Baa's and Bleat's - The AASRP Podcast
Baa's and Bleat's - The AASRP Podcast
Contemplating Colostrum with Robert Van Saun
Join us for this discussion about colostrum evaluations and benchmarking Dr. Robert VanSaun from Pennsylvania State University. This episode covers IgG concentration, evaluating passive transfer, heat treatment of colostrum, and remaining knowledge gaps in the world of small ruminant colostrum.
Today's episode references several papers including:
- Dr. VanSaun's Proceedings from the AABP 55th Annual Conference regarding colostrum in lambs and kids (2022): https://bovine-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/AABP/article/view/8638
- Dr. VanSaun's Proceedings from the AABP 45th Annual Conference regarding pregnancy toxemia diagnostics (2012): https://bovine-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/AABP/article/view/3888
Consensus recommendations on calf- and herd-level passive immunity in dairy calves in the United States: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030220303830
Heat treatment of colostrum increases immunoglobulin G absorption efficiency in high-, medium-, and low-quality colostrum: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030214000939
Heat-treated (in single aliquot or batch) colostrum outperforms non-heat-treated colostrum in terms of quality and transfer of immunoglobulin G in neonatal Jersey calves: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030215000181
- Temporal kinetics of bovine mammary IgG secretion into colostrum and transition milk: https://academic.oup.com/jas/article-abstract/99/5/skab083/6170618
To learn more about the AASRP Research Fund visit: https://aasrp.org/Main/Main/Research/AASRP-Research-Grant.aspx?hkey=546d2e15-f2cd-4ce8-a837-a16cfd4f3790
If your company or organization would like to sponsor an episode or if you have questions about today's show, email Office@AASRP.org
Today we will be talking to Dr. Robert Van Saun, a faculty member at Pennsylvania State University. It's great to see you, Dr. Van Saun. Thanks for chatting with us.
Robert:Well, thank you, and glad to be here this morning.
Sarah:All right, let's get started with a little history. Dr. Van Saun has had a great career looking at many aspects of ruminant nutrition. It's always exciting to talk to somebody who's on the book cover of one of the textbooks sitting on my shelf. I refer to your Camelid textbook very often. Can you share a little insight into where you're from and how you got where you are today?
Robert:Well, that might take us the whole podcast. So I'll I'll give the sort of the cliff notes version. I'm one of those non-traditional large animal veterinarians. I grew up in uh northern New Jersey, not far from New York City, and had absolutely no large animal exposure prior to heading off to my undergraduate program. So it was actually my vet program that gave me the uh inspiration to move away from dog and cat type stuff into working in the food animal realm. And I had lots of opportunities at Michigan State University and lots of mentors that helped direct and provide the guidance that I needed to pursue this. And of course, you know, I'm one of the old fogies at this point. You know, I was uh heavily influenced by the James Harriet books uh to enter veterinary medicine. And and you know, when I was done with vet school, it was I'm never gonna go back to school again. You know, of course, you never want to say never. And I got out into practice. I was in a large animal uh dairy practice in northern New York State for a few years, and then I realized a couple things. One that I really needed nutrition to better help my clients. My clients, you know, vet school taught me how to fix broken cows, as Gordy Jones often says. But my clients don't want broken cows, they they wanted healthy animals, and so I recognized right away with what I was doing that I really needed to focus more on the nutrition side of things in preventative medicine and and then coupled that with reproduction. And so as a result, even though I said I was never going back to school, I ended up going back and doing a residency and a master's program and then went on and did a PhD program. And I did go to I did go back to practice in Michigan for uh a brief uh stint, but the the research and the teaching bug had bitten hard. So I ended up taking a faculty position at Oregon State University in the 90s and was out there, and that's how I got connected to all the Chameled side of things and got much more involved in the small ruminant side. And then the the opportunity to do extension work and get back on the East Coast closer to most of our family from my wife's side and my side, took the position at Penn State and have been there for God, I think 20, 24 years now.
Sarah:Great. I absolutely love hearing that people that we sucked people over into large animal when they had no background farming background. It's just a great way of life, those of us that surround ourselves with farmers all day. I also love that you're a fellow lover of James Harriet. I'm I've introduced my daughter to it. We are reading, currently reading the books, and we love the PBS series, the new one that's out, and the audiobooks are amazing. Another thing after you finish listening to Boz and Bleats, that I recommend all of you listen to while you're driving around. Um so today we'll be talking about the importance of colostrum and colostrum evaluation in small ruminants. Just in case anyone's not 100% sure, colostrum is the first milk after an animal freshens or gives birth. It's made in the udder right up until birth, until the dam gives birth, and then the milk slowly is diluted with the colostrum gets diluted with actual milk. So, and it's so important to newborns of every species, but definitely ruminants specifically. So we'll go into more of that. As we hope to reach not only small ruminant veterinarians, but also producers with this podcast. Can you just start off with a little bit more basic information about colostrum and why it's such a vital topic?
Robert:Yes, colostrum has really come into the forefront in the last few years, even much more than what we traditionally have been taught or have communicated with our clients. Obviously, colostrum is well known for the property that it contains maternal antibodies. So, this is the first sort of immune protection that the newborn animal gets if they, assuming they they consume the colostrum, because the immune response of the animal it takes time. These newborn animals are gonna have what we call a primary response, and that takes 10 to 14 days to actually kick in to have some kind of protection. And so Mother Nature has instilled this passive, what we call passive transfer of immunity through uh the antibody. So, what's important is, of course, getting the right amount of vaccinations into the dam so that she can generate these antibodies. But beyond the antibodies, I know that's been the focus, and it'll be part of what we're going to discuss here, much more has been identified in colostrum. Growth factors, maternal uh blood cells in terms of white blood cells, these are all thought to help stimulate the uh newborn in terms of growth and upregulate the immune response. And then from my perspective, the nutrition side, colostrum has higher concentrations of the trace elements that aren't in milk. And also colostrum provides a critical bolus of the fat-soluble vitamins, so vitamin A, vitamin D, and vitamin E. Those three vitamins don't cross the placenta very well, so they're in minimal concentrations in the fetus during fetal development, and during the birthing process, they rely on the presence of these fat-soluble vitamins to protect them from the lack of oxygen that occurs during the birthing process. These fat-soluble vitamins act as antioxidants. And so we've seen some data, and this may be a talk for uh future podcasts, but these fat-soluble vitamins are important antioxidants. And so we think stillbirths, especially with dystocia and why dystotia cases uh are born dead many times, is probably due to the anoxia and the lack of antioxidants that are on board to protect that fetus. Because I see very low vitamin A concentrations in many of these stillborns. Anyway, the the colostrum then, once that baby's born, provides the big bolus of vitamin A DNE, and that can help protect against you know the uh the uh uh opportunity to have rickets or or other disease processes. So so, yes, colostrum is much more than uh just the immunoglobulin, although that is really the single you know most important thing to to help maintain and support the the survival of the newborn.
Sarah:Wow, I didn't even know all of that. That's super interesting. And of course, uh every time I talk to one of the researchers, my mind just explodes with all the next things and next questions I want to know. I don't know how you guys can stand that constantly. So, in preparation for today, I read, I mean, when I Google scholared you, it was overwhelming. So I try to just pick one thing to review. Um, and so I started with the um proceedings from the American Association of Bovine Practitioners in 2022, where you gave a talk and you had done a great uh, or you had written up that with in conjunction with your talk a great proceedings that was there. And I understand that's gonna be difficult for some of our listeners who aren't AABP members to get to if they want to, but I mean there's lots of other things out there from you that they can read. And just reading that, there were so many things about colostrum and neonatal nutrition with lambs and kids that I was that was such a great refresher for me. Can you talk to us a bit about the research that you and your group have done that went into this talk and you know your current field of study? I know that's a really broad question, so I guess picking two what you feel like our audience would be most beneficial to them.
Robert:Yeah, so obviously my my focus historically was on dairy cattle, and and and it wasn't, as I said, until I got to Oregon State that I really got involved in the the small ruminant side of things, and and we know so much about colostrum in the dairy side, and so I was invited by Dr. Andrea Mangini to visit a large goat dairy in Northern California to do some nutritional consulting, and she'll be talking about pregnancy toxemia, some of the work that her and I have done. And as part of a American Dairy Goat Association grant that her and I had received, we were looking at diagnostics for pregnancy toxemia. But as a side project, I asked about and and her and I discussed the evaluation of colostrum, you know, because we know at least in the dairy goat industry, because of CAE, caprine arthritis, and cephalitis uh virus, that many goat producers forego colostrum and use the colostral replacers or supplements or or use colostrum from dairy cattle. And and each of those has pluses and minuses, of course. But anyway, we we decided that we'd like to try and evaluate and see if we can evaluate the quality of goat colostrum because when I searched the literature, there is very little data out there on uh colostrum quality, and and it's all over the board. I mean, in those proceedings, one of the presentation from those proceedings, I showed uh a chart that had published papers citing published papers that looked at goat colostrum quality, and the range in numbers was just phenomenal. I mean, and many of them were very, very low compared to what we consider for dairy colostrum. And and we know that when we select animals for dairy production, we're actually selecting for a protein in the mammary gland that stimulates milk production and will dilute, as you described earlier, as soon as the signaling from the fetus goes to mom to initiate the birthing process that immediately turns off colostrum secretion in the mammary gland and starts milk production. And so, as soon as that baby is born, uh mom is starting to generate milk and diluting that colostrum. So, this is why it's so important for us to take early samples of colostrum and use that for feeding and not delaying and so on. So, anyway, you know, this whole project then ended up being a side project, but ended up being a very important project because we've documented now that we can evaluate colostrum quality using a very simple handheld instrument called the BRICS refractometer in dairy goats and also in sheep, and that we also can use some of the parameters that we have defined in dairy cattle, like measuring uh total protein in the blood of the kid or the lamb, to give us some assessment of whether or not they did get good passive transfer.
Sarah:Great. So, I mean, I just to be clear, the the side part of that study on colostrum, the objective was basically to have some very early data that we don't have on colostrum quality and and the passive transfer and how well it is, and just be able to see if even we as vets out in the field could assess it like we do in the dairy world on a pretty easy basis.
Robert:Would you say that was exactly exactly that's that's what we were trying to do is start to establish an actual database and baseline reference, for example, on this particular dairy farm. And I I have data that supports the findings we had on this one dairy farm. This was a 900 dough dairy, but I have data from other goat farms, dairy goat farms, that is consistent with what we found. But let's for perspective's sake here. In dairy cattle, we want at a minimum our colostrum to have 50 milligrams of immunoglobulin per milliliter of colostrum. All right, so 50. If you forget about the units per se, but the number we're looking for is 50 as a minimum. And if you use that floater colostrometer kind of instrument, that's where the green bar starts, is at 50. So most people just assume that colostrum is the same, you know, in in other species. And the published data showed in goats that it ranged from as low as two milligrams per ml on up to you know 90 or so. And so it it really shows that there's tremendous variation, which probably has something, you know, a component of that's genetics. But also what I'm interested in is how important is nutrition to making good colostrum, you know, in the in the dairy world, the dairy uh cow world, uh, there's not a lot of data that suggests pre-partum diets, late gestation diets can greatly influence colostrum. But in the beef world and what I'm seeing now in the sheep and goat world, that's not the case. It looks like the the diet is a strong influencer of colostrum quality. So what we found in our study on the this goat farm was the average, the average concentration of immunoglobulin in the colostrum on this farm was 74, so much higher. But yet the range was like from you know 20 something on up to over 120, you know. So so again, it shows even on a farm the variation for individuals, you know, within that. And so there's there's tremendous opportunity for us to be able to evaluate, just like we do in dairy cattle, to evaluate the colostrum and then maybe store some of that colostrum and use that for those doughs that have poor quality colostrum. Now, in contrast, the sheep have a much thicker colostrum because their volume is much lower. Uh, also, it's interesting meat goat breeds have thicker or more concentrated colostrum versus dairy goat breeds. So that fits in with this whole idea of when we select for the dairy character, we're selecting that for that uh gene and protein that causes more volume and and dilutes that colostrum.
Sarah:Yeah, that that makes sense to me because we found in so many different things when we select for one gene, we suffer elsewhere, unfortunately. Let's see. So sorry, my mind is whirling as I try to think of things to keep the conversation going. So if you were, if you were like, like how on dairies we consult, if you were consulting on a goat dairy, would what would be the the the mark, or if you have enough information that you would consider the minimum of good colostrum for small ruminates, or if that's too broad, you know, specifically for the meat goat or the dairy goat? Like would you use that 50? Or do you think I assume you just total proteins from the babies also, and you could tell, you know, how the colostrum concentration correlated with that? Yes.
Robert:Yes, so so let's go through that. Um first things is when we use the BRICS refractometer, it's been validated in in a number of published studies in dairy cows, the relationship between what the BRICS value, it it's reported as a percent, but it really doesn't have any, it doesn't really mean that. And then we compare that to the milligrams of IgG per ml. And so what we found was the relationship of bricks to IgG content was different in goats than it was in dairy cattle, but it was the same for sheep as it was in dairy cattle. Oh, and so that was quite intriguing. That was quite intriguing. And you probably might, if if you had time to sit and think about it, you might understand where that's coming from. I think it's due to the difference in fat globules between goats. You know, goats have this naturally homogenized fat. And so how the bricks works, it's actually an optical thing. And so if you have homogenized fat, it's going to affect the reflectance differently. Whereas sheep have a similar fat kind of process. Now, what we found in sheep is their colostrum is so thick that we actually have to dilute it with saline to get a bricks measurement. And so we usually dilute it one to two or one to three with saline, you know, just a you know common salt water type solution that we would could get. And uh but it the relationship in terms of the Prediction line is the same slope and everything that dairy cattle have, but for goats it's shifted over. So for dairy cattle, we suggest the bricks should be 22 or higher. For goats, we achieved the same value of IgG for a goat would be at 18. All right. So our recommendation based on our evaluation of the the kids and their total proteins, and we also measured their IgG concentrations. We looked at those that had much higher IgG, and they needed about 30 grams of IgG total, 35, excuse me, 35 grams of IgG total to achieve the 6 to 6.5 grams per deciliter of total protein. And so we're recommending at least 70 to 75 milligrams of IgG per ml quality. So a higher quality colostrum in our sheep and goats compared to what we would establish for cattle.
Sarah:Great. I think those are great takeaway numbers for all of us. And my first thought to that is that's why goat milk is so delicious and goat cheese is amazing. Not that I don't enjoy the sheep products, also, but okay. I'm taking notes for myself. So wow, this is just super interesting. And I mean, I work in a very different sheep and goat world than Dr. Mondini does. She's out there consulting with these huge dairies and lots of animals, and you know, nutrition is spot on. But lots of us work in the pet world, right? Where people are breeding for four-inch animals, or you know, they they do breed meat, but they, you know, they have five doughs. But I still think, like across the country and across all these different aspects, this is a great takeaway. I mean, these tests are not hard. Most of your large animal vets should know how to do it. And there's no reason that you shouldn't, if you're breeding 300 animals or four, have great nutrition and great outcomes and less stillbirths and you know, healthy lambs and kids. And I just I think this is great for everybody. I think producers, you know, if they're having any sort of weak kids or they should talk to their their vet about their pre-nutrition and their post-nutrition. And you know, grain is such a hot topic in small ruminants. We are scared of it in our, I shouldn't say that, but obviously we have issues with it in our boys, and you know, a lot of these people don't have the kind of money to throw at the at you know, nutrition that the larger farms do in my world at least. But I think, yeah, I think the takeaways from your research are so applicable and so important.
Robert:Well, what's interesting is there was a recent paper published in the Journal of Dairy Science from a consensus group that looked at how do we now evaluate colostrum passive transfer? Okay. And in the historic perspective, one of my colleagues, Dr. Judd Heindrich here at Penn State, was instrumental in defining the original criteria. And what that was is we wanted to see a minimum of 10 milligrams per ml of IgG in the blood of newborn calves after colostrum absorption. And if they were below that, that was considered failure of passive transfer, what we call failure of passive transfer. Well, this new consortium or consensus panel has said that 10 and below is actually a true failure, and 10 as a as an entity is considered fair. They believe that the excellent passive transfer is 25 milligrams per ml, and then that and above is considered excellent, and then they have two other intermediate criteria. So when we looked at the IgG concentration in the kids that received this colostrum that I mentioned that averaged uh 74 uh milligrams per ml, they had an IgG concentration of of about 16. So not in that really high level. So I I think 70 or 75 is probably very conservative. What we saw when we did some of the calculations is the efficiency of absorption of IgG. People don't realize this. The efficiency of absorption of IgG is quite low. In in these kids, it was only about 17%. We typically consider 20% uh and at best maybe 20 22 to 24 percent. Another important takeaway from all of this is I understand the need and the interest in using colostrum supplements or colostrum replacers. Those are two different things because of the CAE uh issue. But we now know if we pasteurize the colostrum, and there's guidelines on pasteurization, how high the temperature and for how long. We need to verify better with goats, but we certainly have it well established in dairy calves and cattle. We can kill off the CAE. And what's important is even though heat heating of the colostrum could damage some of the IgG, the work done here by my colleague Judd Heinrich and some work done by Dr. Sandra Godin at Minnesota has shown the efficiency of absorption of IgG is actually increased in heat-treated colostrum. So even though that there's a slight damage, uh a slight lowering of the IgG, the calf absorbs it better. So that's my next project is to find some dairies that are doing heat treatment of their pat, you know, pasteurizing or heat treating their colostrum and looking at IgGs and seeing if non-pasteurized versus pasteurized has a greater IgG response. My guess is yes, they should follow that same pattern.
Sarah:Wow, that's so interesting because you know it sometimes it is really hard to convince people to pasteurize their colostrum. And the more ticks we have to show that it's better and it's worth the time and effort is is awesome and huge. Wow, that's so interesting.
Robert:So just to come back to the point you were trying to make there in terms of these tools that we have, the the BRICS refractometer. Um, almost every veterinarian now of large animal vet has one of these things. And you know, you can purchase them online. I use the MISCO, there's others, and again, there you you can get many different functions, but the point is you only need a drop of colostrum. It's not like you have to milk the whole animal out and and have a large volume like in the old traditional colostrometers where you put the you know the specific gravity measurement thing in there. So so that's what makes it so nice is you can just take a drop of colostrum and put it on this thing, you get a measurement right away. And then these things can also, if you get if get some blood samples, again, you can work with the veterinarian on the farm, you can use the same instrument to measure total proteins.
Sarah:Right, yeah. And that is it, I haven't done dairy work for a long time, but we that you have to draw like within 24 hours after colostrum. Is that still correct?
Robert:Well, what we would like to do is you you got to give them at least 24 hours. All right. So so our goal is usually the the sweet spot is somewhere in that 24 to 48 hours. Although we when we took our measurements, we we did them from 24 from one day up to six days.
Sarah:Oh, okay.
Robert:Yeah, so you can you can go out a little bit further, but if you go out further, you also have to take into account are they having scours or something like that and getting dehydrated because then that's going to influence the the protein content, you know, the the concentration that we're measuring.
Sarah:So right, right. Just a a point of interest, did you see any difference within a litter? Like, like, you know, usually there's one kid, like if there's two or three born, one's bigger, one's smaller, one's gets more milk, one gets less. Did you appreciate, and maybe this wasn't something you were looking at, but did you appreciate a difference within you know siblings?
Robert:No, because on on this particular farm, they had a very strict protocol of giving uh six ounces of colostrum twice. And and so they fed colostrum at that amount, so it wasn't like they allowed the the kids to nurse. And I would expect, as you just suggested, if the kids are nursing, depending on size and and thrift and so on, we may see some differences there. What we did notice, which was interesting, was whether they were tube-fed, bottle fed, or uh bucket fed, the IgG concentrations were the same. There was no difference in IgG, so so there's no beneficial effect of tubing them other than the fact that you know they certainly got it.
Sarah:Yeah, I always assumed it was the opposite because tubing, you know, they isn't as good because they don't get the you know, the suckle reflex and the you know, some of it goes into the wrong part of the the digestive tract.
Robert:It it seems, we we looked at this in calves, it seems like in the early stages of life, that rumen, that that developing rumen will will shunt this stuff into the apple mesum there, so that where it needs to be uh processed.
Sarah:So great. Good to know, good to know. Is this study published yet? Is this something that some people can look up or is it not out in the world yet?
Robert:Uh no, it's it's not officially published. Um working with my students on that, but we we're trying to bring in more farms to have a better survey of the goat industry as opposed to just having data from one farm. You know, that you know, when you have we have a lot of data from the one farm, but that doesn't help in it from the publishing world, you know, because that's just farm specific. So so we're in the process of getting more farms and and working on that. And I have two new students working on this now for their honors project here, and so I'm hoping this year, too, since it's now 2024, to get that out.
Sarah:Great, great. So so besides collecting more data on what we've already discussed, is there anything else in this field that you feel like like what are kind of the next steps, I guess, is what I'm asking.
Robert:Well, we want to better define what nutritional components you know could influence the quality of the colostrum. Obviously, having vitamin supplementation, mineral supplementation is important as we talked about earlier, but we're more interested in the IgG concentration. Can we, through appropriate protein levels in the diet, or or what you know, energy protein interactions improve the IgG concentration? And then the next thing is is there any critical factors we need to think about in the absorption process? And so that's where I said the heat treatment would be one. Certainly minimizing contamination, like if you leave, if you if you go to a form of harvesting the colostrum and and and storing it, it's got to be frozen because colostrum is a wonderful bacterial media. And so if you allow bacteria growth to occur by letting it sit out room temperature or something like that, the absorption process in the gut is not specific to immunoglobulins. It will take up bacteria just as easily as it will take up the immunoglobulins. And we've shown that in dairy cattle or dairy calves. So I'm interested in looking at what we can do to try and improve the absorption efficiency and the time frame. We know based on some of the work that we've completed so far, and some work that Mary Smith, some observations Mary Smith at Cornell University shared, the IgG concentration in goat in sheep colostrum drops very rapidly from you know the first milking to even within, you know, it cuts it that it decreases by almost 50% the IgG concentration in the first 12 hours. So yeah, so it's extremely important to get that really early colostrum. And so we we want to look at is there some factors that influence this drop in terms of you know, if we have better prepartum nutrition, will they maintain a better quality colostrum at second milking or something like that? That would be another area that we're we're interested in looking at, and of course, the other obvious thing is what concentration of IgG in the kid or the lamb is critical to survivability, improved health and performance, and so on.
Sarah:Great. Wow, that sounds super interesting. So the final question I always like to ask our guests is what do you see as the next problem that researchers need to think about and address in small ruminant medicine? So it doesn't have to be your field, it doesn't have to be something you want to do yourself. Just what do you what do you feel like is a big question that's out there that would benefit all of our small ruminant producers?
Robert:Well, that's that's a great question. I've pondered upon that a few times. One of the things we're working on right now, and this is again part of uh the project that Dr. Mangini and I were doing, is we were validating the uh human handheld meters that can measure glucose and beta-hydroxybutrate ketones to look at pregnancy toxemia or risk of pregnancy toxemia. And then we were looking at diagnostic or prognostic indicators in the blood that might give us some further insight. And so I think given the situation in terms of the animal value and and you know the perceived veterin costs and input, it would be nice if we could have more point of service type uh diagnostics that a practitioner can do and provide right on the farm rather than saying, hey, look, I'll I'll take some blood and we'll run it and do this and do that. Um that just might help in allowing uh the producers to to take more advantage of veterin services in in maintaining uh animal health and performance.
Sarah:Yeah, that's a great one. Um and that doesn't seem super hard. And I know when I asked Dr. Jones this question, her first thing was, is we need more money. Like it's really hard to just more ruminant research because there's no there's no support out there. And yeah, I get it. I know that that's really hard. So, and as I mentioned in the last podcast, you know, AASRP is trying. We now have given two research grants out. So hopefully, as we fundraise and do other things, you know, we can keep doing that. And like you said, the American Dairy Goat Association, and there's other people out there who are trying, and hopefully we can keep supporting you guys. Do you have any other final comments or anything else you'd like our audience to hear, Dr. Vanson?
Robert:No, I think we've we've covered that. I just again want to reinforce how important colostrum is, and and don't get too, I mean, again, in the GOAT world, we're we're certainly very concerned about CAE. The last thing I just want to maybe mention is based on our work, most of the commercial colostrum replacers are inadequate because, as we said, we need to, we fed in in our the kids that we evaluated in our study received 35 grams of IgG based on the volume of colostrum and the and the concentration of IgG in that colostrum. Most goat colostrum replacers provide maybe 20 to 22 grams. And remember that those replacers are bovine origin. So that means there's there's no goat colostrum products out there, they're all bovine, and so that means that the the IgG from that is going to be less, it's gonna have a shorter what we call half-life. It's not gonna last as long. And you just don't know what pathogens that those antibodies remember, antibodies are specific to to a pathogen. And so if there's no E. coli antibodies in that product, then they're not gonna be protected against you know a traditional diarrhea-causing or scours-causing uh problem.
Sarah:So would you recommend getting frozen colostrum from a dairy as a better source than the powder that you can buy at the tractor supply or whatever?
Robert:Yeah, uh again, if if the dairy is is pasteurizing their colostrum, that would be the perfect option. And and I would encourage you know any goat dairies to to start considering the pasteurization process for that and using their own. We are gonna look into this. This is another side project. But I have a goat dairy that has been using the colostrum replacer and is considering going to a regular colostrum. So we're going to do a comparison with the two and see you know what kind of difference we might observe here.
Sarah:Wow, that's great. Well, I think it's time we wrap it up. Thank you so much, Dr. Vanson, for joining us today on Boz and Bleats, the American Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners podcast.