Falmouth dairy farm confronts Johne’s disease head on
posted on June 22, 2011 11:53am
Falmouth dairy farm confronts Johne’s disease head on
6/22/11
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EAST LANSING, Mich. – The Bunings of Falmouth pride themselves on producing award-winning, high-quality milk, but the herd’s unusually high culling rate signaled that there was a problem.
Herd owner Norm Buning was troubled by having to cull good cows from the herd too early, but it wasn’t until January 2002 when an 18-month-old home-raised heifer was diagnosed with clinical signs of Johne’s disease that he realized the two might be connected.
Working with their veterinarian, Dr. Gary Koester, the Bunings signed their cattle on as a test herd for the Johne’s Disease Control Demonstration Project, a near decade-long research project conducted by Michigan State University (MSU) researchers and MSU Extension specialists that evaluated Johne’s disease control strategies in an effort to identify which management practices are the most effective at controlling the spread of the disease.
Johne’s disease is a contagious and untreatable disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium paratuberculosis, or MAP. Though infection typically occurs in calves, animals generally don’t express clinical signs of the disease until later in life.
The first step was to test the entire herd to measure baseline levels of infection and identify the animals that tested positive for the disease. Next, they worked with MSU researchers to implement management changes to eliminate the spread of the disease.
“When we started participating in this program back in 2003, we didn’t know as much about the risk factors as we do now,” Buning said. “We have made a lot of changes over the past several years.”
Many of the changes the Bunings made focused on the calving and feeding areas. By identifying the Johne’s disease-positive cows, they were able to separate these into a different calving area and not pool the colostrum from these animals with colostrum from non-positive cows. They also stopped feeding waste feed from the milking herd back to the replacement heifers.
“We came to realize that Johne’s is typically a management disease, and that’s hard for some people to swallow,” Buning explained. “It’s more of a management problem than a cow problem. And there is stigma attached to the disease. You don’t want your neighbor to know. But we had to face it head-on and make some changes.”
During the span of time the farm was involved in the Johne’s Disease Control Demonstration Project, the Bunings have been in an expansion mode using home-raised replacement animals. The herd consists of 300 milk cows with a rolling herd average of 28,800 pounds of milk. The prevalence of Johne’s disease increased steadily over the first three years of the study before declining dramatically in 2006.
Several lessons were learned about managing Johne’s disease from evaluating this farm. First, purchasing animals increases the risk of introducing the disease to the herd. In the case of the Bunings, it’s likely that the disease was first introduced to the herd after the purchase of replacement animals in the early 1990s. Secondly, keeping maternity areas clean is crucial to decreasing the potential for contaminating calf environments and transmitting disease from adult cows to calves. Similarly, housing susceptible calves near maternity pens or other adult cow housing can lead to MAP contamination and disease transmission. Management changes the Bunings have implemented to address this area of concern include increasing the cleanliness of the calving pens, no longer pooling colostrum and switching over to feeding milk replacer to pre-weaned calves. Also, instead of feeding waste feed from the cow herd to the replacement heifers, it’s now fed to steers raised on the farm for beef, a cost-effective use of this valuable resource.
Investing in a new dry cow barn has significantly improved cow cleanliness as animals enter the maternity pens. Long-term plans include constructing new maternity and heifer facilities.
“Now that we know more about the disease, we can see where it was a problem here for several years,” Buning admitted. “In the late 1990s, we had a 42 percent culling rate. Looking back now, we assume that our herd’s infection rate was probably as high as 20 percent at that time.”
The Michigan Johne’s Disease Control Demonstration Project was a partnership between the MSU College of Veterinary Medicine and Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health, MSU Extension, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in collaboration with nine Michigan veterinary clinics. Findings from the Michigan farms involved in the study were pooled with data collected from 17 other states as part of the larger, multi-state project, the National Johne’s Disease Control Demonstration Project.
Find additional information on the Michigan Johne’s Disease Control Demonstration Project at http://cvm.msu.edu/johnes.
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