What farmers can gain from a vet discussion group

With both farming and veterinary industries constantly evolving, discussion groups are a great way to keep in touch with current recommendations.

Oakhill Farm Vets have been running the Red Rose Dairy Discussion Group for 14 years and, more recently, the Oakhill Sheep Discussion Group and Oakhill Calf Club across Lancashire. 

The main aims of our discussion groups are to promote proactive farming practices in a sociable setting.

See also: How to work out ewe efficiency and what it can tell you

This allows farmer-to-farmer learning, alongside providing exposure to national specialists and local industry leaders.

After more than 100 meetings across the different groups, we have found these provide a good excuse to get off the farm and gain some perspective by seeing other farms and new ideas.

They also provide a good social occasion, benefiting mental wellbeing.

As mental health is such an important issue, especially in rural areas, we hope that gathering in a welcoming environment can give support to some of our farming community.

Using our farmers’ data (through anonymous benchmarking) across the three discussion groups has been a great way of adding relevance to meeting topics.

It highlights areas for improvement and supplies meeting attendees with ideas and knowledge to target these issues.

For instance, bovine clinical mastitis incidence ranged from five to 40 cases in every 100 cows last year, and is estimated to cost £250/case.

By measuring incidence, talking about it at meetings, and targeting those struggling with high mastitis rates, we aim to improve the health and welfare of the herd and save our farmers money by preventing the problem.

Lambing benchmarking

Another example is comparing annual lambing benchmarking from individual farms against national figures, and for the group.

On average, this has shown a 27% reduction in lamb mortality in the first 48 hours across the past two years.

This improvement follows previous discussion on the subject to investigate what farms with low neonatal mortality are doing differently.

What we found was that those with low watery mouth incidence were using powdered disinfection of pens, two iodine navel treatments, and some were using oral probiotics.

These strategies have been taken up by many other farmers in the group, improving lamb health and reducing the need for prophylactic antibiotics.

On our Calf Club farms, serum total proteins and pre-weaned growth rates are measured weekly.

While serving as an early warning system for problems and providing information for vets to help out with calf-related problems, they also allow us to identify common factors on those most successful farms to highlight in group meetings.

Failure of passive transfer

Failure of passive transfer (FPT) on our farms was 6-42% over the past five years, averaging across the group at 20%, which is in line with other UK studies.

With the cost of FPT estimated at about £50 and serious implications to calf health, it is essential to measure.

Measuring growth rates is a great way of monitoring the success of management changes, such as vaccines or nutrition.

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One example of this was one farm changing to a milk replacer product that supplies more energy, and has an osmolality (concentration) more similar to whole milk than other replacers.

Following this change, growth rates on this farm increased about 0.2kg/day to give an average growth of more than 0.8kg/day.

This prompted discussion about pre-weaning calf nutrition and resulted in the majority of our Calf Club of more than 30 farms using energised milk replacers.

Coach trip

The Dairy Group runs one coach trip each year to outstanding farms or enterprises outside of our area.

Last year’s visit to Cheshire inspired one farmer to replace his feed barrier with ratchet straps the next morning to increase feed intakes.

Early this year, one of the talks was about an artificial intelligence camera trial we are involved in with Vet Vision AI.

This has demonstrated, with 1,200 cows across five of our farms, a positive correlation between lying time and milk yield.

Between the herd with the shortest lying time (8.5 hours/day) and the longest (12 hours/day), there was a 7.5-litre difference, which reflects research finding 1-litre gains for every extra hour lying up to 14 hours.

Milk yield is multifactorial, but this illustrates areas for extra milk potential in herds with lying times less than the target 14 hours/day.

This prompted discussion on how to increase lying time and has led to several farms aiming to improve cow comfort by adjusting cubicle dimensions, surfaces and housing ventilation.

The plan is to use the artificial intelligence cameras to measure the success of these changes to present at a future group meeting.