Veterinarian Trent Wennekamp with the Lloydminster Animal Hospital. Geoff Lee Meridian Source
Drought is a hot topic issue for cattle producers who came to Agri-Visions to hear veterinarian Trent Wennekamp with the Lloydminster Animal Hospital talk about prevention measures.
“What I’m going to do today is talk about a bunch of different cases and things that I’ve seen and other over the years and other veterinarians have seen where there were dry conditions that led to cattle health issues,” said Wennekamp at Lloyd Ex on Feb. 14.
“So —just to try to look at those cases and the impacts of them and give producers some ways to reduce the chance of those things happening.”
His technical talk in the speaker’s lounge was titled, Avoiding Cattle Health Disasters in a Drought.
“It seems timely that it’s looking a bit like there’s not enough snow and we’ve had a couple of dry years as we’ve been seeing a few issues at the clinic as a result of that,” Wennekamp told the audience.
“I just thought it would be a good time to talk about some of the stuff we can see in droughts.”
Wennekamp told the Source there’s lots of different impacts drought has, but feed and water are the biggest ones.
“As the amount of water reduces, the water quality can get worse, so there could be some health impacts from that,” he said.
“There can be a lot of impacts of feed quality from drought conditions and then also trying to utilize feeds that maybe we don’t use on a normal basis, so there’s some potential risks from that as well.”
Wennekamp also notes there’s a lot of health impacts to both the cow and the calf from drought conditions.
“It’s not so much diseases, it’s just deficiencies and different types of toxins they can get into, so weeds can be an issue,” he said.
“The amount of different toxins in the water can increase as there’s less water available and things like that.”
Wennekamp says fortunately, there are lots of things you can do to avoid problems as long as you’re careful.
In his talk, he noted the Beef Cattle Research Council, for example, provides some tips noting the importance of feed testing and water testing during times of drought.
They also advise drought plans should identify the group or class of livestock to be de-stocked first if necessary and at what point each group will be removed if the drought persists.
Another strategy is the importance to monitor for toxic or poisonous plants, which are more likely to be grazed during dry years.
Drought management strategies should also be a permanent part of every grazing plan.
Wennekamp told cattle producers on hand to be alert for an increase in cow/calf abortions this spring due to drought.
Using the online slido.com audience polling tool, 55 percent of attendees correctly guessed the acceptable abortion rate in a beef herd is 1 per cent.
Wennekamp said anything over that is something to be worried about.
“Let’s say you have a 300 cow/calf herd. You get that first abortion freeze it; the second one freeze it; the third one at that point, you should phone your vet. That’s kind of the general rule of thumb,” said Wennekamp.
He says many times that’s an abnormal fetus and that’s not a big deal, but stressed once you get over that 1 per cent, it’s time to start doing something about it.
He says ideally if you are seeing any abortions in your herd you would freeze them and save them.
“We can actually do something on those and actually test them.”
