summer scours

[stw]

Is anybody having problems with scours in calves born on grass? We start calving in mid may on grass and by the first week in june scours begin to appear. The older calves seem to shake it off but the younger ones and new born from then on will be susceptible. Cows are moved every 2or 3 days to fresh grass. If there are any ideas out there please respond.

[perfecho]

Could it be "milk scours", white, almost puffy? Just from having too much milk......usually not a big problem, just a pain. Good Luck....

[countryguy]

STW,unfortunately I share your summer scour woes.I thought I was the only one with that kind of luck.It is quite frustrating when you do everything right and still get bit in the arse by something like this when it is smooth sailing for everyone else.

What I am battling is not an actual scour but some kind of stomach bug.They get weak and wobbly and their stomachs seem to fill with fluid.My vet said that summer scours are quite common and suggested scour guarding the cows next season and that is just what I am going to do.I just can't keep losing calves like this every year.

Good luck to you.

[grassfarmer]

One thing I think is a factor in these late calving scour cases is maternal milk production. Lots of guys have moved to later calving but retained the genetics of big, heavy milking,February calving cows. In our later born calves (May 20 - 7 June)we had a quick burst of scours go through them in late June coinciding with wet cool weather. The bigger the milk supply the worse the calves were. We only treated two and lost one. There seems to be a cut off point as the year goes on though - we calve a few fall calvers in the last week of July and through August and they never get scours.

[kato]

countryguy, I think I remember reading an article in the Cattlemen about that. They were asking readers if they had the problem because one fellow was having a terrible time with it, and his vet was having trouble getting a handle on it. I wish I could remember more about it, but if you have some old issues around, I'm pretty sure it was in an issue from this spring.

Have you had any calves post mortemed? Wobbly calves with big bellies quite often is a symptom of peritonitis. This can happen with ulcers, clostridial infections, or sometimes with a navel infection that goes internal.

If you haven't had a big problem with navels, just in case it's a clostridial infection, it might be a good idea to try a dose of blackleg vaccine at an early age. Ask you vet.

Either way, an autopsy can say a lot, especially if you get samples sent away to a lab for a thorough workup.

As for summer scours, we haven't really had those problems since we're those crazy people who start calving in January. What I do know is that they can dehydrate incredibly fast if it's a hot day, and you really need to be on your toes. As well, getting fresh sample (always a fun job) and sending it to the lab can save a lot of guesswork. You can find out once and for all what's causing it, and which drugs it is sensitive to.

[grassfarmer]

I'm always intrigued by you vet's policy on this Kato - sending samples to the lab and identifying the correct drug was something my Dad tells me was new thinking back in the early 1960s. This could be done and the result back to the farmer in 24 hours back then but nowadays with all our technological progress it takes 4 days to get a result back to the farm which is completely useless.
My vet here refuses to treat calves with anything but electrolytes, not that he is a shy drug pimp normally, he states they won't work. His idea of treating a calf is putting it on IV and calling the farmer back in a few days telling him to pick the calf up because it is better - sometimes the calf still can't stand,is bloated and still scouring although it may be technically rehydrated. These are usually a hopeless proposition on a farm to get back on a cow successfully and survive. I think they charge about $250 a time too!

Scours seem to be largely a management issue, we cope by calving on banked grass with some born on lush green growth. We have treated less than 1% over the last three years - we treat them once with "Cowman's remedy" and they either make it or they don't.

Maybe calving when you have too much grass is a management created problem? It is one that I don't see addressed by advocates of summer calving although I suspect most folks encounter the problem. They maybe want to push the agenda of getting more folks calving in summer and economically they may be correct - you could probably lose 5% more calves summer calving and still be ahead of winter calving.

[PureCountry]

We calve on June/July pastures, and have had scour outbreaks the last 2 years. White or grey looking stuff that smells like no other scour I've ever seen. We traced it to a strain of E.Coli Bacteria in a mudhole they were drinking out of. Throws their stomachs into a bad state of acidosis, and the best way to knock it out, is 2Tbs of Baking Soda in the electrolytes. Balances their stomachs so they can digest things again, and get on a quick road to recovery.

Just our experience anyway.

[kato]

grassfarmer, I worked for 15 years at a vet clinic, and since the vet was on the road a lot, it fell to me to keep the little guys alive while he was out.

We treated quite a few calves over the years. (hundreds) It's funny, but the state a calf was in as it arrived did not always indicate it's survival chance. We had calves that really didn't look to bad who didn't last a night, and then we had some that literally came back from the dead. The best odds however, were with calves that weren't too far gone when they arrived. It's aggravating to get a calf in such bad shape that just the stress of putting in the IV line finished them.

The protocol we used was IV, like your vet, but we used drugs too. Our vet would agree with your vet if he says that the antibiotics won't help with viral scours, but there are still secondary infections that get involved, and there are more ecoli scours than viral on the average.

Some of these calves, especially the ones that were really down, had progressed to the point where the ecoli had gotten into the blood, and they had septecaemia. This will kill them fast if you don't get the antibiotics in there right away. We put ampicillin in the iv, as well as sodium bicarb for the first few hours. The sodium bicarb was what would "bring them back from the dead" It was amazing stuff.

They would also get injectable antibiotics, but not oral. If the calf was chilled or shocky we'd warm up the fluids as well. We had a floor heating mat that is used in pig barns that we would put the chilled calves on as well.

We'd keep them until they would suck Revibe from a bottle, and send them home with a belly full of electrolytes (so they wouldn't just load up on milk right away) and instructions to keep up the antibiotics for three more days to prevent relapse.

Over the years we had a lot of success with this protocol. For the calves that didn't make it, we would do a p.m. Quite often we would find a ruptured abomasal ulcer, which is a tough one, because there really are no warning signs with them. Sometimes the calf had other problems like pneumonia or navel infections.

It's useless to send samples away from a calf that's had antibiotics, so we would rely on manure samples from the farm, or samples from sudden deaths that had been untreated. Especially if it looks like an outbreak is starting, you've got to get on it early.

[stw]

thankyou for all the info on what others are experiencing.Our cows are moderate milkers, angus black and some red. Cows have been on grass since apr 13 so are eased into green grass as it appears. Calves that become sick do not have a bloated appearance but soon become weak and woobly if not treated with fluids asap.Usually our homemade concoction of certo baking soda and salt will bring most calves back. Antibiotics is probably not abad idea to offset secondary infection, a relapse is in most cases deadly. Every calf will have this bug to some degree with calves born mid june on being very susceptible.Has anyone tried putting out hay to balance out the lush new grass in the gut?Vaccination is an option but are you treating the cause or just a symptom?

[stw]

should have edited a little closer. Has anyone put out hay to balance the lush new grass in the cows gut?

[kato]

I've never been a big believer in lush grass being a cause of scours, but then again, it's just our late calves that would have the opportunity to have it happen I guess. A bigger problem we found this spring was with a couple of big old Simmental cows we bought last fall who got massive udders from the good grass, and that made it a tough go for the calves at first. I guess a bargain is cheap for a reason eh?

Have you ever tried popping a couple of pills into the calves when you give them the fluids? If they snap right back, then you will know it's not grass.

Vaccination works really well as long as the calf gets a good load of colostrum within 12 hours of birth. If they don't get a good first suck, it's not going to help.

[greybeard]

You might be able to use the Nebraska sand hills calving system in your operation. Basically it amounts to leaving the cows that have calved behind when you move the cows and not having calves together that have more than a ten day age difference.
You can get the whole deal here: http://vbms.unl.edu/extension/sandhills%20scours%20paper%20smith.pdf
I think you have to cut and paste to use the link.
Old Pratt tells me those white puffy scours are undigested milk. You see them when calves aren’t nursing regularly. Most common after a storm.
The wobbly calf thing seemed to be something we hadn’t observed before. It was common in this area. I had one big calf with it that never did scour. Fluids seemed to fix it up.

[grassfarmer]

stw, I would say you are introducing your cows to the grass the best way possible - working them onto old grass in April. I don't see a need to put hay out for cows however lush the grass, the cows do well enough even if the grass is running through them pretty fast and you aren't "wasting" grass because it's all being returned to the pasture anyway. hay to balance out the lush new grass in the gut? I agree with you vaccination is merely treating the symptom instead of the cause. We have never done it and I don't intent to start - the less than 1% scour problem we have is always in cows that supply their calves with substandard colostrum, either quality or quantity. As such vaccinating all my cows would not help - it would add cost to the already healthy calves and not solve the minority giving us the trouble.

As Greybeard suggest the Nebraska Sandhills method of calving works well - we have adapted that to use in our banked grass calving situation over the last 3 years and it has been an excellent move. A bonus has been discovering how much easier it is to move uncalved cows out from the herd versus new born pairs.

The wobbly thing was something we noticed here when we calved cows earlier in the year - calves that were 100% one night would be so wobbly they could fall over the next morning. My vet tells me it is pure dehydration that causes this but I would argue again that it must also be the type of scour causing the dehydration. Classic scouring calves in my experience would get scoury then after a day or two they would start to get wobbly and then you could catch them to treat them. This wobbly effect must be caused by a much more virile and fast hitting bug in my opinion. I suggested that to my vet once and that it might be a good time to take a scour sample for testing. As usual he dismissed that saying it was only dehydration and electrolytes solve all scour problems.

[kato]

That's quite a vet you have there.

Many years ago we had a horrific scour outbreak that our vet responded to the same way. We were young, very poor, and only had 20 cows. The first eight calves born all died. Needless to say, we were going crazy! We even brought him a sample, and he didn't bother to send it to the lab. Finally we worked through the vet in the next town, and he arranged for us to take the next calf born straight to the lab to be euthanized and tested. (As I said, we were at our wits end!) It turned out the calves had viral scours. Starting with the next calf born, they got a dose of Calf-guard, which was a brand new product at the time, at birth, and it was like you switched off a light. The scours stopped right there and then.

From this we learned to get a test done if either a calf doesn't respond to treatment at the first sign of scours, or if we have more than the occasional case. We also learned that if we didn't like the service we were getting from a vet, we'd go elsewhere. It's much too expensive not to have the problem solved.

We also have vaccinated the cows for a lot of years now, because prevention beats treatment any day.

[grassfarmer]

Yeah, he's a real wise guy Kato, left vet school knowing it all and no new information will ever come to light to change his views.
Among the disagreements I have with him:
No scour bolus works - if you reckon they helped a calf recover he insists it would have recovered equally without it - he still sells the boluses though!
Systemic is best for pink eye, considers the common UK treatment of aureomycin powder puffed into the eye inappropriate as it may damage the eye surface. My experience is it's cheaper and way more effective. I have had lasting eye damage from systemic treatments that didn't work - never any with the powder.
Systemic is best for mastitis, considers my wish to use the old fashioned tubes into the teat a waste of time. My experience has proven the tubes more effective (it's a $12 treatment too versus $100 for a bottle of the systemic he advocates)
He can also tell me that preg checking using ultra-sound won't work and is less accurate than manual preg checking. I had 15 years experience of preg checking by ultra-sound, he has none. I consider it a vastly superior system.
I enjoy my little "debates" with him when I go to pick up these old fashioned drugs that he doesn't approve of but still sells!

The real learning experience for me has been that I don't really need a vet or their advice very often. By moving to a more holistic approach and setting up the conditions for cows to be healthy and more in tune with nature we encounter very, very few health problems. Our treatment rates for lameness, pinkeye, mastitis, calf scours or anything else are below 1% a year. Prevention really is better than cure. I still use the vet for things I can't do - he has calved one cow with a twisted uterus and confirmed one outside-in calf for me in three years and that is the extent of his involvement.