Feeding Your Future

On this episode we sit down with Dr. Robert VanSaun from Pennsylvania State University and Dr. Andrea Mongini of M&M Veterinary Practice and Ewetopia Dairy in Denair, CA to discuss feeding goat kids from 2 days of age until weaning. This is the second half of our 2 part series on youngstock nutrition. Listeners are encouraged to email DairyGoatExtension@iastate.edu with feedback and questions to be addressed to our content experts.

Topics of conversation include options for feeding growing kids on bottles; pros and cons of feeding goat's milk, cow's milk or milk replacer; cleaning feeding equipment; nutritional requirements of young goats; managing coccidia, and more.

Helpful Links:

Basic Small Ruminant Nutrition:
https://bovine-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/bovine/index.php/AABP/article/view/3553

This podcast is sponsored by the American Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners as well as USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Agricultural and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program, Antimicrobial Resistance grant # 2020-04197.

Questions or comments about today's episode can be directed to DairyGoatExtension@iastate.edu

Transcript

Michelle: 0:33

Hello, I'm Dr. Michelle Buckley from Iowa State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. Thanks so much for joining us on Baas and Bleats, sponsored by the American Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners. Just a quick note before we get started, this work is also supported by the USCA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Agricultural and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program, Antimicrobial Resistance Grant Number 2020-04197, which funds my research on improving antibiotic stewardship in dairy goats to assure food safety and milk quality. As always, if you have any questions about any of our episodes, please email them to dairygoatextension at iastate.edu. I hope you enjoyed today's show. This season we're focusing on improving the quality and food safety in Dairygo. Before we get started, I'd like to make a special request as our season winds down and we prepare to shift topics and hosts. We'd really appreciate hearing from you out there, our listeners. If you have questions related to any of our episodes or feedback about the show, or you just want to let us know who you are, where you're from, and why you love Dairygoat podcasts, send us an email at Dairy GoatExtension at IASate.edu. We'd love to hear from you, and we'll do our best to answer any questions that come our way. Thanks so much for listening. Alright, for today's show, we will be continuing our conversation with Drs. Andrea Mongini and Robert Vanson about raising healthy goat kids. This week we'll be focusing on feeding kids from two days of age through weaning. I hope you enjoyed today's discussion with Andrea Mondini and Robert Van San. What kind of criteria do you look at, Andrea, when you're working with um farms to determine what's the best source for them of nutrition for these bottle kids? And then do you um I'm I would prefer, of course, goat milk, I would imagine, um, or you would prefer goat milk. Uh, but had you used cow milk before? And um is it all the same like we found out with replacer or with colostrum replacer, or um is goat milk replacer truly made from goat's milk?

Andrea: 3:20

Wow, this is uh this is like opening Pandora's box. I so let's see. Obviously, but I guess I need to state the ideal food for kids is going to be goat's milk. Pasteurized goat's milk would be the the feed of choice. The thing is the these are dairies, and so their check, 99% of their income is selling goat's milk. And so we have to be sensitive to that when we're making recommendations and when we're deciding on what is best for these animals, because we need to raise a quality kid to make a quality replacement, to make a lifetime milker. But if we are taking money out of the tank at a time when producers really need that money, right? Because the the kids tend to be born after the doughs are dry, and so the dairies are low in income, and then there's this flush of kids, so we have an economic period of less income followed by an increased demand for money to feed these kids, and so we want as big of a milk check as possible. The milk replacers are an easier and less labor-intensive way to raise kids, just because we don't have to take milk out of the tank and then spend the labor and the equipment costs on pasteurizing it. So, in a large commercial dairy, generally we're feeding milk replacers, whereas sometimes the smaller dairies that are have a creamery, like a farmstead type operation where they have a creamer attached to it, they will pull off some of that surplus milk and feed it to kids. And so, you know, in those settings, of course, it makes more sense because they're controlled, they are the creamery in addition to the producer. Uh just briefly touch on cow's milk. It is, there's nothing wrong with feeding cow's milk to kids. What I find is one, it has to be pasteurized still. Uh, two, you have to be some of these dairies are getting a discounted milk because they're buying, say, a hospital milk from a cow's dairy. And not so much, even if it's pasteurized, the quality of that milk is not as good. And there are things like endotoxins from bacteria in that hospital milk that aren't going to be broken down with a pasteurization product process, but could really affect the growth of those kids and their health. So if we're assuming that kids are drinking, you know, quality tank milk from a cow dairy and it's pasteurized, the only thing to keep in mind is that the solids are lower. So there's a lower fat and protein than goat's milk, and so we have to feed a higher volume of cow's milk to meet the nutritional demands of those growing kids. So if we cycle back to milk replacer now, uh there are no milk replacers made from goat's milk. So we're still back to looking at uh cow origin milk solids to produce a goat replacer. So a goat milk replacer really just implies that it's at a higher fat and protein level. Maybe the minerals are a little bit different than what a calf would need. But when choosing milk replacers, it's really important that the protein and fat sources are milk-based. We want to avoid uh plant-based fats and proteins. Those are not the these kids don't have the enzymes to metabolize and break down those fats and proteins. And so we can see poor rate of gain or diarrhea just from the inability to digest these fats and proteins that are not milk-based. But I did feed a cow milk replacer to kids for years until a company came out with a kid one that was balanced properly. So but that's only been the last three years. So for the 10 years before that, I was feeding a cow product.

Robert: 7:19

You know, that I think the thing to consider here on the liquid diet for the the newborn kid, um cows, whole whole milk of cows and whole milk of goats aren't near as different as they are with sheep. So sheep is a much more concentrated fat. Uh on average, you know, your goat's milk is in the 3, 5 to 4 percent range. Sheep are going to be up around 7% fat. Um not that high, I don't think.

Andrea: 7:53

Well, the dairy sheep. It depends on the sheep, yeah.

Robert: 7:58

Dairy sheep, probably not. Yeah. Yeah. So that so that's the other important thing. But generally, the the rule of thumb is we we look for milk replacers that are in that 25 to 30 percent fat, and the fat should come from animal fats and not from vegetable fats. So it's important to look at the guaranteed analysis and the ingredient listing. Um, I like to see my proteins up in the 25 to 28 range for my small ruminants, although that's where a lot of the calf, uh the premium calf milk replacers are going to be, you know, that are fitting into sort of the natural growth um concept where people are feeding whole milk to calves or or higher protein. And the new NRC, or actually it's called Mason now, for dairy chemical they are recommending a 25% uh protein milk replacer. So another good thing is the crude fiber on the ingredient or on the guaranteed analysis should be less than 0.15, so that usually means that you're gonna be from all milk protein sources rather than plant protein sources. All right, and typically ash should be in the range of about six to eight percent. If you're below that or well above that, then that's a problem. I think the bigger thing that Andrea hopefully can talk on is the total solids and mixing it up because a lot of people either try to dilute it or they add much more powder than they're supposed to, and that's where you're gonna get into bloat and enterotoxemias and things of that nature.

Andrea: 10:57

Sure, I would I would love to talk about total solids. So I've played with this for a long time because when I started feeding kids, I couldn't find a kid replacer that either didn't cause ablomasal bloat, like Robert mentioned, or I just was we weren't getting the gains we wanted. The kids were skinny, we had scouring off and on. So we switched to a really high quality cow or calf milk replacer. And then I had to figure out what the solids were to achieve the desirable rate of gains and body condition and the best health parameters. So what I've found with kids is that uh this is assuming we have a good quality milk replacer. So the these this doesn't necessarily hold up if you have a less desirable milk replacer because you could get into trouble. But I like to see the kids at around 18% solids. So that's uh basically uh 18 ounces. If if you if you want to think about eight but how you make 18% solids, it would be 18 ounces of powder to 100 ounces of water. So uh it anyways, you can do the math on that. But what I found is there's a lot of dairies get into scouring problems and they think that the milk is too strong, and then they drop the solids down, and they're getting these solids down to 14 or 15 percent, and now the kids are starving, they're underconditioned, they're thin, they don't have milk fat res or body fat reserves, they stop growing. And that's that suppression of calories causes a lot of health problems. So now we have more uh infectious diarrhea because these kids are have a weaker immune system because they're being underfed. Whereas it's 18% solids if you're on a poor quality replacer, you might have diarrhea because uh the kids aren't digesting the material that's in that replacer. So we have to, does that make sense? We have to make sure it's a good quality replacer, and then we feed the right amount. When we get, if you want to start making apple maceble bloat in kids, I can tell you that you're gonna get to 19.5%, and that's really the sweet spot of where it gets too high. So sometimes in the winter months when it's colder, it is nice to bump the solids up. You can go to 18.5%, maybe even get close to 19, but you just have to realize that you're really walking that line there. But it is nice to have a little more concentrated uh milk replacer on board because of the extra calories. The real important thing to remember with feeding concentrated milk replacers is that the kids have to have access to free choice water. So it's really important. Gain is there's a lot of water in body tissue, and these kids, if they're fed, um so I'm talking about really a three times a day feeding system and not a free choice feeding system, although you can feed free choice at 18% and that works fine. But you will have very heavy kids, and so I don't want to get too far, you know, off track here, but when we start feeding these really quality milk replacers at free choice volumes, um of these kids will grow so well that you can actually have um angular limb deformities because their bones are they actually will bow a little bit, they'll have growth plate defects because of this tremendous gain. So I've worked with producers where they were feeding free choice and they've got, you know, these kids are three months old and they're 50 pounds, 55 pounds. I mean, just gigantic, and that that can cause a lot of stress on the system. So I'm 18% is a is the sweet spot, but there's you you do need to have some either work with a nutritionist or your veterinarian and make sure that you have all the parts of your kid management program dialed in because it isn't just there's more on board than just feeding colostrum and feeding milk and weaning a kid. There's a lot of parts, and we all know that if we've raised goats, there's a lot of steps and places that we can do it right and still manage to not do it right overall.

Michelle: 15:14

Right. And I think one of the main places where that tends to break down is even if we're feeding the correct, you know, high-quality replacer in the correct amounts, um, if our equipment isn't squeaky clean, we can have some serious issues with bacterial um or abomacitis and things like that from outside sources. So, can you talk about just generally, because this is again going to vary from farm to farm, but um cleaning routines and maintenance for things like um nipples or bottles, depending on what people are uh how they're delivering the milk, um, and then feeding equipment, um that type of thing.

Andrea: 15:54

Yeah. Uh the feeding, so if we're feeding, you know, three feedings a day, two feedings a day, four feedings a day, the equip all the equipment has to be broken down and cleaned after each feeding. Uh and I like to have producers uh use similar what you do on a CIP on a in a milk pipeline. So we're washing it the same as we'd wash any surface that's had milk on board. So it's a cool water rinse, uh hot soapy water wash, and then rinse and warm water after that. Uh we need to be scrubbing the inside of tubes, we need to be using brushes on the inside of nipples. Ideally, we're throwing nipples away every two to four weeks, any tubing is thrown away every one to four weeks, uh depending on you know what we think the risk of contamination is. But anything that touches milk or kids needs to be disinfected between feedings. Uh I don't necessarily think that you have to soak and bleach the equipment in bleach. Bleach is really hard on uh rubber and plastic, and it can cause microcracks. It actually end up harvest, you know, being a place where bacteria can hide. And the thing which we're gonna eventually, I know we're gonna get to, but things like coccydia are not affected by bleach, and that's our biggest nemesis. And so I don't think we're doing ourselves a favor by soaking and bleach. So we just leave everything out to dry in a clean, dry place, let it dry out between feedings. If you're doing free choice milk, then that hosing needs to be replaced weekly, it needs to be washed, and this in addition, the nipples need to be washed ideally hourly, but at a minimum, probably four times a day. You need to be washing and sanitizing that that equipment from those feeding machines. Uh but the nipples should be changed out weekly, the tube beans should all be changed out weekly. Um, you know, having warm milk sitting in none of us want to drink milk that's sat on the counter for a day. And you know, even if you run even if you dump the old milk out and pour fresh milk in, you still aren't gonna want to drink out of that glass. You know, these are these are neonates, these are very small animals, they need to be um handled in a very sanitary fashion.

Robert: 18:10

You covered covered that well. I would I again your experience uh with the 18 to 18 and a half uh is good, and I think that's appropriate, but we we need to caution people that that may not always work for everybody. Total solids at least looking at goat's goat's milk, it's usually around 15-16 percent, which is a little higher than what dairy cows are. They're at about 13 percent. Um so measure, you know, when you mix milk replacer, it's important to use hot water to mix it so that it goes into full solution. And then many of these refractometers can measure total summelids. So you if you're not comfortable with the calculations and doing that, um, you can use that. But I I think as Andrea had had described, you you got to kind of see what works best on the farm that you're doing and what kind of feeding system they're doing. You know, I don't know if I'd go with the as she said, uh at the 18% and an ad-lib feeding system. Um and and you you just cannot cannot give up anything on cleanliness. That that's so important.

Andrea: 19:38

You bring up a really good point about temperature, and uh I it is so important to make sure that that milk is mixed in and I would say warm hot water only because I every year, and even on my own dairies, I see this and we go over it every year, but some employee decides they're going to use the hot water out of the line, which is what's used to wash the tank, and that's 120 degrees. And every year I see this, and we catch it because the kids are doing great, the lambs are doing great, and suddenly the growth rates fall off, and we have skinny kids that have stopped growing. We have intermittent scours, and you go back and you realize they're cooking the fat. So if the if the water is too hot, and on these dairies, the water is gets extremely hot, and you use straight hot water to mix that replacer, you will cook those fats, and then and the proteins are also degraded in the replacer. So what was what was what I always what commonly I see happen is the powder goes in the jug, uh, the hot water goes in, they mix it, it mixes beautifully because the water is so hot it just melts it all together, and then they add cold water to make it warm and they feed the kids. And that will definitely cause a drop in rate of gain. You'll see scours, and so it can be a great, you can go out and for yourself as a veterinarian and evaluate an operation where they've got a great quality milk replacer, they're very clean, it looks wonderful, and then you know, it's always important to make sure that you ask, you know, we do want to feed warm milk with hot water, but how hot is the water and what is the mixing process for that replacer?

Robert: 21:16

Yeah, most milk replacers have a recommendation for a temperature for their mixing, and and you know, what I see is people don't get it warm enough in the cold weather, you know, they don't get it warm enough, and then you you get Milk solids that are stuck at the bottom, and so the milk the milk is too dilute, and then that coupled with the cold weather, you know, you just see these these animals lose body, body weight, body condition so fast and go downhill.

Andrea: 21:49

There's a million ways you can screw up milk replacers. I think that's we could just call them for hours of all the ways we've seen people mismanage them.

Michelle: 22:00

I think I was going to ask about that, but I I really think that could be a whole separate episode. So I think that's probably a conversation to be had based on an individual farm's issues and needs to be had with the veterinarian who's um experienced at tracking down those issues. And um if the local veterinarian's not comfortable with that, then you know this group could be a resource for helping with that type of outbreak investigation. So certainly folks are welcome to email us at uh dairygoat extension at iastate.edu for questions that pertain to more in-depth information here, but we're gonna keep uh moving on our on our discussion with what you had already mentioned, Dr. Manjini, about um coccidia. Do all goat kids get coccidia? Um my boss was very surprised when I told him it's the answer is most likely yes on most operations. Um and uh how can we mitigate these pathogens?

Andrea: 23:08

I would probably agree with you. Uh if if all kids don't, I guess the question would be I would say yes, all kids get coccidia more likely than not. 95%. The the question is do all kids show signs of coccidiosis? So then we're talking about scours and poor rate of gain and possible death, right? In the worst case scenarios, uh so the things that we you know, cleanliness is a big deal, and this pasteurized rearing program is uh Dr. Manson mentioned, you know, it was originally really started to control CAE and goats, but it just does so much for uh the overall health of the animal because these kids in the close-up pen or the birth pen are exposed to coccidia, and then the coccidia could be in the colostrum or in the raw milk. And so all these steps we're doing to control for other diseases are also really good preventative measures for coccidia. Um obviously, clean pens, clean waters, uh a clean place for the kids to sleep. So some operations have clean pens, but the area where these kids are bedding down at night or under the heat lamp can be pretty contaminated. And so the whole pen needs to be clean. The little houses they sleep in need to be cleaned. Uh, you know, they shouldn't be able to stand in their feet or their waters. Um they shouldn't be able, if there's a bucket in the pen with nipples on it, they shouldn't be able to stand on the bucket, you know, get their feet on the nipples. Uh I do recommend, and I think is a general recommendation that a coccidious stat would be in the milk, ideally. Uh decoconate is probably the most common one used, and it seems to be the most effective against small ruminant coccidia. So that's a little different than calves. Um and then ideally the the kid starter, so the grain that these kids are eating uh initially and through the weaning process would also have uh a coccidia stat in it, so that as these kids grow heavier and they're they're gonna be eating more grain, and so as their body mass increases, they're getting a similar concentration of coccidia stat as they go from a solid milk diet to a milk and grain diet and then to an all-grain diet. So the earliest we're gonna see coccidia is around 28 days, sometimes a few days earlier, but it's about four weeks of age when we start to see it. And we can have problems with coccidia up until about four months of age, and then it it becomes less of a risk that we have more immunity. Uh the problem is when you have a few kids with coccidia and they're cocidiosis, I should say, and they're scouring all over these pens, the load goes up so high that it tends to sort of explode. Become a problem for everybody.

Michelle: 25:55

And just to clarify, for listeners that aren't um familiar with the terminology, coccidia would be the parasite that all of these goat kids are exposed to. Coccidiosis is the disease that the animals display because of that infection. So um they may they probably all are exposed to it, but it's just whether that pathogen actually causes a disease in that particular animal.

Andrea: 26:21

Yeah, I totally, yes, and that that's a good clarification. So we see, you know, when we talk about coccidiosis or cocks, you know, any of these diseases in kids or in any animals, where there's a con there's an interaction between the environment and the animal. And so if an we want to minimize and shrink the amount of coccidia that these kids are exposed to, but if they are nutritionally stressed, they will have less immunity against the coccidia, so they'll be more likely to show disease. So we're managing the environment to keep the amount of coccidia, the actual parasite, down, but we also need to manage the kids so that they are nutritionally healthy and strong because then they could actually have exposure and not show disease. And so the goal is to try and be environmentally clean. Um, you know, so we're doing pasteurized rearing, and then we're feeding a coccidia stat, which will suppress the growth of that parasite in the GI tract of the kid. And then we need to feed these kids and house them and minimize stress and keep them warm and clean and dry so that they have uh better immunity to actually fight the coccidia and develop immunity. We know that adult goats uh shed coccidia, but they don't generally show signs of disease because they have immunity that protects them from the disease process caused by coccidiosis or coccidia. So that's what we're trying to get to eventually with these kids.

Robert: 27:52

Uh just a couple quick ones. Just, you know, basics with uh coccidia, it's a protozo parasite. It only lives in the gut, and its transmission is fecal oral. So um when the coccidia is shimmed from an infected individual, the uh the egg or the ovocyst is not infective for about 24 to 72 hours. So that's an important part of cleaning, you know, minimizing um the fecal contamination of feed as an injurious and so on. The other part is I get a lot of calls from people, given in the small room in industry, we're so worried about implementing resistance. And I hear all the time, oh my kids have coccidia over and over and over again, and they must be resistant to decox or whatever. I don't think there is a single paper yet that has shown resistance of the coccidia organism to any of the compounds that we have. What people don't realize is the drugs that we use are coccidious status, right? They slow the development of the microsoft light and those intestinal forms, and it's gut immunity that is critical to uh developing the or boosting the animal's ability to fight off, as you you two were both describing. If we think about gut immunity or the immune system in general, many of the trace elements, vitamin A, vitamin E, and others are important. And these young kids, when they hit four weeks of age or more, they may have already depleted some of their liver reserves of trace elements, and if they're not on an appropriately nutritionally balanced diet or uh for the trace elements or with the vitamins, they could have impaired immunity, and that's often where I see uh these animals get into, or these young kids get into repeated bouts of coccidia. And believe it or not, one of the bigger ones that I see is copper deficiency or selenium deficiency. And then those kids just get it over and over and over again.

Michelle: 30:26

And I'm I haven't found any, I haven't really done the literature search yet, I should say, but um there's been a lot of discussion on um veterinary forums in recent years about persistent coccidiosis causing damage to the intestinal epithelium or the lining in the intestine, to the point that even once these animals do you know stop showing signs of an infection or maybe even kick the infection, their their intestinal lining is damaged and it's going to affect their um their gut health for the rest of their lives. And have you two seen um this to be the case?

Andrea: 31:08

Yeah, I think that that's definitely a real thing. So especially in untreated cases, I I see it more I find that if these cases are if we treat once the kid has coccidiosis, if it's treated with an effective uh drug and we make we can stop the scours, these kids tend to be fine. What I find is that uh if we if we don't treat those kids, or you go to operations where the kids are not getting treated and they are not being fed a coccidious stat or the environmental load is very high, the the kids actually are stunted for life. So there will be, you know, you'll see. I've gone to dairies where there's you know an 80 and 90 pound mature dose, and they're they're tiny and they just they don't grow. So that that scarring of the intestine does occur, it's definitely a problem. Uh I I usually recommend that if the kids fall behind, whether they have a history of showing signs of coccidiosis, because there are cases uh and it's it's a smaller portion of the whole, but there you can have a coccidiosis event without having diarrhea. So we're looking for we're talking about kids with diarrhea between one and four months of age. The most common cause is coccidiosis. You know, we should be doing fecals, and as a producer of veterans, we should be using a fecal exam to confirm that our suspected diagnosis. But sometimes there will be kids that show don't show signs of scours but have very poor rate of gains, and they can have very high cocci uh levels. And in either case, these kids that are stunted and small just need to be cold. So probably by six months of age, producers should be able to go through and pull out all those undersized kids and just uh cold them at that point because they will not catch up, they don't grow later and become larger and then they're not productive animals.

Robert: 33:04

Uh I approach it in a very similar way across the species that I work with. I mean, obviously the first thing when I think about young animals is the morbidity mortality rates. You know, I mean, if they're, you know, that's usually when I get called in is you know, farms losing too many kids or or having problems. The other thing I would look at is um weight gain. Um what are the you know, what are the uh weights of the animals. And if I'm looking at them early enough, I will pull bloods and look at total proteins to to estimate uh immunoglobulin or passive transfers. So those are sort of the three big metrics that I would look at in evaluating, whether the nutritional program. Of course, I always recommend any uh lost kids, uh you know, stillborns or anything like that. Uh they collect livers and and then we can do trace mineral analysis on livers and sort of monitor what the uh nutritional program from that perspective uh might be.

Michelle: 34:18

All right. Well, this has been a really educational discussion, and I think we could probably make about three more episodes on just this topic, but I'd like to wrap it up with just one more question, um, which is how do we know if our feeding program is actually effective on a dairy? And again, this is going to vary based on you know um each individual operation, but are there any parameters that you like to look at when you get called out to consult on young stock or if someone thinks they might have a problem where you can determine yes, there's absolutely an issue, or you're doing a really great job here, let's move on to another portion of the dairy.

Andrea: 35:01

Yeah, you know, the the the I have numbers that I use that um for the farms that I either manage or work with or for myself, but I like to see for kids so you know, ideally we're weighing these kids at birth. Um I mean that's just a nice way to then make sure they get the right amount of colostrum and it gives us a starting point. So the rule of thumb that we follow, I follow is um I want to wean kids at two and a half times birth weight. So that should be happening around between six and eight weeks, depending on the operation and how they're fed. Um there it does, uh I have we've decided that there's a or I've decided there's a baseline number that I don't want to go below. So I don't like to wean kids under 20 pounds. Um and that's then I'm talking about, you know, say a five-pound kid. You know, two and a half times birth weight on a five count pound kid is 12 and a half pounds, and that's not enough. So it's two and a half times birth weight or 20 pounds is the weaning weight. We like to see uh 10 pounds of gain per month, and so that's a crude number, but I like to be able to go to a farm and know these kids are six months, they should weigh 60 pounds. At seven months we're breeding, they should weigh 70 pounds. So ideally, we're breeding these kids at seven months and they're 70 to 80 pounds. If I go out and there's seven month-old kids and they all weigh 50 pounds, then we start working our way backward. But if I can go to a farm and those breeding age kids are six, seventy to eighty pounds, um, and you know, these giant saunen doughs, they're some of those will be 85, 90 pounds just because they're gonna be such big milkers. So, of course, there's breed variations that you have to account for, but the the run of the average dairy breeds, we should be hitting a 70 to 80 pound mark. And so then I can say at four months I want them to be around 40 pounds. Um, and and those are just easy numbers for uh evaluating and checking with producers and and then trying to figure out where the the breakdown could be. Um, in terms of kid mortality, um I would like to see uh up to weaning of five under five percent. And so the good operations, you know, we're in that three to two and a half to three percent, three and a half percent kid death loss. Uh you know, there the bad operations can go to fifty percent if they're really struggling with something, there's a huge range there. But if if things are working right, we should have five percent mortality at the time of weaning. Now, goats are a little different than cattle, in that we have uh other reasons that kids leave the herd. So for instance, I figure um when we do math on dairies, we figure we're gonna lose about 10% of the kids or up to 10% by the time they get to breeding age. And then I'll have another 10% that actually don't freshen. So the 10% that don't freshen could be uh infertility, uh it could be abortions, it could be uh, you know, like pseudohermaphrodites or free martins, uh it could be does that uh just had problems with kidding and didn't come into the barn. So if I look at the number of kids born on an operation, I want to see 80, I want to figure 80% of those kids are actually gonna be milkers on the farm. And so those are I realize I'm talking about big numbers over a lot of time, but that's sort of my rule of thumb is that I want to lose 5% by the time they're weaned, and then plus another 5%, you know, it could be, and those aren't necessarily all that that could be something like um a doe that ends up having, you know, just really abnormal conformation, or um so those are animals that were selling voluntarily, but they're still leaving the program. You know, they could have stopped, they could have a heart murmur, and so a lot of times heart murmurs won't show up until around weaning age if they're s if they're mild enough, but they end up having to be sold or leave the herd for various reasons. Um those are sort of the numbers that I'm looking at. I don't look I I do based on those numbers, then we'll go look at you know, disease incidence say, but that varies so much from herd to herd. So ideally we're gonna have you know less than 10% of the kids scouring in that milk phase, you know, for the pre-weaning phase. Um but that just varies with again, it could be quality of the replacer, it could be is the pasteurizer working, it could be are the how recently were the kitten pens cleaned. So those numbers can really float a lot on dairies just because it's not uncommon to go from having in one month no dose kiting to 30 days later you've had three or four hundred dose kid. Excuse me. And so that sort of variation can really put a lot of pressure on these systems and it can be really variable then in terms of what we see for um health parameters.

Michelle: 40:12

Fantastic. Well, I think one thing that I was taught by a dairy preceptor in school was that if you look around and you see a lot of variation within the same age group, there's a problem. So, kind of just to get producers to start thinking about evaluating their young stock, go out and look in your kid barn, and you know, do you see a lot of consistency or are you seeing a lot of variation in the same age? Obviously, as we talked about in the beginning, that can differ based on if it's a single kid versus you know plods, but um, we should be grouping appropriately. So that might be a way to know that we need to dive deeper and utilize some of Dr. Mongini and Dr. Van Son's advice here and um start picking apart our young stock management program a little further. So I think this is our longest episode to date, um, and I really appreciate both of you giving me so much more of your time than we had planned, but this was just an incredibly insightful episode, and I'm really excited to get it out and let people listen to it. Um do you have any any final thoughts for folks? Or I mean we could go on all day, I think.

Andrea: 41:28

Well, thank you for having me, Michelle. It was great to talk to you again. It was great to talk to. You, Dr. Vanson.

Robert: 41:33

Yeah, I appreciate it and uh enjoyed uh doing this and look forward to maybe some more.

Michelle: 41:38

Fantastic. Well, thank you both again, and I hope you have a great week. Take care of it.