Ensuring cattle health through vaccinations, disease prevention, and biosecurity measures to protect against pathogens and pests.
Reducing stress during livestock handling can increase productivity, maintain or improve meat quality, reduce sickness, and enhance animal welfare. Implementing low-stress handling techniques when working with cattle is the first step to reducing stress.
Seller reputation is often included in discussions on traits that influence feeder calf prices. Yet, historically it has not had a value assigned to it as many other traits have.
Reproductive diseases of concern for Wisconsin’s cow-calf herds include those caused by bacteria, protozoa, and viruses.
You should contact your veterinarian early on as symptoms present, especially for something you have a negative gut feeling about. The odds of successfully returning the animal to health are improved the earlier it is correctly diagnosed and treated.
Composting can be used for occasional mortality, emergency livestock mass casualties, and disease outbreaks.
Throughout this calving season it is important to remember that continuing proper cow management is necessary for your cows to have a successful, tight calving window next year. One of the most effective ways to manage the post-partum interval is to maintain the body condition scores (BCS) of your herd.
As the gavel falls on your cattle purchase, do you really know what you bought? Herd additions have inherent risk. Every movement of cattle onto your cow-calf operation—be they cows, heifers, calves, or bulls—brings biosecurity risks to your farm. It is critical to isolate new additions so that any sickness they break with is not shared with your home herd.
Deworming decisions are farm-specific and depend on the age of the animal, how much exposure they had to infective larvae while grazing this spring and summer or the previous spring and summer, when they were last dewormed, and what products were used.
Bringing new calves to the feedlot is stressful for them due to transportation, adjusting to a new home, changing feed, exposure to disease, and establishing social order with new cattle. Minimizing both clinical and subclinical disease in feedlots is essential for producers to improve profitability.
Keeping your livestock safe from microbes, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi, is the biosecurity goal that all farms should have. Wearing clean, sanitized footwear helps meet this goal as foot traffic moves microbes to and around the farm.
