"From cows not treated with the growth hormone rBST"

Factual Questions
21

Homework was very light and I was able to take some notes as I was helping out. 2nd grade doesn’t reqiure all that much thought for a 33 year old after all.

Numbers and type:

We are milking about 1549 Holsteins and one Jersey/Holstein cross±10 head. All our hefiers from birth through 7 months bred(roughly 20-21 months) are kept at a separate facility and raised by a custom grower.

Pasturage:

All dry lot. Even the custom guys are all dry lot. A lot/all of the new construction locally and almost everywhere in Cali are free stall dairies. Local is Kern County California. Spring, summer and fall we rake the lots daily and in the summer we have a huge pile, changed weekly and raked daily, of dried manure under and 20 feet on each side of our 20 foot wide shades creating a 60 foot wide area of dry bedding for the cattle.

Parlor and milking:

Double 25 parallel parlor. Milking 3 times a day for all cows excepting those 21 days or less fresh who are being milked 6 times. We do not use our wash pen except during the wet months. Usually here; late November through late March early April. But we have had major dry spells in January/February where we have been able to have the lots dry enough for no washing milking. We have done this the last 3 years. Normal rainfall here is about 6 inches a year. So the cows walk directly into the parlor and are dipped with W-S Theratec then stripped. About a minute later the other guy comes by, wipes the teats with the paper towel and appies the unit. Automatic detatchers remove the claw at the end of milking and as soon as possible W-S Teat Kote 10/III is applied. When all 25 cows are finished milking they are let go back to the lots.

Breeding:

Our hefiers are bred AI 3 times and if not confirmed are sent to the bull. Our cows are bred AI starting 65 days post freshening. We usually keep them there either 3-4 breedings or until they are 200 days in milk. The confirmed pregnant ones are put in the preg pen and the ones that have not been confirmed are put in a bull pen. We use mostly young sires in the AI pens. We have a guy down the road who we buy our bulls(live, the frozen ones come from Select) from. He usually knows where they come from and they are usually ok. Major hedge there. We try to keep about 1 bull for every 20 cows in the bull pens. There are about 20 here now. We get them around 750 lbs and they leave at 1500-1600. Beef prices have made this a fun exercise the past year.

BST effects:

We have not seen an major increase in twins. Our pre Posilac dairy was in So Cal and was about 350 head. We were here and milking about 800 cows when Posilac became available. My father’s records back in the '80s are hard to make a lot of sense from but it does not appear that there is anything wild happening in regards to twinning. We will probably have better data on that soon as the Posilac allotment(40% of last year) starts to have been in effect during the breeing period of soon to freshen cows. For my part if we can get rid of twinning I will dance all day long and late into the night. Our cull rates have varied wildly over the years. Low for many years before the move, huge after, lower as we were growing and had a good milk price behind us to about 30% now as we are currently in a stable mode. My oldest cow will be calving in the next week or so. She was born 2-27-91. We will probably nurse her though this calving and that will be it, we have her by herself and it doesn’t look all that good. We play with her because of her good service and we really aren’t the ruthless jerks everyone likes to make us out to be. 3-4 of those charity cases running around. But we haven’t seen a big effect on cull rates because of rBST. My experience at least.

Dry period:

We used to dry off at 60 days before calving. Using Quartermaster(pennicillin) on every quarter and let them be; then put in the pre calving pen about 3 weeks before we expect them to give birth. We lately have been trying out shorter dry periods. We still dry off at 60 days pre for all low producers. The low producer number varies by milk price. 25lbs at $17 50lbs at $9. They get the whole antibiotic treatment. But if they still are producing we keep them milking until 20-30 days pre calving. No antibiotics at all just leave them off feed for 2 days and then get them into our pre calving group to get them spun up again for the next lactation. We have been doing that fo about 9 months now. We’ll see how that works out this lactation. So far so good.

100 lbs:

That would be about 100 lbs per cow treated with the Posilac during the 2 week period. It works out milk-wise, if it goes right, to having 15 days of milk in that 14 day period with no extra cost than the feed and I can turn my feed into milk for profit at a very low milk price. It is the other thiings that make the money iffy at times.

Typos:

It has been a long day and I am ready to get out of here. Sorry for all the crappy typing and the disjointed thought.

22

OK, I can only speak for myself here…

deadeyesdad - do you worry about suggestions that rBST has the potetial for human health problems, in the longer term? And two-pronged, if-not-why-not?, and if-so-why-do-it? Obviously I’m not expecting full arguments in response, any more than I’ve offered them at this point. But surely the whole use of such procedures such be regularly reviewed?

23

I guess I missed it, but what is the difference? There was that mastitis thing, but the cite posted by Miss Purl says that the SCC count of milk from rBGH treated cows is within the range measured from nontreated cows. Everything I’ve seen is that the two milks are indistinguishable, even to a science lab.

Are you talking about just the difference in how they’re produced?

Well, since BST is present in the milk of non-rBST cows, and rBST is indistinguishable from BST, then if anyone worries about rBST in milk, he should be worried about milk in general. Right?

24

Oh, no, I got the joke, and it was amusing. We feed our cows corn silage and hay silage in the winter – hay silage only if a hay crop had been rained on a lot and was especially tough. It stinks to high heaven, but they love it beyond all reason. We also have a couple steers who devoured fermented wild grapes once and were pretty wobbly for a couple hours. After that, we added grape vines to the lists of things to machete in the spring.

I guess my question was a very not-pointed way to feel out how you feel about those ads. I felt very insulted after seeing them, as they implied that Midwestern dairy farmers mistreated their cattle and the cattle were unhappy. We have a small herd (about 65 being milked at any time, plus more dry and unbred heifers), and some of them are more like pets than “milking machines.” There’s just this sense of helpless frustration when accusations of mistreatment (however frivolous) are tossed out there.

Thank you very much for your thorough answers to all my questions. I’m sure I’ll have more questions about your answers, but it’s, um, 2:30 in the morning, and I’m at college. Whee! If anyone likes, I can give the small family farm answers, though they won’t be anywhere near as detailed, since I’m at college, and always worked with the newborn calves, with a few ventures into dipping & washing.

Nevermind the typos. My dad’s fallen asleep at the computer, at the dinner table, in the tub – anywhere. It’s hard explaining to people that even though my daddy is hardly ever more than two miles from home, I’ve gone weeks at a time without saying anything to him. Typos are nothing.

25

Those French comic book characters have a lot to answer for.

(asterisk is the word you are looking for)

26

Yes. I’m talking about the right of consumers to be well-informed. If there’s a different production method being used, it’s inaccurate to tell them there’s “no difference”.

Untreated milk has been drunk for millennia. We know the risks. We don’t know the long-term risks of the increased levels of growth hormone introdiced by rBST.

27

It’s not inaccurate to tell them there’s no difference in the final product. Further, there’s no obligation on the part of a producer to tell someone how something is produced. You might want to know, and some producers would be willing to tell you, but you can’t force a producer to tell you. It’s like labels for GM food. There are lots of things that consumers might possibly want to know about their food - was it picked by union labor? What company supplied the seeds? What date was it picked on? But if we mandated labelling on every piece of information that some consumer somewhere wants to know, every piece of produce would have to be sold with a binder full of info. We only require labels when food safety is an issue.

First, I’m not sure that there are increased levels of BST. But even if it is higher, BST is digested, so does not enter the human’s bloodstream as a hormone.