Breaking free from the chains of the past Where
truth moves faster than a Holstein calf No law
waiting on some printed page We're charting new
ground in the digital age From genomic codes
to robot facts We cut through the noise, no hold
them back not your daddy's dairy news tonight
we're sparking Welcome back to the Bullvine Podcast,
where we cut through the dairy industry noise
to get you the insights that actually matter
for your operation. And today we're doing another
deep dive. We have a mission here. And if you've
been listening for a while, you know exactly
what it is. We are here to provide no BS insights.
We aren't here to sell you a product. We aren't
here to pat you on the back. And we certainly
aren't here to tell you that. Everything is sunny
and bright when the thunder is rolling in. We
look at the data, we look at the market, and
we tell you what is actually happening. That's
the plan. And my job, as always, is to take all
that high -level analysis that you love so much
and filter it through the lens of, well, what
actually works in the barn? Because you can have
the best data in the world, but if it requires
me to build a new barn or, I don't know, fire
my nutritionist to implement it, it's not going
to happen on Monday morning. That's fair. And
today we are diving deep into a topic that fits
that description perfectly. It is something most
farmers look at every single day. You probably
saw it this morning if you were walking the fresh
pen. Oh, yeah. But the data suggests that while
you see it, you are completely and I mean completely
undervaluing. what it's costing you i have a
feeling i know where we're going with this you're
talking about that rock hard swelling on a fresh
heifer exactly the kind where the utter looks
like a basketball the teats are strutting out
sideways and we all just kind of shrug our shoulders
and say well that's part of the deal she's a
heifer she'll work it out that is exactly what
we were talking about yeah utter edema but we
aren't just doing a biology lesson today we are
calling this the 16 000 hyper tax for a reason
a tax i like that because that swelling isn't
just cosmetic it is bleeding your balance sheet
dry, and in the current market conditions of
early 2026, it is a tax you literally cannot
afford to pay. $16 ,000. Now, hold on a second.
That is a massive number to attach to some swelling.
I saw the show notes, and I honestly thought
you added an extra zero by mistake. No typo.
And when we unpack the modeling later in the
show, I think you're going to see it's actually,
well, maybe even a little conservative. Wow.
But before we get to the biology or the accounting,
We have to set the stage. We are recording this
in February 2026. What does the world look like
for a dairy producer right now? It's tense. That's
the word I'd use, tense. I was at a sale barn
last week just watching. You know that feeling
when the auction year starts and usually there's
a bit of a lull, people are feeling it out. Yeah,
the warm -up. There's no warm -up right now.
If a decent springing heifer walks into the ring,
the bidding doesn't start low. It starts at $3
,000 and it goes up. We are seeing replacement
heifers trading between $3 ,000 and $4 ,000 consistently.
I've seen some genetic lots pushing way, way
past that. It's the beef on dairy hangover. That's
what I'm calling it. We spent five years aggressively
breeding everything to beef because the premiums
were so good. And they were good, don't get me
wrong. A day -old crossbred calf was bringing
$800, $1 ,000. Compared to $100 for a Holstein
bull calf a few years ago, it was a no -brainer.
Of course it was. Mike North over at Ever .ag
called it a fantastic opportunity to make money
without feeding a cat for 18 months. And he was
right. But we squeezed the pipeline. We just,
we stopped making our own replacements. And the
numbers back that up. The CoBank outlook from
late 2025 put Heifer inventories at 20 -year
lows. We are talking late 1970s numbers. So you're
in a situation where the asset is scarce. And
it's expensive. An incredibly expensive asset.
And this is where our topic comes in. Imagine
buying a car for double the sticker price, driving
it off the lot, and realizing the tires are flat
and the engine is overheating. That's the fresh
heifer with severe edema. Exactly. You've paid
a huge premium to get her there. All your feed
costs, raising costs, or just the flat -out purchase
price. And the moment she hits the milking string,
she physically fails. She's broken. But here's
the friction point. And I want you to be honest.
If I'm a farmer, And I say, yeah, my heifers
have some swelling, but they work out of it.
What are you thinking? I'm thinking, so does
everyone else's. And that's the trap, isn't it?
It's the everyone knows myth. We assume that
because 90 % of our neighbors have heifers with
rock -hard udders, it must be normal biology.
It's just what heifers do. Common does not mean
normal. And it certainly doesn't mean it's profitable.
The data we're going to walk through suggests
that this normal swelling is actually a distinct
disease process. A disease. I heard Donna Borderski,
a veterinarian from Michigan, say that. She said
it's a disease, not just a cosmetic swelling.
And that kind of flips the script. It does. And
in 2026, with heifer prices where they are, you
literally cannot afford to treat it as a nuisance.
It's a tax. A tax you pay on every single animal
that freshens. So let's get into our first segment,
problem identification. Because I think we need
to strip away the desensitization. We've all
seen it so much. We've stopped seeing it. Paint
the picture for me. You're in the parlor. Our
first lactation heifer comes in. What are we
looking at? Okay. Visualize heifer 402. She's
brand new. Maybe three days in milk. She's got
the frame. She looks the part from the neck up.
But you look at the udder and it doesn't look
like skin. It looks like a polished apple. It's
shiny. Tight. Incredibly tight. And the architecture
is gone. You know the median suspensory ligament?
That nice deep cleft that splits the utter halves?
Yeah, the center support. It's gone. The bottom
of the utter is just a flat, hard plate of tissue.
The teats aren't hanging down. They're strutting
out sideways at 45 degree angles. They look like
they're trying to escape. And what's her behavior
like? She's dancing. She's nervous. You try to
wipe her. She kicks. You try to attach the unit.
She kicks it off. If it's a robot, the arm tries
three times, fails, and calls you at two in the
morning. Right. And we usually get mad at the
heifer. We say, she's wild, or she's just a jumpy
heifer. But she's not wild. She's in agony. That
pressure is real pain. That pressure is pain.
And yet the industry stats on this are, they're
shocking. I want to pull up a study from 2018.
It was Morrison and colleagues. published in
the Journal of Dairy Science. We looked at the
prevalence of this. What percentage of first
lactation heifers do you think suffer from utter
edema? Ugh, if I go by my gut, I'd say half.
Maybe 60 % on a bad dairy seems high, but...
Let's try 86%. 80! Oh, wait, what? 86 %! No,
you're kidding! 9 out of 10 first calf heifers.
That, okay, that explains why we think it's normal.
If 86 % of the population has a condition, you
stop calling it a condition. You just call it
being a heifer. That's the new baseline. Exactly.
But here's the kicker. Compare that to second
lactation cows. The same study found only 56
% of them had it. Still high, but a massive 30
-point drop -off. So something specific is happening
to these rookies. Something is hitting them harder.
It's the mate and voyage problem. That's what
it is. That's a good way to put it. Let's get
technical for a second because we need to understand
the why if we're ever going to fix it. Why does
a heifer blow up like a balloon while an older
cow generally handles the transition better?
It all comes down to plumbing. The vascular system,
the veins, and the lymph ducts in a heifer is
immature. It's brand new. It has never been under
this kind of load before. Then suddenly, she
calves. You have this massive hormonal signal
telling the body, send blood to the udder. Make
milk. Now. And we've bred them to do that. The
genomic drive for production is so intense, we're
asking for 100 pounds of milk out of the gate.
Right, so you have a fire hose of blood rushing
into the udder to support 80, 90, 100 pounds
of milk. But the drain pipes, the veins taking
blood away, and the lymph system removing excess
fluid? They're the size of garden hoses. They
haven't had a chance to stretch mature yet. So
you get a traffic jam. A massive biological traffic
jam. The hydrostatic pressure builds up inside
the tiny capillaries until the fluid, the plasma,
literally gets pushed through the walls of the
veins and leaks into the surrounding tissue.
And that's the edema. That is the edema. It's
fluid trapped between the cells because the drainage
system is completely overwhelmed. And here's
the part that really clicked for me when I was
reading the source material. We tend to think
of this fluid as harmless water. You know, it'll
go away, but it's not just sitting there. It's
actively causing damage while it sits there.
Think about a rubber band. If you stretch a rubber
band to its absolute limit and you just hold
it there for three wins, what happens when you
finally let go? It's loose. It's warped. It never
snaps back the same way. It's shot. That is the
perfect analogy for what's happening to the udder
support system. Lingering, severe swelling stretches
the suspensory ligaments. This is the breakdown
of the udder architecture. So a heifer with severe
edema today is your pendulous, low -uddered cow
in three years. You are predisposing that animal
to a pendulous udder later in life. You are literally
shortening her productive longevity before she
even finishes her first month of milk. It's crazy.
You're shortening her career before she even
peaks. And we see the consequences in the calling
data years later. Bad udder, hard to milk. But
we rarely trace it back to that very first transition.
And that's just the internal damage. We haven't
even talked about the external stuff. When that
skin is swollen tight and her leg rubs against
the udder every time she walks. Friction. Constant
friction, heat, and moisture. The cleft, that
little area between the thigh and the udder,
becomes a swamp. It just rots. You get utter
cleft dermatitis. Oh, it smells terrible. It's
awful. It's raw. So now not only is the internal
pressure hurting her, but she has what is essentially
an open sore rubbing against her leg every single
time she takes a step. And we wonder why she
won't let down her milk. It's a torture chamber.
We've basically created a torture chamber for
our most valuable, most genetically superior
animals right when they enter the herd. So to
recap, this is ubiquitous. 86 % of heifers. It
is painful. It causes permanent structural damage.
And it creates a cascade of secondary problems
like dermatitis. Which brings us right back to
the money. Because in 2026, with a $4 ,000 asset
on the line, we can't afford to damage the goods
in the first week. Let's move to segment two,
the industry reality check. We mentioned the
heifer shortage, but I want to drill down on
something you touched on earlier, the opportunity
cost. This is something farmers are, let's be
honest, notoriously bad at calculating. Oh, we're
great at calculating the check we write. We see
that every month. We're terrible at calculating
the check we didn't get, the invisible income.
That's the perfect way to frame it. The lost
sale. In a normal market, say back in 2018 or
2019, if you had a few extra heifers, maybe you
sold them, maybe you didn't. It wasn't a life
-changing event. You got $1 ,200. Maybe $1 ,500
if she was nice. It paid for some feed, it was
nice, but it wasn't the core of your business.
But today... Right now, if you have a healthy
transition perfect heifer program and you have,
say, a 10 % surplus rate, you are sitting on
a goldmine. A legitimate goldmine. You can sell
those excess heifers for $3 ,000, $3 ,500, $4
,000 a pop. That is pure profit. That is cash
flow that pays off the tractor note. That's money
that can... renovate the parlor or pay for a
family vacation, it's real money. But if you
have an edema problem. You don't have a surplus.
You're just trying to keep your stalls full.
You're culling your mistakes and hoping you have
enough left over to maintain herd size. Exactly.
Let's walk through the math on that. If that
heifer with severe edema washes out, she gets
a nasty case of mastitis, she doesn't breed back,
whatever, you have to replace her. So you go
to the sale and spend $4 ,000 to buy a replacement.
Check written. I feel that pain. Indeed. You
lost the $4 ,000 you would have made if you had
kept her healthy and been able to sell her as
surplus into this hot market. It's a double whammy.
It's an $8 ,000 swing on one single animal. That
is the hypertax, and it's hiding in plain sight
in your barn right now. It is. And I want to
highlight something from that CoBank outlook
again. They are saying recovery of the national
heifer inventory isn't expected until 2027 at
the earliest. So we are in this tunnel for at
least another year and a half, maybe longer.
Correct. This isn't a tough quarter that you
could just ride out. This is the market reality
for the foreseeable future, which is leading
to another problem. Farmers are hoarding cows.
Oh, I see it everywhere. Keeping animals they
would have culled years ago, just keep the stalls
full. Talk about that. What does that look like?
It looks like a cow with a 400 ,000 somatic cell
count. Two years ago, she's gone. Today, keep
her. It looks like a cow that's a chronic three
-quarter milker. Gone. Today. Keep her. Breeding
trouble. Let's give her another shot and another
one after that. The slow milker who holds up
the whole parlor. Keep her. Why? Because you
have nothing to put in her stall if she leaves.
The replacement pipeline is dry. But that destroys
efficiency, doesn't it? You are actively degrading
the overall performance of your entire herd just
to maintain headcount. It's a desperate move.
It's a Band -Aid on a gaping wound. And it makes
the edema problem even worse because now you
have these old problem cows taking up your time
and resources while your fresh heifers, your
best genetics, your future are failing because
of a preventable swelling issue. So let's get
into the specifics of that cost. We've talked.
High level. Let's do segment three. Follow the
money. What does the bullvine modeling say this
actually costs day to day? Because I know the
skeptics are listening right now. I know exactly
what they're thinking. They're driving in the
tractor thinking, OK, an $8 ,000 swing. Sure,
if she dies. But most of them don't die. Realistically,
how much milk am I actually losing? Is it really
worth overhauling my feeding program for? That's
the question. So let's start with the direct
milk loss. The immediate stuff. The modeling
shows, on average, approximately 316 pounds of
milk lost per lactation for every affected heifer.
Okay, let me do some quick napkin math here.
316 pounds. At roughly, what, 20 bucks per hundredweight
on average? Let's use $20, yeah. That's $63 .20.
About 63 bucks per heifer. You know, I'm going
to be honest. $63, that doesn't sound like a
crisis. I probably spill $63 worth of teat dip
in the milk house every month. If that's all
it is, I'm not changing my whole feeding program.
I'm not building a new commodity bin for $60.
And that is exactly the trap. That is why nobody
fixes this problem. They look at that direct
milk loss number and they say, eh, $60, no big
deal. Right. But the milk loss is just the tip
of the iceberg. It's the cover charge to get
into the club. Right. It's the opening act for
the real disaster. The real killers are the downstream
effects. The hidden costs. The stuff that doesn't
show up on the milk check. Let's start with mastitis.
The data shows that cows with significant edema
are two and a half times more likely to get clinical
mastitis in the first 30 days. 2 .5 times. That
makes perfect sense. We talked about the dermatitis,
the difficulty milking her out completely because
the teats are so tight. If you can't get the
milk out, bacteria grows. It's a perfect storm.
So instead of a normal 2 % mastitis rate in your
fresh heifers, you're looking at 5%, maybe higher.
What does a single case of clinical mastitis
cost you, bottom line? By the time you buy the
drugs, dump the milk for the withdrawal period,
pay for the extra labor to treat her. A conservative
number is $350. If she becomes a chronic case
or loses a quarter, could easily be a thousand
bucks and that's if she even cures okay So there's
mastitis. Now add metabolic issues. Edema is
linked to higher BHPA levels in the blood. Ketones.
Ketones, which means a higher risk of subclinical
ketosis in that critical second week post calving.
Now she's not eating right. Now she's losing
too much weight. And now she's not breathing
back in 90 days because her body spent the first
month sick and trying to recover. You've just
torpedoed her reproductive cycle. The cost just
keeps stacking up. Exactly. And then there's
the labor cost. You mentioned the slow outs earlier.
Oh, this is the one that drives your milkers
crazy. You have a parlor that is designed to
turn over every seven minutes. Then you have
heifer number 402 with a rock -hard udder. She
takes 15 minutes to milk out because the flow
is restricted by all that swelling. The whole
side of the parlor waits on her. Your efficiency
goes right out the window. Or the robot calls
you at three in the morning because it failed
attachment five times in a row. What is your
time worth? What is your milker's frustration
worth? High frustration leads to bad handling,
which leads to more stress on the cows, which
leads to less milk. It's a vicious cycle. So
let's tally the total bill. We ran the bullvine
modeling on the theoretical 100 cow herd. Let's
say you freshen 40 heifers a year. Yep, pretty
standard turnover. If you have the industry average
86 % edema rate, that's... 34 affected animals
out of your 40 new heifers. Okay. 34 heifers
with some level of swelling. On the absolute
most conservative low end. Minimal mastitis,
just the milk loss and some minor issues. You
are losing about $3 ,500 a year. $3 ,500. Okay.
That gets my attention more than $60. But the
realistic loss. When you factor in the inevitable
mastitis treatments, the extra labor, the discarded
milk, and crucially, one or two early culls because
a heifer just completely crashes and burns, is
between $8 ,000 and $16 ,000 per year. For a
100 -cow herd. For a 100 -cow herd. So if you
are milking 1 ,000 cows, you can add a zero.
That's $80 ,000 to $160 ,000 a year walking out
your door because of a little swelling. And the
thing that really sticks out to me in that math
is the cull. Why that specifically? Because like
we said at the beginning, the replacement cost
is $4 ,000. If just one of those 34 heifers crashes
and burns because of edema complications, she
gets a nasty menstitis, doesn't breed back, and
leaves the herd in her first lactation. That
one animal wipes out the profit of the next 10
healthy heifers combined. It's catastrophic.
In a high -cost replacement environment, the
penalty for culling a young animal is absolutely
catastrophic. You cannot afford to lose her.
Okay, you've scared us. You've made the case.
We understand the cost. $16 ,000 is on the line.
Now, what do we do about it? Let's move to segment
four, case studies and examples. You promised
me three practical levers. I did. And these are
things you can actually do. We aren't reinventing
the wheel here. Lever number one is body condition
score, BCS. This is a classic. We've known about
this for years, but man, we still screw it up
all the time. The mechanism is just so simple.
Excess fat, particularly around the udder and
brisket, increases the tissue pressure. It physically
traps the fluid. It's like wearing a belt that
is two sizes too small and then trying to eat
a big holiday meal. There's nowhere for anything
to go. So what's the target? Where do we want
them? Pre -calving. And at the moment of calving,
you want them at a 3 .25 to a 3 .5. That's the
sweet spot. And what do you actually see out
in the field? I see 3 .75s. I see 4 .0s. I see
roly -poly heifers that look like they're ready
for the show ring, not the milking parlor. And
that is a pre -bought edema risk. If she's a
4 .0 at calving, you have already signed the
check for the edema damage. You can't fix that
with a pill on day one. The damage is done. No.
And I know you're going to say, this isn't a
quick fix. No, it's not. If you've got fat heifers
in your close -up pen today, they are going to
be fat heifers when they calve in two weeks.
This is a breeding and growth management issue.
This goes all the way back to how you fed them
at six months, at 12 months. This is a turn -the
-Titanic kind of lever. You have to start now
to see results in a year. Agreed. But you have
to start. It means looking at your heifer rations,
maybe adjusting your age at first calving, but
you have to stop giving them fat. Okay. Lever
one is BCS. A long -term foundational fix. What's
lever two? Lever two is the big one. This is
the one that can make a difference almost overnight.
It's diet. Specifically the pre -fresh or close
-up diet. Yes. And the most common mistake is
feeding heifers the exact same cow pre -fresh
diet that the mature cows get. Which happens
on, what, 80 % of farms? Maybe more? Easily.
And logistically, I get why it happens. You have
one pre -fresh pen. You put the springing heifers
and the dry cows in there together. You feed
them all the same TMR. It's simple. So why is
that so bad? Because mature cows need a deep
negative DCAT diet. They need those anionic salts
to help prevent milk fever. Their bodies need
to be primed to mobilize a huge amount of calcium
from their bones. Right. Heifers do not need
that same intensity. They very rarely get clinical
milk fever. Their calcium metabolism is much
more robust. But when we feed them that high
-salt, anionic cow diet anyway, what happens?
The high salt and potassium loads act like a
sponge. It makes them retain water. It directly
drives the formation of edema. Cora Okima from
MSU Extension has been shouting this from the
rooftops for years. Heifers should not receive
the same strong DCAT ration as mature cows. Okay,
so the fix is obvious then. A different diet
for heifers. Lower sodium, lower potassium, and
a DCAD that's neutral to only slightly negative.
Correct. But here comes the reality check. I'm
a farmer. I have one mixer wagon. I have one
pre -fresh pen. I am not going to mix a tiny
separate 500 -pound batch of feed for my six
heifers that are springing this month. It's impossible.
It ruins the mixer accuracy. It takes way too
much time. So what is the practical solution?
I hear you. The one mixer problem is real. But
there are workarounds. You can't let logistics
dictate bad biology. Okay, like what? Solution
A, use headlocks. If your heifers are in the
same pen as the cows, lock them up at feeding
time. Feed the main mix to the cows, and then
come back and feed a heifer -specific top dress
or a separate small mix from a cart to just the
heifer section of the bunk. That takes more labor,
but it's possible. What else? Solution B, the
easiest thing you can do today. If you can't
separate the feed, at the very least, remove
the free -choice salt blocks and any loose salt
top dress from the heifer pens. Don't add fuel
to the fire. Okay, that's a simple one. Anyone
can do that this afternoon. But here's the hard
rule. If you do an audit of your herd and you
find that more than 60 % of your heifers have
edema and you are losing money on mastitis and
calls, you have to stop making excuses about
the mixer. You're saying the cost of the logistics
is finally lower than the cost of the disease.
That's it exactly. If you are losing $16 ,000
a year, you can afford to figure out a way to
mix a second load. Or put up a simple gate to
make a second pen. Or buy a small pole cart to
feed the heifers separately. The I can't do it
excuse expires when the losses hit five figures.
That's fair. If the pain of the problem is big
enough, you find a way to fix the logistics.
Okay, so that's lever two. What's number three?
Lever three. Vitamins. And specifically, we're
talking about vitamin E and selenium. This feels
like the easiest one to implement, right? It's
just... changing your mineral pack. It is. The
mechanism here is all about dealing with oxidative
stress. Calving is a hugely stressful event,
and it spikes oxidative stress in the body. Inflamed
tissues, like a swollen udder, need antioxidants
to heal properly. And most farmers are already
using a mineral pack or a premix in their TMR.
But here's the question. Is it a premix designed
for 2026? Or is it a formulation from 2015 that
you've just been reordering out of habit? That's
a good point. We tend to just say, give me the
usual dry cow mineral, and we don't look at the
tag for 10 years. You need to audit your premix
against the NESM 2021 requirements. The science
has evolved. We now know we need higher levels
of vitamin E and adequate selenium to help these
animals cope with transition stress. But a warning
here, and this is important, you can't... vitamin
shot your way out of a bad diet or over -conditioned
heifers. Thank you. That is absolutely crucial.
If your heifers are fat, which is lever one,
and they're eating a high salt cow diet, which
is lever two, then just giving them extra vitamin
E is like putting a Band -Aid on a gunshot wound.
It helps a little, but it will not save you.
It's part of a complete system, not a magic bullet
you can just buy. Exactly. So those are the three
levers, body condition score, diet, and vitamins.
Now let's move to our last segment. Contrary
intakes and future implications. Let's talk about
the return on investment. The cost of the cure.
Right, because... Changing a ration or buying
a better vitamin pack does cost money. It's a
check you have to write. It is. So we calculated
the investment. To implement these changes, tweaking
the diet, maybe buying a better mineral pack
with the right vitamin levels, it comes out to
roughly $40 per heifer. Forty. Four zero. Forty
dollars. And we are protecting an asset that
is worth, on today's market, $4 ,000. It is literally
1 % of the asset's value. It is the cheapest
insurance policy you will ever buy in your entire
life. When you put it that way, It's a complete
no -brainer. But why do we still fight it? Why
does the industry accept an 86 % problem rate?
I think it goes back to what you said earlier
about the invisible costs. Yeah. The normalcy
bias, the normalcy of 86%. We accept it because
the cost is invisible. We write a check for the
mineral. We see that $40 leaving the bank account.
We don't write a check for lost milk or lost
heifer potential or future culled cow. That money
just, it never appears. So we don't feel the
pain. It's the difference between a cash cost
and an opportunity cost. Farmers and business
people in general hate cash costs. They tolerate
massive opportunity costs. That is profound.
And it's 100 % true. I would rather lose $100
in potential profit than spend $10 in cash. It's
a psychological hurdle we all have. But in this
2026 -2027 market, you have to get over that
hurdle. You have no choice. With heifer prices
staying sky high, the farms that solve their
edema problem will have a massive competitive
advantage. They will be the ones selling heifers
for four grand to the neighbors who didn't solve
it. Exactly. You want to be the seller in this
market, not the buyer. Solving edema flips you
from a buyer to a seller. All right. We've covered
a lot. We've done the math, the biology, and
the strategy. Now let's land the plane. I want
actionable insights. A farmer is driving to the
feed store right now or walking into the farm
office. What are the three things they absolutely
need to do? OK, let's break it down by timeline.
Immediate, medium term and long term. Perfect.
What's first? Immediate. This week. Score the
problem. Stop guessing. Stop saying, yeah, we
have a little swelling. Get a simple scorecard.
Go out to the fresh pen. Look at the next 30
to 40 fresh heifers from one day to maybe 10
days in milk and score them on a simple zero
to three scale. OK, but what am I looking for?
What's a zero versus a three? Zero is clean.
No swelling at all. A 1 is a little bit of pitting
edema. You press your thumb in and it leaves
a little dent. A 2 is more severe. The udder
is tight and shiny. The cleft is starting to
disappear. And a 3 is the basketball. Rock hard,
flat on the bottom, teats strutting sideways.
Got it. And what's the benchmark? Here are your
red flags. If more than 60 % of your heifers
have any edema, a score of 1 or higher, you have
a problem. And if more than 15 % are severe,
scores of 2 or 3. You have a crisis -level issue.
Okay, so first, measure it. What's next? Medium
term, the next three to six months. The nutrition
audit. Sit down with your nutritionist, put the
feed analysis paper on the table, and ask the
hard question. Are my heifers actually on a different
ration, or are they just in a different pen eating
the same cow feed? And look at the numbers yourself.
Don't just take their word for it. Get the real
sodium, potassium, and DCAD numbers for that
heifer ration. If the DCAT is deep negative,
like minus 100 or minus 150, you have to change
it. And while you're at it, check that premix
tag. Update the vitamin E and selenium levels
to the NASEM 2021 standards. And finally, long
-term, the 1 -2 year plan. BCS Management. This
is the slow turn of the Titanic. You have to
work backwards. Adjust your heifer growth rates.
Maybe that means a slightly less energy -dense
diet from 6 to 12 months. Maybe it means adjusting
your age at first calving. The goal is to have
them hit that springing pen at a condition 3
.25 to 3 .5, not a fat 4 .0. It's a holistic
approach. It starts with measuring, moves to
feeding, and ends with long -term management.
Precisely. You can't just do one and expect a
miracle. Well, this has been an eye opener. I
think for a lot of us, we've just been walking
past those shiny swollen udders for years, not
realizing they were leaking money out of the
business every single day. It's time to stop
paying the edema tax. It's a voluntary tax. And
in this economy, you should volunteer to stop
paying it. This has been another deep dive from
The Bullvine Podcast. Stop letting your $4 ,000
heifers wash out because of a $40 vitamin deficiency.
For more straight -talking industry analysis,
head to www .thebullvine .com. Subscribe wherever
you get your podcasts. We're out with new episodes
every day. Next time, we're looking at the shifting
landscape of carbon credits and what it actually
means for your bottom line. Is it real money
or just hype? Thanks for listening.