Friends and in particular how its six star players played a master stroke of canny negotiation (that our dairy farmers could emulate).

He writes: “When Warner Brothers, the makers of Friends, renegotiated contracts at the end of series two, it was [Lisa] Kudrow [aka Phoebe Buffay] who suggested that the six lead players should negotiate as a collective. That way, she reasoned, the studio could not divide and rule. There would be no chance of one character being promoted as the star and paid more at the expense of the others; no possibility of a character being written out if he or she was in dispute over money. Warner Brothers would either pay them all or get none.”

As a result, Samuel says the actors got a 150% pay rise, to $100,000 each per episode. By continuing to stick together, subsequent negotiations saw this rise to $750,000 per actor per episode in 2000, then $1 million two years later.

Clearly, the six actors had something that the studio wanted...... just like our dairy farmers have something that the processors (including the co-ops) want.

In a post of the British Farming Forum website[2], in response to one from Marrowman saying “Use your power now and don’t ever over produce or let any individuals over produce again”, a contributor called Moors Farmer says “Indeed. We need somebody with the enthusiasm and energy to drive such a plan forward”.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Don’t expect “somebody” to do anything. If you want to take advantage of the situation, do something yourself. Form an informal alliance with six to 10 like-minded fellows so that you have at least 10 million litres a year of bargaining power, then have a friendly chat with your current buyer, whether that’s one of the co-ops (who all need their tails peppering) or a processor. Get a copy of the N F U’s milk supplier contract, adapt it to your purposes and present it to your buyer. And in parallel, have an informal chat with other potential purchasers about how much they would like to buy your milk.

If you’ve ever tried renegotiating a mobile phone deal, it’s amazing what you can get by suggesting that a rival provider is offering better terms. But going back to Moors Farmer, you wouldn’t expect “somebody” to do that deal for you, would you?

Best wishes.

Phil Christopher

References:

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[1] Martin Samuel, 22 August 2007. Rich cannot get richer without help from friends. The Times, p58.

[2] http://farmingforum.co.uk/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1186608612/60, reply #72.

Aquaculture and environment

Here's something I wrote recently for one of my clients.

Sustainable future for aquaculture needs knowledge gap closing on nutrient requirements, deficiencies and toxicity

As the fastest growing food production sector in the world, aquaculture faces ever-closer scrutiny of it’s impact on the environment, according to Dr Santosh Lall of the National Research Council’s Institute for Marine Biosciences, Halifax, Canada.

Dr Lall was addressing the inaugural Organic Trace Elements for Animal Nutrition and the Environment symposium, OTEANE 2007, held recently in Geneva. Sponsored by Pancosma, the two-day event brought together 20 world-leading speakers and more than 200 delegates from all five continents.

“Aquaculture now ranks fourth in terms of global farmed meat supply, with approximately 195 species of fish being cultivated,” said Dr Lall. “The sector’s environmental impact has so far been associated mainly with intensive systems for carnivorous marine fish and salmonids cultured in raceways and cages.

“This includes discharge of suspended solids – faeces and waste feed – antibiotics and other drugs, disinfectants and algaecides, and other chemical compounds leached into water. The mineral and organic enrichment of water causes the build up of anoxic sediments, alteration of seabed fauna and flora, and eutrophication.”

To minimise the adverse effects of these factors, Dr Lall said the past two decades had seen significant efforts through changes is feed formulation, better nutrition strategies, improved practices and stringent environmental regulations. But he stressed that much more would be needed in the future.

Micro- as well as macro-emissions from aquaculture are increasingly under the spotlight, not only in scientific and industry circles, but also in the wider public domain. Only four months ago, the New Scientist published an article that began: “Pollution far below the level seen as dangerous for aquatic life has nevertheless dramatically altered animal behaviour in North American lakes. Heavy metals [ie trace elements] are knocking out the sense of smell in organisms from bacteria to fish. Even we may not be immune.”[1]

At concentration levels of copper as low as two parts per billion, the report said the sense of smell in salmon was impaired, with potentially fatal consequences through being unable to detect the presence of a nearby predator.

The OTEANE symposium’s focus being on trace elements, Dr Lall pointed out that in general carnivorous finfish diets contained a high proportion of fish meal and marine by-products, supplemented with trace elements at a higher concentration that required due to limited information on requirements and bio-availability.

“These feeds are supplemented with copper, zinc, iron, manganese, selenium, iodine and phosphorus,” he said. “Elevated levels of copper, zinc and manganese have been found in sediments under sea cages and in solid waste generated by land-based fish farms. These minerals have a wide range of effects on seabed fauna and flora, particularly in their reproduction, recruitment success and survival.”

The contemporary relevance of this for governments and policy-makers was outlined by Dr Paul Römkens from Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He drew parallels between existing European Union legislation on nitrogen emissions from farming to the environment and the potential for the same thing applying to trace elements. He said the trigger for this to happen would be awareness by legislators of the high cost associated with heavy metal leakage from animal production into the environment, those costs including environmental damage as well as financial.

In farmed terrestrial and aquatic species alike, a key issue for minimising the environmental footprint of trace element supplementation is increased bioavailability and lower supplementation levels, explained president of the organising committee and director of the Pancosma minerals division Stéphane Durosoy. “This is the raison d’etre of the Oteane symposium,” he said.

A problem facing aquaculture, according to Dr Lall, is that major gaps exist in the knowledge of mineral requirements, their physiological functions, and the bio-availability of trace elements from mineral supplements and feed ingredients.

“For some fish species, dietary requirements have been reported for six trace elements: Copper, zinc, iron, manganese, iodine and selenium. But none has been published for shrimps or crustaceans.”

Table 1: Published* trace element requirements for fish (reviewed by Lall)
Trace element	Dietary requirement (ppm)
Copper	1 – 5
Zinc	15 – 40
Iron	30 – 170
Manganese	2 – 20
Iodine	1 – 4
Selenium	0.15 – 0.5

In terrestrial animals, the potential for reducing trace element supplementation was presented by Professor Klaus Männer from Berlin University. In a trial on weaned pigs, enhanced bioavailability was found for both the chelate B-TRAXIM TEC, and the glycinate B-TRAXIM 2C, forms of trace elements compared with the sulphate salts.

The extent to which this applies to fish nutrition is not known so clearly. But it is apparent, according to Dr Lall, that the tipping point from trace element deficiency to excess is much more knife edge in fish than land animals. He explained how fish have unique physiological mechanisms to absorb and retain minerals from their diets and water through both the gills and the gut.

“Although mineral uptake by the fish gill from water has been an area of active research, there have been few studies on the absorption of trace elements from the gut,” he said. “What we do know is that excessive mineral intake via gills or gut can cause toxicity and therefore a fine nutritional balance between deficiency and surplus is vital if aquatic organisms are to maintain homeostasis.

“However, insufficient knowledge of trace element requirements and metabolism render it difficult to make reliable predictions of macro-mineral and trace element deficiency or toxicity. The signs of deficiency in fish include reduced growth and anorexia, bone mineralization and skeletal deformity, fin erosion, lens cataracts and muscular dystrophy.”

It is a commonplace recommendation in research reports that ‘more research should be carried out’. This would be particularly well-justified in this field of scientific endeavour if Dr Lall and his aquaculture colleagues are to accumulate the detailed knowledge base necessary to improve the environmental sustainability of this fastest growing area of meat production globally.

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[~960 words]

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[1] Aria Pearson, April 2007. 'Safe' heavy metals hit fish senses. NewScientist.com news service, 18:16 09. http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn11559-safe-heavy-metals-hit-fish-senses.html