Mitigating Human Error In Colostrum Management
When colostrum comes out of the cow, it’s perfect. Not figuratively either, it’s literally perfect. But with the way dairy calves and cows are today, humans have to get in the middle of it, which is where things get tricky.
You can’t leave the calf to its own devices, they likely won’t get the volume of colostrum they need, which means you run the risk of them not getting enough IgGs, which we know is a big problem. But how can you get cow level colostrum to the calf when you have to get in the middle of them?
Well, it’s simple, but not easy to do. That’s why we’re here, to make it easy so that you can implement these things on your farm today and buffer out some of those human errors that inevitably happen between the cow and the calf.
The first thing that typically goes wrong with colostrum is cleanliness. It is by far the hardest part to do, and do consistently. Colostrum is a PERFECT media for bacterial growth. Like I said earlier, it’s perfect, but unfortunately, it’s not just perfect for the calf, it’s perfect for a lot of other unwanted things to grow too.
Being confident in your colostrum cleanliness is the number one key to success when it comes to colostrum management. Everything else is important too, don’t get me wrong, but if I could only have one of the 4 Qs (Quality, Quantity, sQueeky clean, Quickly), cleanliness would be at the top of my list.
That being said, how does someone make that happen and make it happen every time? By implementing tools to make sure it does.
We have two colostrum cleanliness tools we could never go without. One of them is our ColoQuick colostrum pasteurizer. This takes care of diseases like Johnes, Mycoplasma, and other diseases that are transmittable from cow to calf. But, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong both before and after the pasteurization process that need to be taken into account.
One of the things that goes wrong many times is that the equipment being used to milk the cow and store the colostrum isn’t up to par when it comes to cleanliness. Colostrum is tricky. It’s thick, it has a lot of fat, and it’s hard to get off of stuff. When we are cleaning our colostrum equipment, we follow a 3 step process: warm water rinse, scrub with hot water and Dawn dish soap, rinse with warm water, and spray with DK-ll.
This process gets us 0 on the ATP meter 100% of the time.
Next is the challenge of keeping the colostrum from growing bacteria, especially from the time you milk the cow to the time you actually put it in the pasteurizer or it gets fed to the calves. You know how it goes, the fresh cow comes into the parlor, they get milked, and then it sits in the bucket until after milking when you finally have a chance to feed the newborn calf. The problem is, the bacteria in colostrum doubles every 20 minutes at room temperature, and even if milking only takes you an hour after you milk the fresh cows, you could go from E. Coli counts of 5,000 cfu, which is acceptable, to 20,000 cfu, which is not. Additionally, you might find yourself storing colostrum in the fridge, which is better than at room temperature, but can still harbor more bacterial growth than you would like it to.
After all that being said, which you likely are well aware of, what can you do about the lag time where colostrum is getting more than ideal opportunities to grow unwanted bacteria?
Add some tools to your toolbox!
The first thing we suggest is to come up with a solid, well outlined plan for your colostrum. What happens to it and when does it happen? It’s essential to have protocols in place for how things need to get done, and with colostrum, it’s even helpful to put time limits on it, because we all know how time sneaks away on us when we’re doing farm work.
The number one goal is to get the colostrum to it’s final destination as fast as possible, in the cleanest most efficient way. This is how we recommend you process your colostrum. Just a reminder, clean colostrum is has total plate counts less than 50,000 cfu, and less than 5,000 cfu of E. Coli.
Prep the cow the same as you would for milking.
Make sure you use clean gloves, equipment, and a clean bucket.
Immediately after milking, add 1oz of DK-ll per gallon of colostrum to preserve it.
Test the quality of the colostrum, if it tests above 22% BRIX, it can either be fed directly to the calf at that point, or it can be bagged and labeled with the quality and the date.
Once the colostrum is bagged and labeled, if you aren’t pasteurizing, get it into the freezer as fast as possible for long term storage.
If it is only being stored short term, with the DK-ll you can store it in the refrigerator for up to 5 days. The benefit of storing the colostrum safely in the fridge is to decrease thaw time.
If you are not using colostrum with DK-ll added within 5 days, transfer the colostrum to the freezer for long term storage.
If you are pasteurizing, put the colostrum into the pasteurizer as soon as possible.
The goal is to cool or pasteurize the colostrum as fast as possible.
Adding DK-ll to the colostrum helps take out the human error element of colostrum handling, which is hard to account for when it comes to protocol drift or something as simple as losing track of time. Don’t let those things impact your calves, keep their colostrum sQueaky clean.