24.2: Organic Dairy Production Tips with Dr. Brad Heins

Join Emily Fread as she interviews Dr. Brad Heins, an organic dairy production professor at the University of Minnesota.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Emily Fread 0:08

Welcome to Bovine Banter with the Penn State Extension Dairy Team. I'm Emily Fread and I'm a dairy educator based in Union County, Pennsylvania. Joining us today is Dr. Brad Heins, an organic dairy production professor at the University of Minnesota. Thanks for joining us today, Brad. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Brad Heins 0:26

Yeah, thanks for having me, Emily. Yeah, I'm a professor of animal science here at the University of Minnesota. I'm actually located at a research center in western Minnesota. I do research and extension in organic dairy production and grazing and calves and precision technologies and everything that revolves around dairy management.

Emily Fread 0:48

Can you tell us a little bit about the research center that you're at and some of the research that you're currently doing?

Brad Heins 0:55

Sure. Our research center is about 300 milking cows. So we have two herds here. One is an organic dairy herd, it's about 120 cows, and everything is managed organically with that herd. We also have a side-by-side conventional herd, about 180 cows. Now it does some grazing as well. We do use some antibiotics in that herd if need be, but it's an almost organic herd, I would say. It's housed outside, it's not in any freestall barns or anything like that. So it's kind of a lower input conventional type herd. And we have at our research center about a thousand acres of land, and it's all certified organic for doing lots of organic research with crops or different feeds and pastures with our dairy herds. I would say we're kind of lucky and blessed here to have this organic herd here and all the organic land to be able to do lots of different research.

Emily Fread 1:58

That's pretty impressive that you can run those two herds side by side. I think that takes a lot of good management to make sure no one ever gets mixed up.

Brad Heins 2:06

Uh it does. It does. We have good employees here to be able to manage that. And sometimes it takes a lot of thinking to be able to do something. So it's but it works out really well.

Emily Fread 2:19

So, what is some of the current research that you're doing?

Brad Heins 2:23

Some of the research that we're doing here, we're actually looking at lots of different things. We're exploring different calf management practices right now. We're running calves on an automatic calf feeder, how that works from an organic perspective. And does it make any sense? Is it costly or does it cost too much? Trying to really figure out how much you can feed these calves or what's the optimal way to feed these calves. Doing a lot of precision technologies with those calves as well. It's kind of the hot topic with technologies and young dairy calves, trying to figure out you know how to find those that are not feeling as well a little bit faster. And it's kind of interesting to see how those things work. We've worked with about nine different organic herds around the Midwest here. I actually had a student go out and fly score a bunch of cows throughout the summer, so we're looking at more genetics of flies and parasites and how genetics play a role in fly reduction in organic dairy farms. So that's kind of exciting. Probably the other one I'm mostly excited about, going to start this summer, is actually virtual fencing for dairy cattle on pasture, which most of it's pretty popular in the beef world, but not as many dairy producers doing that. So we're going to figure that out. Does it make sense first? Can it work in a dairy farm with lactating cows and how that works with cows coming back to the parlor? And does it make economic sense? Because they're not really cheap, I'll tell you that. But that's what we're here to try and figure that out for farmers and see if it makes sense for them.

Emily Fread 4:11

That's cool. I was in New Zealand in February and went to a dairy who was using virtual fencing, and it was awesome. They didn't have to send an employee out to go get the cows in the morning. You know, the virtual fencing was able to bring the cows in to be milked. It was really cool.

Brad Heins 4:25

Yeah, if we could if we could do that, that would be wonderful. Trying to then nobody has to go get cows. I think all the employees would be really happy here if they didn't have to do that.

Fly Control Without A Silver Bullet

Emily Fread 4:36

So you

Speaker 1 4:37

talked about you might be some genetic management you can do to control flies, but do you have any other advice for organic farmers to control flies on their farms?

Brad Heins 4:47

There's a lot of different things. One of the things that you know we have found is probably making sure you clean up all of the spilled feed, and that's probably the biggest thing. Just kind of a little more cleanliness around the farm helps reduce fly load, especially with stable flies. Now, those are the ones that bite the cows on the legs, so that's certainly helpful. We've done some other things with essential oils on our lactating cows and younger animals. Now, they take maybe a little bit more management because you have to spray them quite often, maybe twice a week or more, to help reduce the fly numbers here on in our research herd. So it takes a little bit more thought process to do that. There's a lot of you know different ways that you can do it. Some farms use chickens or ducks to help reduce the fly load. I think it works, but I think you need a lot of chickens or flies. I think we did some stuff with chickens a few years ago, and I thought we needed about 2,000 chickens to be able to make it work. So you need a lot of birds around to really make a dent in the fly population. But they work, but it might take a lot more animals than what you think. There's a lot of different ways, and probably not one silver bullet, I would say, to help reduce the fly load. Kind of an interesting new study that my one of my students is working on. We found that cows that were darker colored, so dark black or dark red, had more flies. So cows that had more white on them or white spots were probably less prone to flies. We really think it involves heat, so flies are more attracted to the heat of the cow, and black and dark reds hold more heat. So if you can reduce heat stress or reduce the heat stress of cows, that certainly could help too to help reduce the fly population.

Emily Fread 7:00

So I know you've done a lot of crossbreeding research too. So when you started this crossbreeding research, how did you pick the breeds that you were crossbreeding with?

Brad Heins 7:10

Well, that's that's a good story. I don't know if I don't know if we've really decided on what breeds work the best. We w have some good ideas, but we first started with Jersey a long time ago because that's what a lot of farms were using, and especially a lot of organic or grazing herds were using Jersey, and they worked out very well. They're a little bit smaller cow, but I think sometimes there's a little bit more variation in body size. You might get some small cows and some big cows, and as those Jersey Holstein crosses got older, they had deeper udders, so it was a little bit more difficult in the milking parlor as they got older. And then we kind of switched to Montbeliarde and a Swedish red with Holstein cross, and I'd worked on that for many years, and we still have that cross here at our research herd, and they do very well, you know, they're pretty moderate body size, uh, all of the cows are about the same size, they have high fat and protein, probably a lot less health problems, say, than a Holstein cow. So that's a benefit of those animals. And then we started with so I kept the Jersey in from a small body size perspective, but we use Jersey Normandy, so another French breed, and then Swedish red or Viking red to be able in that cross. And those are more moderate-sized cows as well, probably a little bit better suited for grazing and less concentrate, so less corn, and they do really well. Probably the Normandy crosses are the best for fertility that we found, and they're high fat and protein, do well in a grazing environment. Uh, pretty hardy cows. I don't know if we've settled on one breed. I like a few different breeds here. I think it depends on the management style of the farm, how you know if you're grazing, how what you're feeding the cows, how much forage versus grain, because some of the breeds do better in those situations than others. But all of these breeds have a lot less health problems, say than a purebred Holstein. So that's why we've kind of done a lot more crossbreds. We have about a third of our herd is still so we still have Holsteins and trying to improve the Holstein breed as well, with higher fat and protein, which we've done, but just less health problems and maybe a little bit better grazing animal.

Emily Fread 9:45

I'm not familiar with a few of the breeds that you were talking about. Are all of them strictly dairy breeds? Are they dual purpose breeds? Because that's become popular in Pennsylvania, breeding to some dual purpose animals.

Brad Heins 9:55

I would say they're not dual purpose breeds, they are dairy breeds, but kind of an example is the Montbeliarde breed. So it's a French breed in in the French Alps, and it's a little bit more sturdy type cow, known for a little more when those cows get called, they have a little more beef characteristics, or you do much better on a beef market. So that's why we've kind of kept those. The Normandy as well. The Normandy does very well from a culling market. You get more price per pound for those cows, even though they're dairy. So these are all dairy breeds in their respective countries, but they haven't necessarily been selected for really high milk production like a Holstein cow does. So they have a few other traits that they've kind of kept in there, and one of them is you know, just more sturdy type cows.

Dam Calf Contact

Emily Fread 10:44

So here in Pennsylvania, dam calf contact and the use of nurse cows has become pretty popular in our organic farms. Do you have any advice for these farmers?

Brad Heins 10:54

Well, that's an interesting one. I think everybody does it differently from what we found. So some and we did that as well. So we kept calves on cows for nine weeks. I know a lot of farms keep them on there a lot longer. It certainly depends on management and pasture and how you're going to feed those calves as they get older. We kept them with the same cow, so we didn't use a nurse cow system like some people do, which works very well. But we kept the calf with the with their mom for those time periods, and they grew really well. Probably the highest growth we had some calves doing over three pounds a day, but they're drinking a lot of milk, so you kind of have to sacrifice a little bit on milk production for a lot of cows if you're going to do that. But I think the biggest thing is for farms that are wanting to do that is to watch the calves a lot more. So kind of pay attention, making sure that the calves are healthy looking, they're drinking milk. You know, if you put too many calves on a cow in a nurse cow system, sometimes some calves are getting more milk than others, so you have to kind of watch those calves a little bit more to make sure they're doing well and they're and they're growing. Really, that's kind of the biggest thing, you know. We sent them out to pasture with their dams as well, and they kind of learned how to graze right away when they were young, you know, two months old. So they did really well as they got older. And I would say for our cow calf system, it was maybe a little bit more management because we were still milking those cows as well. So the cows were coming back to the milking parlor with their calves, so we had to separate the calves off when they came up, which they got used to after a while. But the first few times it was kind of a rodeo trying to separate calves from cows, and the moms were getting mad. But once they got used to milking twice a day, it worked out really well. So it really depends on you know management, whether you have pasture, whether you have barns. You know, we did it in the winter time as well, so you have to have enough space for all of these calves and cows in a barn if you're going to have them in a barn. So it it's a little bit more thought process to be able to do that than just maybe feeding calves in a single hutch or a group pen. But it worked out really well. Worked out really well.

Picking Nurse Cows And Managing Risk

Emily Fread 13:24

That's really interesting. So for the farms, if they're not having one calf with one cow, they're having you know a few nurse cows. I've seen a lot of farms choose their high somatic cell count cows to be these nurse cows. What would you look for in a nurse cow to make her a good nurse cow?

Brad Heins 13:45

Yeah, I know a lot of people use some high somatic cell count cows, which I think you know is a good idea. I would like to test those cows once just to make sure they don't have staph aureus or anything like that, that they can certainly spread between other calves. So that's probably one consideration. I think it does work. One other thing that we noticed a little bit was we have Johnes in a herd, there's no doubt about it. A lot of herds do, but make sure you test those cows. And we had all negative Johnes cows when we did it, but some of the older cows popped up positive as they got older, and so it's kind of tough to manage. So you have to think about management a little bit more uh a little differently when manage those cows on a somatic cell count. And you know, you want to make sure that the cow is producing enough. So if you have two or three calves per cow, you want to make sure that she's going to supply the milk that those calves need because we had some calves close to weaning, they're drinking oh, three, four gallons of milk a day. So if you have three calves on a cow, that's a lot of milk. And I'm not sure that a lot of cows can produce you know 12 gallons of milk per day in a grazing situation. So I would limit uh to two calves per cow if you're doing a nurse cow system just because of being able to provide those calves with the milk that they're going to consume.

Emily Fread 15:22

We talked about you have some future research coming up with virtual fencing, but are there any other future research plans that you have coming up?

Brad Heins 15:31

Well, we're going to continue some more fly stuff, trying to figure out how to reduce some flies and kind of look at this heat stress model of cows on pasture and trying to reduce heat stress. We've been actually grazing cows underneath solar panels. It's kind of like one of the things that we're known for as well at our research center. So we're going to do more exploration of that this summer, kind of looking at how we can reduce heat stress of grazing cows. We have our own portable shade system that that we developed where we can bring it out to the cows to help reduce heat stress and maybe produce a little solar energy as well. So that's probably one of the hot things as well, is kind of this grazing underneath solar panels that we're going to do this summer. So we have lots of stuff to do on pasture.

Takeaways And What To Do Next

Emily Fread 16:23

So before we wrap up, do you have any take-home messages for our audience? Anything you really want them to know?

Brad Heins 16:30

Well, I think one thing is you know, everything works for every farm. I think you have to look at your management and housing and pasture-based system and how to manage some of these things, whether it's raising calves or different breeds of cows or you know, lots of different technology. So I think you know, it's not one size fits all, and I think some things work for others, but I think as we move further uh on in the dairy industry here, I think technology is going to become a more popular thing in grazing herds and we know with virtual fencing and a lot of different things. So I think technology will save a lot of time and effort in pasture-based herds in the future.

Emily Fread 17:12

Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you would like to meet Dr. Heins in person, he will be presenting at our first annual Mid-Atlantic Organic and Sustainable Ag Exchange on November 9th in Harrisburg. Make sure to tune in next week where Daniela Roland talks to Leslie Zook from Team Ag about their free consulting services for transitioning to organic.