Practical feedlot seminar: Feedlot design and management

good morning great to see such a great roll up buddy fantastic now I've been given the brief of moving between lambs and beef cattle so if you get confused at any stage pull me up and make sure you understand which bit I'm referring to but I understand there's a lot of lambs and beef people here so I want to cover both we're going to work through drainage the importance of pen surface feed troughs or bugs self feeder beans and water troughs now this might sound a bit dry but it is extremely important to performance of stock in a feedlot and the general principles can be seen in this this aerial photo here so we need an exclusion zone around the intensive feeding system so we can't have water flowing through the system and it is contained there a series of drains from the Pens runs down into a sedimentation pond and then the the solids dropped out and the liquid goes into a retention pond which can be a useful resource so that's the general principle now as far as lambs go feed trough spacing five centimeters per head or better and my preference is certainly for a total mixed ration with feeding lambs and we'll talk more about this when we go through the nutrition aspects but it is always fraught with danger where your feed concentrates separate to roughage it is a huge challenge for ruminal or lactic acidosis so if you can feed a mixed ration that is certainly preferable so food is three centimeters per head water trough space only a centimeter per head is required but what's really critical here is that we have good high flow rates and I would avoid large troughs you want to keep the volume low so you can keep the water trough what the water fresh sorry and clean and with lambs we clean those water troughs out every single day because they are such fussy finicky buggers that they can't stand dirty water I had one example of a client who had a trough near a working area in the just used to accumulate on the surface and he had trouble getting water consumption to target in that pen until he dangled some chains in and the Lambs would bump the chains to get that little bit of dust off the service and then they drink so they really are fussy food and water troughs must not allow soiling even though we're cleaning them every day in lamb feedlots and beef feed Lots we would clean water troughs out three times a week two to three times a week in summer and certainly weekly in winter some people get worried about algae they go oh look at this there's algae in the trough that's bloody terrible that doesn't worry me the algae if anything is probably doing us a favor by cleaning things up it's just an indication of how long it is since the trough was cleaned what worries me is that breaking down feed matter or fecal material particularly and I'll show you a slide later that gives you an idea of the impact that fecal soiling can have on water intake and therefore on feed intake pen density one to five square meters per head depending on rainfall if you're in a nice dry environment obviously you can squeeze those lambs up a bit more here's a well-designed feedlot pen great drainage and a solid structure you don't necessarily have to go the full hog on that sort of fence structure with lamb feed lining particularly when most of the time we're going to be moving in and out of lamb feed lighting anyway I think it will generally always stay an opportunity business and the reason for that is that grass-fed lamb is a magnificent product there's no great advantage over grain fed lamb because they're bloody good products to start with the advantage of lot feeding lambs is just consistency and turnover and guaranteeing we can meet a spec at a given time but when there's lamb grass-fed lamb available it's really difficult to complete with a grain fed product so we will always be moving in and out of it and in that case a good solid ring lock fence even with maxi posts will do the trick and the beauty of that is that it means we can move in and out of lock feeding lambs fairly easy because we don't have vast amounts of capital tied up in this the facility like we do with beef feed Lots when it comes to feed troughs oh I have problems with a design where lambs have to put their head into a dark box we need to keep things open so that they can get in and see what they're what they're reading and they're skittish little buggers they hate the idea that something might eat them while they've got their head in that dark place so they won't get good consumption open chops a hell of a lot better and people have said to me well you want to keep the buggers in but it is amazing how few lambs get out of that system so these are just smaller standard feed block crops you can use least for cattle as well with a bar at the right height and if we're putting lambs in at 35 kilos plus they're pretty big animals to start with and it's actually fairly easy to manage we lose very few with that system as long as we feed them correctly in terms of feed delivery which I'll talk about later water troughs a great idea here was to prevent minimize any soiling it's it's a bit of a bag of the clean but they designed a brush on a rope that you could pull through so it wasn't too bad my preference is for more open systems so you can get in and clean it more quickly and more easily some people have taken that design and they've organized it so they can quickly detach the water line and just tip the whole lot which makes it very quick and easy to clean you've got to make these things quick and easy or the won't get done every day like they should cattle fleet off spacings 22 centimetres per head now if anyone's familiar with the guidelines at least 22 centimetres per head pretty much familiar with the guidelines for feedlot design that's well and truly below the suggested rates which is 25 to 30 30 to 38 and 38 to 46 centimetres for little cattle yearlings and bullets respectively the reason this works because this is what you actually find and a lot of large commercial feed Lots is because of the way we feed the cattle so we're not feeding them so that they all need to get get a feed at once we're feeding them so that they are interested in feeding but they're not pushing each other out of the way to get to a feed so it's a very different approach so this works in practice cell theaters we require about 17 centimeters per head and water trough space of three centimeters per head which again doesn't sound like much but we've got to make sure we've got high flow delivery food and water chuff's again must not allow soiling pen density nine square meters per head is the minimum the recommended minimum so we want at least that and again it depends on how wet your side is if you've got a well drained dry site yeah you can run up to those higher pen densities and in fact under dry dusty conditions it can be advantageous to actually stick a few more in the pen because you're definitely on the surface with the urine and feces works at rate okay drainage extremely important why is drainage important what sort of conditions would could poor drainage lead to this I actually get to ask you questions - I forgot to mention that let's start foot right absolutely so lots of different forms of blindness because if you cause maceration you know breakdown of that skin between the claws that gives access to a whole range of bugs that just occur naturally in free season on the pen floor so you can end up with lameness problems what else can it cause probably you're not for your question there's work from Texas A&M that shows you get for a an average depth of mud on the pen surface of 15 centimeters you get a 14 percent reduction in average daily gain with cattle and then they went hell-for-leather and for an average depth of 30 centimeters you get a 25% reduction in average daily guard and there's a corresponding increase in free conversion ratio for those decreases in growth rate so you increase problems with lioness and you decrease production really important this is working well they've just had a downpour deficits in southern Queensland and they get them gradiant about two and a half to three percent and the waters run off really effectively and it's taken the solids out this is actually working as it should drains we generally run about one-and-a-half percent so we get the water away without cutting runs with erosion there's our sedimentation pond with the retention we're here solids drop out liquids into the retention pond which can be used for irrigation you just got to make sure with that you're meeting your nutrient balances in terms of what EPA requires when you utilize that resource various flash ways of actually making those retention wears rock baskets look fantastic they do actually fill up within about five minutes but they look the part I really like them and wouldn't throttle wears wouldn't end throttle we it's here works well and say that that's a relatively inexpensive system that's that's cheapest tips to build okay you have a resource there that you can use for irrigation and the other thing is with pen cleaning if you are routinely keeping cattle in a pen there's not only a production driver and a health driver to ensure that we keep those pens clean there's also a welfare aspect to that so we are the custodians of the welfare of the cattle in our care we must make absolutely sure that we are looking after their welfare in the to the best degree that we can not only because it's a PR issue but also because it's the right thing to do and the two things health the three things health production and welfare go hand-in-hand so we can do all those things for the benefit of us and the cattle so with pen cleaning we actually try to preserve an interface so it's been a bit away from that in some places and in some instances it's not possible to clean the material off the pen without taking it back to the pen surface and if that happens that happens but if you can leave that top three to five centimeters of compressed manure on it then an axes are a layer between the gravel the hard gravel and the feet of the cattle which is good in terms of not making the foot saw it's also less slippery and if you put heavy cattle if you have a pen clean and your transfer heavy cattle into a freshly-cleaned pen with no interface darby futsal within about 24 hours so we need to look after that I clean out under the fences otherwise you end up making dams one thing we can utilize and this is particularly useful in mixed enterprises because you've you've got machinery where you've got machinery constraints but you've also got time constraints if you're short of time to get in and clean pins you can mound manure and it gives you a short term depo when I say short term because cattle enjoy nothing more than demolishing those mounds they just they put them all into it let's say great we've got a project we're going to demolish this as soon as we can so they will only last I don't know month or two but they can be useful for short-term stockpiling so you can get around and get those pens rounded up and then remove the material later the other thing is that during hot weather you get them up into a bit more air movement and that can be useful and under wet conditions provided it's not thoroughly wet if that manure is likely to pack it also gives you a way to get them up out of the mud now if it gets super wet like it did a couple of winters ago hard to believe now everything turns to poke there's nothing you can do about that you've just got to get the material out under those circumstances we actually embarked on doing a fair amount more with bedding and there's one site that's in a reasonably high winter rainfall area southern area where we routinely put out straw bedding now for all heavy cattle to begin with now they're doing it for the whole feedlot including trade cattle and you have to change that a few times through the winner but it makes a huge difference to cattle comfort and the main thing the big payoff for the feedlot is that with those big heavy cattle we're not getting as many injuries where they slip they bust things and when we're not getting as many cattle cast once that beds down right there's their interface layer if anyone hasn't seen it so it's compressed 35 centimeters well looking after we've got to make sure we don't keep making the same old mistakes now if what what happens times is that we do a bit of opportunity feed lighting and we go right well we can see there's quit in this we're set up we're equipped with plenty of feed we're going to dive in and start feed lighting do it properly first up because a lot of feed Lots grow organically in a fairly bad way probably not so much now because of the huge amount of capital involved in building a beef feedlot but certainly it can be the case with lamb feed light so if you are going to do it refer to the guidelines and there's a swag of wonderful published material for beef feed Lots with the designing better feed Lots publication which has recently been revised and you can get that through MLA and I understand departments of Ag ll s have information on design of lamb feedlot so refer to those documents this is actually a feedlot in Canada near Calgary and when I say don't repeat mistakes it's showing the age of it now this is actually back in the 90s so I don't know if they're still building the same way we'll have you been to Canada and the last company is know what amazed me was that they're still hey they still look like that thank you okay don't repeat mistakes you're still putting feed banks on the downhill end having cattle walkthrough through galleys basically to get to the feed so that discourages intake so simple things like that can have a big effect on performance and health notice these ten percent porosity fences something fortunately we don't have to worry about Australia Australia is a wonderful place to feed cattle so we might struggle with a bit of heat through summer but we're getting better at managing that the reason they have ten percent porosity fences is so that when the blizzards come through the snow doesn't just Eddy over and pile up and cover the fence and give them an escape route so it slows down the wind but if the if the snowfall is heavy enough it has happened that they have had the fences basically covered and cattle will stack up in the corner poor buggers trying to stay warm then their mates go you beauty we're out of here and they just slide out over the fence that's why they have those fences feed troughs a design that is easily cleaned is important something that's often missed people get worried about botulism they get well yeah rotting animal matter you can also get botulinum toxin produced work from Clostridium botulinum overgrowth in decomposing vegetable matter as well so if you've not troughs that are hard to clean out and you get little pockets of decomposing plant material you can also end up with botulism from that something to be mindful of if you're going to put an apron in and I suggest you do three meters is a good idea if you make it too short you simply move the trough in the pad a little bit further away from the feed drop you don't have to be going all out with super duper designs like I just showed you but whatever you do however you design that feed trough make sure that it's it's actually it has some integrity and won't allow a feed to spill out it amazes me how much people will tolerate I've spilled food if you take something like a matter of 1500 grams per head today and in a large feed LOC multiply that out over a year it is a massive amount of feed and food is worth far too bloody much to be spilling it on the ground now the feed conversion ratio from this stuff that's out here is appalling lilo it's almost as bad as the fig inversion ratio from that consumed by pigs your pigs around here yeah not so bad yeah they'll had a feedlot up in the territory and we used to have to hunt mobs of pigs out of the feed trough every morning place havoc with your fake conversion several things make sure that the design is appropriate to the size of the stock these poor little buggers they can't reach that feed there so that's just a poor design the other thing that I found really interesting in Canada again it was some years ago don't know if is still the case is the amount of wood that was used enormous amount of timber now they've got lots of that they don't call them Canucks for nothing okay short apron all you do is chuff away the the feed pad a little closer sell feeder bins we mentioned 17 centimeters per head for cattle access is all-important and one of the key things about using sell feeders is to ensure that they never run out so it's not the sort of thing you can say no they're pretty close they might get through until tomorrow we'll fill them up tomorrow afternoon if you make them hungry they will in gorge and you will cause lactic acidosis because with self-feed immense with cattle where we can get some roughage through with them and that roughage really needs to be at least 20 to 25 mil if it's any longer it won't run through the feeder bin which it's not as prone to issues with acidosis that's the lam system with just pure grain but if you run them out you will cause a problem the other issue with feeder beans is we tend to chop a trough around them which fills up with mud which can then cause lameness problems so this is extremely well designed but I would suggest if you're going to go to that sort of expense then you're probably better off just to go all out and put in trops water troughs open around them make sure that they can't get in and defecate in them but most cattle are gymnasts so they will find a way to prep in those feed troughs and every now and then if they're feeling particularly nasty and they know that the stock including the water troughs has had a big Sunday night the night before they'll throw up in the water and that fermenting mess is something to behold like the stocky right water intake we mentioned previously how dramatically important this is to performance and water intake relates directly to feed intake and therefore to performance so if you restrict water intake you restrict feed intake therefore your slow down growth rate increase feed conversion ratio quite fundamental stuff I found this one interesting and we're looking at cool water hot water and British and while Senecas cattle the Brahmins didn't give a bugger in fact it's a non significant increase in daily gain so I think they just they like to drink tea it must be an Indian thing whereas the the British cattle know it knock them around they like cool water so if you have a structure where you have exposed pipes get in barrack quick smart it's having an adverse effect manure contamination I worked out that this where we got a reduction in feed intake it was akin to something like a tablespoon full of manure per liter of water it's a tiny amount so if you look at a feed trough and sometimes you might see you know a big lump of feces at one end that is certainly enough to decrease water intake that it's why it's so critically important that we clean them out regularly if you see that when you're doing the pen check you know say jeez we need to clean those clean those water troughs clean the bloody thing out there and then that's a North American water trough again it's a problem we don't encounter here this was actually in Colorado and the balls are there so they can push on them to break the ice so they can then get in and get a drink that's got to be a bag of a way to get a drink hasn't and that's the same same feed like they thought they'd get in early is you know how often people will go and build near a feedlot and then start complaining well they put their sign up and said just realize they were going to be some issues with this for you right induction procedures now this is where I ask you it's hard with a big crowd but I will get you going what do we do at induction with cattle what are we giving them for a new car you just put them in the feedlot and say good luck chaps vaccinations absolutely so what are you vaccinating against yes fair enough so the Clostridium vaccine a drench couldn't agree more absolutely what sort of dress do we need a long-lasting drench do we need an expensive drench what are they likely to become infested infected with parasites while they're on the feed lot no no bloody chance so all you need is a drench that's going to knock down all the major species you in the south we have to ensure that we also take out inhibited inhibited hasta toga so it's either a generic ml you know an Abba mekt and a burr mech didn't or an ox fenders off cheapest chips see you don't need to spend a heap of money on flash trenches when they're going straight into the feedlot same thing applies with lambs as long as you are knocking everything out the Clostridium vaccination just be aware that those killed vaccines can suppress growth rate for three or four weeks after they're given and it's quite a bit of data to support that so if it's possible with an on-farm system to actually give that clostridial vaccine two or three weeks before they come in do that if you can because it will slow them down a little so but I'm not game enough not to give them a toss trivial vaccinations going into the feed lock because any situation where you have a high intake of readily fermentable carbohydrate and some of that can overflow from the room and through into the intestine and that's certainly what we've got with feedlot diets then you can get overgrowth of Clostridium perfringens and the elaboration of that toxin so it is it is cheap insurance but we just got to manage it so that we don't knock early performance around if we can what else we give them okay so with lambs ideally they're already accustomed to eating concentrates because you've Group fed them or you've trial feeding them at some stage so they're accustomed to the grind if you can do it absolutely couldn't agree more Wang was mentioned here absolutely critical it just amazes me how much of the hair long cattle on pasture per tick without being weighed so we try to do a six-week pre way I've got a cattle place for on that I tried around the weekends for my sins it's a genetic fault I couldn't get away from it so we weigh them every six weeks roughly and that has allowed us to pick up changes in seasonal feed availability which is not much to talk about at the moment but changes in seasonal food availability and quality that we never would have picked up otherwise so get some weights on them we need some data we need to know how we're performing so you need to be able to say to your nutritionist or your vet these bloody cattle are growing fast enough what are you doing you've got to have the information couldn't agree more what else do we do we've covered most of it okay identification we didn't mention so we have the NLRs in cattle so it's a given use that information this is one of the greatest tools that we have available for improving our productivity because we can measure stuff now that we never could before what if I'm bizarre is that I see producers every now and then going oh I've got to sell those cattle or working in lis tagging them you've got the cost without the return use that tag and if you've got an antenna a reader on a wine box bang bang bang you can run them through quick smart it's a wonderful tool so use that stuff but we also put a visual tag in why what are we boiler with a visual tag obviously in case we lose an NLIS tag which then allows us to match up to what its original ID was but also it gives us ready identification when we're looking for to identify sick cattle and treatments and we can record our treatments either on that tag or on an on an additional treatment tag we've got to be able to track an information to ensure the integrity of our withholding periods now when it comes to lambs and I think this is a bit of a hot topic I would say if if you are routinely feed lotting lambs if you're doing that for several months of each year I would use I would certainly use electronic IDs in a in a sample so that you could track before it's more rapidly and easily and in fact if possible I'd like to say the whole lot with electronic IDs in because that gives you an enormous amount of information and quick information when it comes to your real ways so I know some people are not happy with it and it is it certainly is a substantial expense when you look at the value of sheep but the value of sheep is rapidly chasing the value of cattle at the moment so it's not such a disparity okay flick aside if you're buying cattle from anywhere where Fluke are known to occur hidden with a fluke aside on the way in and the only drench that takes out all stages of fluke here strike lebed result so immature was immature now the area where fluke can occur has actually expanded considerably since the big Lenina years and you also need to be wary of the potential for fluke to actually exist and be transmitted down irrigation channels so I'm not sure it's something to talk to the LLS people about I'm not sure exactly where that boundary is anymore because fluke have spread considerably +20 or vaccination was mentioned they survive in one of your seven in one seven in one you mentioned lepto as well with cattle don't know how you're going well you just keep bluffing so lepto as well that's not that's highly unlikely to have a production effect in the feedlot and a lot of the lesions we see at the abattoir are old lesions in kidneys so it's lepto that they might have suffered as a calf which can leave those spots on the kidneys which has an effect on them when they're little but it's unlikely to affect the cattle in the feedlot the big issue there is our H and s and I've heard of people who had left oh and it's a horrendous disease so if you care about your staff it's probably worth doing respiratory vaccines in cattle so we recently just finished a big study funded by MLA and was supported by Coopers as well where we looked at various vaccine combinations in cattle that were locally back rounded so we dragged cattle from all over the place sale yards everywhere yeah multiple sites throughout Australia including w-a and we found that where we put them in local back rounding wood so I mean you can walk them out of that backgrounding system into the feedlot where we had them there for at least four weeks it didn't pay to vaccinate them where there was an issue with IBR it certainly paid to use a vaccine against IBR whether that was mobility makes plus IB or honor guard so those were worth doing if you identify it OB are so the use of a vaccine against Manheim er hemolytic er which is the MH bit in BO villus MH depends on the timing of feedlot entry and the prior history of the cattle if you're in a system where you can only put them out in the paddock for a couple of weeks then you're still worth giving them a Billis MH or Birla so much plus OVR because they don't have time to get over all the stresses and inflammation involved with going through sale yards and transport and swapping those respiratory viruses we know that from the National BRD initiative if you only give them a couple of weeks you actually have an increased risk of of BRD so if you're going use backgrounding make it four weeks make it next door you can save your money on the vaccinations less than that I suggest you vaccinate and particularly if you're buying cattle direct from from the property of origin if you're getting farm of origin cattle I'd have them vaccinated because those poor buggers most likely naive to pretty much every virus known to man is they haven't had that mixing so the mixing is to the detriment of the cattle in the short term but it makes them more immunologically robust in the long term but if you're buying cattle straight out of the paddock from the neighbor work with your neighbor to having Backson ated before they come to your place so on mh+ IBR we have a vaccination interval of two weeks now so if you can only hire them for a couple of weeks you can use that vaccine or voice or you can get the producer to actually give them the first vaccine and you're giving them the next one way in HDPE and cattle unless you have a market that doesn't want to take HTTP that won't accept HTTP you are crazy not to use these there is absolutely no human health risk whatsoever it is purely a political issue there's no reason we shouldn't be using these if you have a market that says no we won't take them and your tailoring to that market okay don't use it but you're losing out this is there's a great return on investment from the use of HTTP sharing in labs lots of data either way to the extent that I don't know whether it has a positive effect or not and I would say the data is so equivocal I would say don't spend the money on sharing them unless the skin value is such that you're picking up a premium for that six week long that six weeks Shawn skin and that case is probably worth doing but otherwise it's just an expense okay there's a few procedures and I'm glad they didn't come up there's a few procedures that are done with cattle and sometimes with sheep on induction that have absolutely no supporting evidence in fact we know they don't work we've established state well and truly but they die a very slow death vitamin-a DNA doesn't actually have an effect B vitamins demonstrated not to have an effect microbial inoculants have not been shown to have an effect I'll show you why so we had about 4,000 head through this study back in 2008 and to look at this this was cattle to look at the effect of injectable vitamin a DNA on entry on subsequent health and production and are you said to myself look it's got to be the vitamin A sorry the bottom of a that's having the big effect they've got adequate vitamin A that's not too much of a worry I don't need vitamin D because this was Queensland and they're getting plenty of sunlight so I did a high e low a mix then I did the vitamin A DNA at label dose twice labeled ace and the placebo carriers at those doses and the only thing we achieved was to that with more non eaters with Paul super brew of the high vitamin E so nothing else changed I suspect that we made them saw so anytime we jab a needle into something we need to be bloody sure that we're actually going to have a positive effect because we could have a negative effect Hippocrates said above all else to no harm we need to establish we're not going to do harm first and foremost so save your money but there's more big study here this is a meta-analysis so if you go home tonight and people say what are you learning you can say I know all about meta-analysis it's a piece of cake it's a statistical tool that's just dead easy so what it allows you to do is to take a number of studies and the size of the box here describes the sample size and how much variance there was in the the results this line here is nil effect so we're looking at morbidity so whether or not they became sick here and above one means that there's an increased chance of them becoming sick below ones a decreased chance of the becoming sick so a lot of people had said are based on this study injectable vitamin E decreases the chances of cattle becoming sick in the feedlot have a look at the overall result it's on the wrong side of the one fortunately it's not significant but there's the potential that we could be doing carbs so it doesn't work they're still more from the National BRD initiative bovine respiratory disease initiative a big epidemiological study in 2014 we found an odds ratio 1.1 so more than one means you increase the risk but it wasn't significant so we can confidently say this does not work so you save your money on the a D&E I did have a bit of frustration with a client many years ago who said our but it doesn't cost much I said well the T stop screwing with the wall on a price of bottle of my cattle and stop spending money on a DNA I'll take that money there's a new take on Fox coming so it's b12 I think is the nice pink stuff they put in those vaccines it's a relatively small amount if you have a healthy Roman the Roman microbes produce all the B vitamins the animal requires and unless you're off cobalt deficient country giving b12 is not going to make any difference so with a lot of these things once you saturate all the potential sites for that vitamin or that mineral to be involved in enzymes in the body all you do is then produce expensive urine so it doesn't make any difference no but if you're in cobalt the fishing country it's something you need to look at ok bought the fishing country is parts parts of the table lands it's mostly coastal sandy soils you gave the vitamin a day injection in the in the leg and it caused a lot of loneliness yeah which doesn't surprise me because a lot of these things are fairly irritant so you we are causing some irritation so we have to do it we have to have justification for doing it and I make the point too that the cattle in that study and certainly my study and I would imagine in pretty much all the other feed Lots where those other studies were done you had you had a very good vitamin mineral trace element premix that was going into the feed so they were being fed the stuff in any event so we're covering their requirements with the premix but that's an important point thank you okay What's it cost currently for a moment okay so ninety bucks worms fluke coccidia I think that's going to be really hard to manage to get your results back quickly enough to determine whether or not you use a drench at freeload entry so my practical reason 24 hours you can hold them in the quarantine area then you may be you may be able to save yourself a quid on on some drenching so if they're coming in pretty clean there's no point giving him a drench we only do this based on averages so if you can get 24 turnaround yeah I think that's worth looking at yeah now more generally that's going to be fairly site-specific so I'm kind of refer to your LLS vets for an answer on that one frequency of worm egg count checks in irrigation country four to six weeks under high challenge it's got to be related to your environment so if you're in dry country through summer after your summer drains you're probably going to be safe until the break in the season but if you've got irrigated country you've basically got a constant high risk yeah that's more like six weeks what frequency do you use so the answer was we're testing every three to four months but the last couple of tests have been quite low so the management systems that are being put in place have managed to keep that worm burden quite low so it's working information is power that's great [Laughter] I would I think when it comes to sorting through all those products your best stuff to get independent advice because then you've got some Danny got someone and I do sell premixes and so on as well but yeah else is good no Daniel got someone who's not his sole purpose is not to sell you the product so if you've got an independent nutritionist and you can say them what about this product they might say well there's this other one here which is going to have the same or higher concentrations of the goodies and it's actually less money so that's what it comes down to there are some pretty big markups on a lot of the off-the-shelf products so see if you can get someone to give yourself a bit of a bit of advice they are worth using where unless you're just topping stock off you know two or three weeks I think you really need to take care of those vitamin and trace element requirements and if you're going to do that it's well and truly worth using a room and modifier so it might be romancing in cattle or Baba tech in lambs because that's money for Jam we know we get a good return on those so the short answer is yes use them for any sort of substantial feeding period try to get some independent advice on what's best for you okay question is what do you do to reduce high feeders what do you do if you get a few of them yeah it's a it's a tricky one oh I haven't seen data on it but I I certainly agree that if lambs already know to wet grain from prior exposure I think there is it's easy to get them feeding and I think the same applies to cattle where we where we yard wayne you teach them to actually concentrates out of a bunk it's easier to get them feeding and they come in so those behavioral effects I think are very important where we get in the strike with big licks big numbers of lambs in large feed Lots where we're dragging them out of sale yards from various sources is time off feed and that can induce a failure for them to eat because if you if you reduce the microbial population in the room and enough you and you're not only doing that with time or food you're actually also reducing the metabolic activity of the papillae and the lining of the rumen to absorb those fermentation products that suppresses intake so single most important thing is to get these buggers eating early quickly once you get blood glucose up you overcome the appetite suppressant effect of tissue mobilization how you do that is the tricky bit there are feeds that are have a really strong smell and a really palatable that might help with travel some pens to get them on the feed loosen hay appears to work very well I think leg um hey generally so if you just do a chop run and just get them get them eating first and foremost it's that's more important than getting them on the big licks of growing straightaway you've got to get them first so I would suggest legume hay and perhaps with a problem pen splitting them giving them more access to the to the trough and you might spend a bit of time just very quietly pushing them up and holding them on the back just seeing if you can get the buggers to actually take to the feed with cattle if you have cattle coming off the truck that are obviously knocked around and they don't eat they might just need a rest for the first 24 hours or so because they just get tired they're still not eating and they've had a prolonged period of feed so it could be three five days by the time they've been mustered transport you know put three yards transport it you can get that situation that I was talking about where mobilization of tissue and fat bodies in their bloodstream suppresses appetite if you kick their blood sugar up they'll start eating so those individual cases where you go I've got five here they just won't eat stick a bag of foreign one into them a calcium-magnesium bora gluconate it kicks up their blood sugar it takes care of the fact that they will undoubtedly be low in calcium and magnesium and the higher blood sugar might seem odd but it over rise overrides the effects of those fat bodies and they feel better and they start early so that's that's a few things you can consider so there's a heap of work with the intensive feeding of lambs that's yet to be done so often we find ourselves extrapolating from cattle but we don't really know so I suspect it will help but there's the only one from Emory like here we can get some funding I'll do the study works you reckon you have observed so emily has said trial feeding even if you if you're holding stock in a paddock before you put them into the feedlot even a week before running a bit of grain out in the trial to get them used to eating it it's been observed to have a positive effect and it makes sense to me that makes sense adequate vitamin A status will help so if they're getting adequate vitamin A in their feed it won't make any difference to inject them with extra because it won't actually overcome the infection with the organism that's causing the pinkeye but vitamin A is important to the integrity of all the surfaces on the body including the conjunctival and the eye so make sure that that has been covered in your premix would be my suggestion so injections aren't going to make any immediate difference and every time I say that there's someone who says yeah we had fifty and we gave it to them and they came good well they're probably gonna come good anyway so we've got to be a little bit careful about cause and effect okay so the question is is confinement in itself an advantage to production you know you're better off if you're going to use cell faders should you just put them out the paddock or do you get an advantage from putting them in a pen and the short answer is you get an advantage from putting them in the pen because you reduce the the energy they burn up in walking around so the silly buggers won't just camp near the feet Abednego I can get everything I need there they do still tend to do quite a lot of walking so that's mainly where the production advantage comes from it also gives you better control over what they're actually eating so out in the paddock they still get a bit of food here better feed there and from what I've seen you're more likely to end up with more variation in a group of lambs because some are eating the food some are not so there's there's a couple of advantages to confinement yep yeah oh what the question is what's the minimum white range for lambs to go into a feedlot if you're feeling really hard on yourself you can win them early and put them in at fifteen kilos I've heard of down to twelve and a half that is that is a bit of a suicide mission you're right to shake your head you do lose quite a few of those they looking for an excuse to tie the merino wieners sole purpose in life is to find a way to die as you all know so ideally I'd like to see them going about 35 kilos that makes my life a hell of a lot easier and yours I felt it okay so powdered versus pelleted it depends on your system if you've got a really dry ration then the concern is that powder premixes can get lost out of the system and you end up shoveling it out of the trough or the trough on the feet of been as long as the pellets are palatable they can work better in that system but you just got to make sure you just got to make sure that you make a pellet that they're going to be happy to eat and with a concentrate only automated system that I've worked with over the last few years we ended up especially formulating a concentrate pellet so it's 50 kilos per ton inclusion and we added in molasses and apt as I'm and another palatability enhancer and we had to chop the pellet length to the same length as the barley grains and we made sure that the lupins was milled and was the same size as the barley grains and then we got good even intake so depends on your system you put me in a difficult position I think this so biotech is a registered ionophore so there's no problem with feeding it whatever that room an enhancer is yeah I'd have to know what it was before I could comment but if it's an antibiotic you need to be sure of what you're actually dealing with so you need to know what you're fighting yeah as in the person you're dealing with needs to tell you exactly what's in it okay I think we're out of time where's my chair person do one quick one shade right I'll mention shade and then I'll get your question you're not meant to ask me questions just adding to the load shade I'll come back here shade has been shades a tricky thing so in cattle if you have short fed cattle and during the finishing period some shade and some not shaded if the timing of turn off is such that those unsated cattle after a heat event have got a few weeks to catch up they tend to compensate so it's not that you will consistently make a return from it however if the heat period coincides with the period toward the towards the end of feeding shade will make a big difference the other thing is it reduces the number of deaths and a heat excessive heat load so it's a bit of an all-or-nothing event you don't get the big payback until you get into real stock really bad conditions there is no doubt that particularly with British bred cattle if you have shade in what is generally a dry climate you will significantly reduce this under conditions of excessive heat load and depending on the timing of turnoff you will often also get a production payoff as well right and as far as lambs go again we need to do more work sheep handle heat better because of their fleece this worked from Broken Hill that showed that the outside of the fleece of merino sheep in summer got to seventy odd degrees and they maintained normal body temperature so they got a bit of fleece on them there are a hell of a lot better at handling the heat but I don't know there might be an advantage we need to do that work it's certainly from a welfare perspective or maybe that's just being answered by morphic I prefer if their shade there but we don't really know there was a I said I'd come back someone here yeah so the question was how short can you make that interval on clostridial revaccination ago for the booster you can come back to four weeks I'm not sure how far you can stretch it out I'm not sure that that works being done Shepherds walk here in a minute you

Channel: Riverina Local Land Services

Views: 21,529

Rating: 4.9365077 out of 5

Keywords: agriculture, feedlot, sheep, cattle, livestock

Id: ksegpVlRjPw

Length: 48min 44sec (2924 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 01 2018