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 dairy industry noise to
get you the insights that actually matter for
your operation. And today, we're diving deep
into a feature piece about the actual physics
and economics of pair housing your dairy calves.
Yeah, and we're pulling from a massive stack
of sources today to really do this right. I mean,
we've got a 2024 Journal of Dairy Science paper,
a 2025 Scoping Review from Frontiers in Veterinary
Science, and just this really extensive field
data from both the university of british columbia
and the university of florida right so the mission
of this deep dive is to figure out if breaking
the golden rule of calf rearing you know the
individual hutch if that is actually the secret
to saving your farm 10 grand a year all while
making your house better competitors at the feed
bunk which i mean let's be honest it sounds completely
backwards to anyone who has spent their entire
life raising calves oh totally but before we
get to the how and the why of you know Actually
tearing down the walls between your hutches.
We really need to talk about why we are even
having this conversation right now. Because if
you are listening to this on the tractor right
now, you already feel the massive squeeze on
replacements. Right. You feel it in your wallet.
Exactly. But hearing the actual national context,
it really puts a chill down your spine. According
to the USDA's January 2025 cattle report, the
total heifer inventory is sitting at 3 .914 million
head. Let me just put that 3 .914 million number
into a historical perspective for you for a second.
That is the lowest that specific inventory number
has been since 1978. Wow. 1978. Jimmy Carter
was in the White House in 1978. You're talking
about a generational low here. I mean, most of
the people managing your calf barns today weren't
even born the last time we had this few replacement
heifers in the national pipeline. Yeah. And if
you think we are just, you know, at the bottom
of a normal cycle and things will naturally bounce
back by the fall, think again. Because the projections
coming out of CoBank show that this number is
going to drop even further. Right. There's no
quick fix. No, not at all. We are not looking
at any sort of structural recovery starting until
maybe 2027. We are in a deep, deep structural
deficit. And because of that deficit, the stakes
for your dairy operation have literally never
been higher. Let's talk about the cold, hard
cash value of the animals sitting in your hutches
this morning. Because replacement prices... are
absolutely astronomical right now. Oh, they're
painful. If you look at average Holsteins, just
your standard middle -of -the -road heifers,
they are commanding around $3 ,300 per head.
And if your operation is dealing in premium strings,
you know, the ones confirmed with sex semen,
you are seeing them clear $4 ,000 in markets
like the upper Midwest. Think about what that
means for your daily routine, though. Every single
wet calf that hits the ground on your dairy is
worth more today than at any point in the last
two decades. The math has entirely shifted beneath
our feet. A dead calf isn't just a, you know,
a frustrating loss anymore. It is a massive financial
blow. You simply cannot afford to lose them.
And maybe more importantly, you can't afford
for them to underperform two years from now when
they finally hit your milking string. Which brings
us to the ultimate contrarian pivot we are unpacking
today. We are talking about ditching the individual
calf hutch. I can hear the collective gasp from
here. Right, I know. The individual hutch has
been the holy grail of dairy biosecurity for
generations. But the data we are digging into
today comes from a physicist -turned -dairy researcher
who has proven that keeping calves in pairs can
save a 300 -cow dairy $9 ,900 a year while actually
improving their welfare. Okay, I am going to
play the skeptic here. Because when you first
slid this article across the table to me, my
immediate reaction was a physicist. What does
someone who spent their college years studying
quantum mechanics know about scraping out a calf
hutch at five in the morning? I knew you were
going to say that. I mean, it sounds like the
absolute classic disconnect between academic
theory and farm level reality. Usually the research
we see on calves stops the day they are weaned.
We measure their starter intake. We put them
on a scale for their weaning weight and we call
it a day. If they hit the target, wait, we slap
ourselves on the back. But stopping the clock
at weaning creates a massive blind spot for farmers
regarding long -term behavioral development.
Let me introduce you to the researcher, Emily
Miller -Kushin, because... Her unconventional
path is actually the key to why this research
is so disruptive. Okay, let's hear it. She grew
up in rural Ontario, surrounded by agriculture,
but she went to the University of Waterloo for
a highly rigorous physics and mathematical physics
program. And Waterloo is not a joke. It is one
of the top STEM schools in North America. She
was doing intense abstract math, but by her senior
year, she hit a wall. Let me guess, she couldn't
see how calculating the velocity of a subatomic
particle helped anyone in the real world. You
nailed it. She couldn't connect the abstract
physics to the tangible things she actually cared
about. So the summer before her final year, she
assisted with some animal science research. Her
mentor saw how lit up she was by the farm nata,
way more engaged than she was with the physics,
and suggested she make a hard pivot. So she just
walked away from physics? Entirely. She entered
a doctoral program in animal science at the University
of Gulf, studying under Trevor DeVries at their
animal welfare center, finished her PhD, and
now runs an incredibly influential calf welfare
program at the University of Florida. Look, I
hear the backstory, and it's a great human interest
piece. But if I am a producer listening to this
while mixing a batch of milk replacer... My healthy
skepticism is still flashing bright red. Sure.
We have veterinarians, we have lifers who have
studied ruminant digestion for 40 years. Why
should I redesign my entire housing setup based
on someone who started out looking at physics
equations? I expected you to push back on that,
but consider how a physicist actually processes
information. She brought her entire physics toolkit
with her to the dairy barn. She brought intense
statistical rigor. She brought a deep comfort
with massive long -term data sets that would
make most people's eyes just glaze over. Right.
She likes the math. In physics, you are trained
from day one to question deeply held baseline
assumptions. You never accept that something
works just because that is how we have always
done it. You test the baseline. That habit of
questioning the unwritten rules of the dairy
industry is exactly what calf research was starving
for. I will give you that. If there is one fatal
flaw in this industry, it is doing things a certain
way because grandpa poured the concrete that
way and his dad built the barn that way. The
individual calf hutch is the ultimate sacred
cow. We just accepted his gospel because we are
terrified of the alternative. Well, the broader
scientific community is certainly not terrified
of her alternative. We need to validate the weight
of her research before we get into the numbers.
Because she didn't just publish a neat little
paper in a fringe journal. She was awarded the
2025 PCAS. PCAS. For those outside the D .C.
grant bubble, that stands for the Presidential
Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
It is the highest U .S. government award given
to early career researchers across all scientific
disciplines. Wait, so the federal government
looked at every young scientist in the country
across medicine, engineering, all of it, and
said her work on dairy calves was among the most
groundbreaking. Yes. And on top of that, she
won the 2025 ADSA Foundation Scholar Award in
Dairy Production. So the data she is bringing
to your farm isn't just a theory. It is award
-winning, rigorously vetted science that is shifting
paradigms at the highest possible levels. Alright,
you have built the credibility. Let's get into
the mud. We need an industry reality check here,
because the deeply ingrained belief, the absolute
everyone -knows -this fact of dairy farming,
is that individual hutches are the only barrier
standing between your calves and a total respiratory
disaster. Right, the old dogma. The old logic
dictates that if you put two calves together,
they're going to suck on each other's navels,
they're going to share scours, and one is absolutely
going to give the other pneumonia. And Miller
Christian's team took that exact narrative and
put it under a microscope. Let's look at her
five -year study funded by USDA NIFA, which ran
from 2020 through 2025. What makes this study
almost unheard of is the timeline. She tracked
these specific calves from birth all the way
through their second lactation. Which requires
an insane amount of funding and patience. Like
we said earlier, most researchers pack up their
clipboards at day 60. Tracking an animal into
a second lactation means she is measuring how
a housing decision you made on day two of a calf's
life impacts an adult cow competing in the milking
string three years later. Which is huge. That
is the only metric a farmer actually cares about.
We don't raise calves just to take cute pictures
of them. We raise them to become highly profitable,
durable cows. Well, the behavioral breakthrough
that came out of this five -year tracking, which
was published in the 2024 Journal of Dairy Science
paper, is fascinating. They tracked Holstein
heifers raised in pairs versus those raised individually.
Then they observed their behavior during a social
regrouping and a housing transition when they
were pregnant heifers. They specifically looked
at how these animals reacted under competitive
pressure. Let's translate competitive pressure
into plain farmer English for a second. We're
talking about that brutal moment when a fresh
two -year -old heifer gets dropped into a pen
with older, mature boss cows. It's intimidating.
Oh, it's a war zone. The bunk space is tight,
the older cows are throwing their heads around,
and that young heifer has to figure out how to
get her head through the headlocks and eat without
getting bullied out of the way. What do the numbers
actually show? The pair -housed animals spent
4 .2 more minutes per hour feeding. But the metric
that really jumps off the page is their feed
bunk visits. The pair -housed heifers visited
the feed bunk 1 .5 times per hour. The individually
raised heifers, only 0 .8 times per hour. That's
nearly double. Exactly. The heifers that grew
up with a roommate were visiting the bunk nearly
twice as often under the exact same competitive
pressure. Let me stop you right there, because
if you are milking cows right now, this is your
aha moment. If you have a heifer that is willing
to fight for bunk space, a heifer that marches
up to the feed 1 .5 times an hour instead of
hiding in the back of the free stalls, she is
consuming significantly more dry matter. And
dry matter intake is the absolute engine of milk
production, period. If she doesn't eat, she doesn't
milk. What this data says is that whether she
fights for that TMR or backs down to a boss cow
was hardwired into her brain by whether she had
a buddy in her hutch two years prior. The study
concluded that pre -weaning social housing establishes
long -term effects on behavior and the ability
to adapt to novel environments. It all comes
down to social learning. Calves learn to eat
by watching their pen mates. We severely underestimate
the role of the social environment, but calves
develop preferences for feeds that others in
their group are eating. Which makes sense. They
learn how to interact, how to yield, and how
to assert themselves way before they ever see
a freestall barn. If they are in a solitary hutch,
they never learn a single social eating cue.
It makes total sense if you step back from the
farm. If you raise a kid in an isolated room
for years and then suddenly drop them into a
chaotic high school cafeteria. they are going
to be terrified. They won't know how to navigate
the social dynamics to get their lunch tray.
That's a perfect analogy. We're doing the exact
same thing to our heifers. We put them in solitary
confinement, and then we stand around scratching
our heads when they act timid at the bunk as
fresh cows. And Miller Fission pointed out in
a recent interview that pair -housed calves actually
eat more solid feed earlier in life precisely
because of this social learning. They figure
the grain bucket out together. But... But I can
hear you winding up to ask the obvious question
here. You are thinking about the BRD myth, the
bovine respiratory disease fear. Oh, absolutely
I am. Because that is the very first piece of
pushback you will get from any herd manager.
Sure, they might be bolder at the bunk two years
from now. But if they die of pneumonia at three
weeks old, they're going to make it to the milking
string to show off that boldness. Right. We have
been preached to for decades that shared airspace
in a hutch equals shared respiratory bugs. End
of story. Let's look at the 2025 scoping review
published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science
to address that head on. This review aggregated
pair housing studies published since 2016. They
look specifically at the health outcomes. Out
of seven specific BRD studies that they reviewed,
take a guess at how many showed an association
between pair housing and increased respiratory
disease. Well, knowing how these deep dives go,
I'm going to guess the number is shockingly low.
One, two, zero, zero. Out of the seven studies
reviewed, exactly seven showed NO association
between pair housing and an increase in respiratory
disease. And I want to make this crystal clear
to you listening right now. This is not cherry
-picked data to support a narrative. That was
the entirety of the BRD data they examined in
that review. We were talking about studies from
UC Davis, UW -Madison, the University of Florida,
UBC, across the board. Social housing, specifically
pair housing, did not increase BRD incidents.
I am having a hard time wrapping my head around
that because it is a massive paradigm shift.
If you were telling me that putting two calves
together doesn't actually spike my pneumonia
rates, then the primary foundational argument
for keeping them isolated completely crumbles.
It really does. But here's the thing. Farmers
don't buy reciprocating saws and start cutting
walls out of their hutches just because a paper
says it improves welfare. They change their setups
when the math demands it. If they're equally
healthy, where is the cash? Let's follow the
money and break down that $9 ,900 advantage we
teased at the start, tailored specifically for
a standard three -numbered cow dairy. To anchor
the math, we need to look at national pre -weaned
mortality rates. Okay, way out. The 2014 NAHMS
data, which is the National Animal Health Monitoring
System, the gold standard for USDA benchmarks,
put national pre -weaned mortality around 5 .0%.
A new NAHMS study is pending, but let's be realistic
about what is happening on the ground. Many commercial
farms are running closer to 6%. Sadly, 6 % is
very common. When you factor in the brutal winter
cold snaps, unpredictable scours outbreaks, and
the sheer labor shortage, meaning your calf feeders
have less time to observe each individual animal,
6 % happens fast. It does. So on a 300 -cow dairy,
assuming you are calving relatively evenly year
-round, a 6 % pre -weaned mortality rate on your
heifer crop means you are hauling about 9 dead
heifer calves to the compost pile a year. Let's
tie those nine dead heifers back to the replacement
costs we established earlier. With an average
Holstein replacement sitting at $3 ,300 right
now, those nine calves represent between $25
,000 and $36 ,000 in lost inventory value. That
hurts to think about. And keep in mind, that
is just the raw, unrealized replacement value.
That doesn't even begin to calculate the sum
costs of the milk replacer you already fed them,
the vet bills and electrolytes you pumped into
them trying to save them, or the labor hours
your team wasted. It is a staggering leak in
farm profitability when you look at it annually.
But you just told me the BRD rates are the same,
not necessarily lower. So how does pair housing
actually fix that leak and save us money? The
literature shows that while BRD might remain
neutral. Pear housing improves overall health
resilience and reduces other major issues. Miller
Christian's own 2021 JDS work found a tendency
for reduced scours in pear -housed calves. Interesting.
Less scours. When calves are less stressed, when
they learn to eat solid feed earlier because
of that social learning we discussed, their immune
systems are fundamentally better supported. The
aggregated data suggests that if a farm switches
to pear housing, they can conservatively drop
that overall mortality rate from 6 % down to
4%. Okay, let's run that through the calculator.
Dropping from 6 % to 4 % mortality on a 300 -cow
dairy saves you three hyper calves a year. Multiply
those three saved calves by that $3 ,300 average
replacement cost, and it equals exactly $9 ,900
saved annually, just in retained inventory. You
are putting almost $10 ,000 back into your operations
equity just by letting two calves share a space.
To a farmer writing checks, that is incredibly
tangible. Ten grand pays for a mountain of milk
replacer or a couple months of your calf feeder
salary. But there is also a growth velocity aspect
to this, right? It's not just about minimizing
death loss. It's about how fast and efficiently
they grow before you wean them. The weight gain
bonus is undeniable. Research out of the University
of British Columbia published in 2023 isolated
this specific metric. They found that pair -housed
calves averaged an advantage of 130 grams per
day in weight gain pre -weaning compared to individually
housed calves. And this has been a consistent
finding across multiple massive Canadian studies.
To someone sitting in an office. 130 grams a
day might sound like rounding error, but let's
look at a 60 -day weaning period. That compounds
into nearly 17 extra pounds at weaning. That's
a huge difference on a calf. A bigger, heavier
calf with a more developed skeletal frame transitions
off milk better, reaches breeding weight earlier,
and ultimately calves in as a larger, more competitive
animal. What did Miller Cushion's Florida study
show regarding this growth? Her 2025 study at
UF was a massive undertaking. They looked at
100 pens, 50 individual versus 50 paired, and
showed clear, statistically significant performance
benefits from pair housing right from birth.
But the most fascinating variable they uncovered
was that these advantages were particularly strong
during the cooler months. Which paints a very
vivid picture. Picture your farm in February.
The wind is howling and the temperature is sitting
at minus 10 degrees. An isolated cack in a single
plastic hutch is shivering, burning every single
calorie of that expensive milk replacer just
to keep her core temperature high enough to keep
her heart beating. It's all going to maintenance.
Exactly. But she has a buddy. They cuddle up
like a pile of puppies in the deep straw. They
share body heat, they keep their core temperatures
up naturally, and those calories from the milk
replacer actually go towards skeletal growth
instead of just basic survival. The physiological
math works beautifully, but as a practical dairyman,
I know you still have logistical nightmares running
through your head. Let's pivot to case studies
and actual implementation on the farm, because
the theory only matters if you can execute it.
Let's tackle the biggest, ugliest practical fear
first. Solving the cross -sucking problem. We
acknowledged it earlier, but we need to dive
deep into it. Farmers are terrified of cross
-sucking. It's gross. If you have ever walked
a pen of recently weaned heifers and seen them
grouped up, aggressively sucking on each other's
ears, navels, or developing teats, it drives
you absolutely crazy. We put them in individual
hutches specifically to stop that oral fixation
from ruining, developing utter tissue, or causing
blind quarters down the road. Miller -Kishen's
data gives us a surprisingly simple, almost shockingly
low -tech fix for this. To completely reduce
abnormal oral behaviors, especially around that
high stress weaning period when the urge to suck
is highest, all you have to do is provide hay
from day one alongside their starter grain. Wait,
hold on. Day one. We have been preached to for
years by nutritionists not to give hay early
on. The dogma is that hay takes up physical space
in the rumen and prevents them from eating enough
of the highly digestible starter grain they need
to develop their rumen papillae. You were telling
me to throw hay in there immediately. I know
it goes against the old dogma, but her research...
And the broader literature shows that providing
hay from the time you introduce starter grain
universally benefits the calves. It gives them
a physical, natural outlet for that innate oral
foraging behavior. So they chew the hay instead
of their roommate. Right. If they're chewing
on long -stem hay, they are not chewing on their
penmate's ear. The data consistently shows it
drastically reduces cross -sucking. It is a low
-cost, incredibly effective intervention that
solves your biggest fear. All right. I will concede
that a handful of hay is a cheap fix for the
cross -sucking. But let's talk about the facilities
because I am not going to march into my loan
officer's office and ask for a half million dollar
line of credit to build a brand new state -of
-the -art pair housing calf barn just because
a physicist published a paper. My concrete pads
are already poured and my white plastic hutches
are sitting right there. You don't need a new
barn and you don't need a loan. This is where
Laura Whalen's commercial farm study at UBC is
so critical. She proved that facility conversions
can happen with the exact equipment you already
own. The setup she used on commercial dairies
was incredibly simple. She literally just pushed
two standard individual hutches together and
created a shared outdoor fence space in front
of them. You are saying the massive infrastructure
overhaul is just pushing two pieces of plastic
side by side and wrapping one big wire panel
around the front of both. That is literally it.
Two calves, two hutches, one shared yard. The
calves have the option to sleep in separate hutches
if they want their space, or they can cuddle
up in one together. Other operations have converted
their existing super hutches just by taking a
reciprocating saw and removing a shared plastic
wall between two hutches placed end -to -end.
That's brilliant. UW -Madison's Dairy Welfare
Program actually published a step -by -step introduction
guide for commercial farms, specifically designed
for operations using existing individual hutches.
The capital cost is basically zero. It is just
the labor time required to rearrange your existing
plastic. That completely removes the financial
barrier to entry. If I don't have to pour new
concrete or buy new steel, I can test this concept
tomorrow morning. But I do have a major question
about group size. If pairing two calves together
is good, is throwing eight of them together better?
What if I just take a giant super hutch and throw
ten calves in it? You have to be very careful
there. The data provides a golden rule of group
size, and it is a hard boundary. Pair housing,
exactly two calves, works beautifully. But the
data shows that disease risk starts to climb
significantly, almost exponentially, once you
get above eight calves per pen. Which may sense.
And this is especially true if you are running
a continuous flow system where you are constantly
adding new wet calves to an older group. Because
when you do that, you are mixing completely different
levels of immunity. The older calves are shedding
pathogens that the two -day -old calf has absolutely
zero defense against. It's a recipe for a massive
scours outbreak. To keep the biosecurity math
manageable and safe, you need to stick strictly
to pairs, or at least... Very small, static groups
of similar ages where it is all in, all out.
Pair housing gives you the behavioral and welfare
benefits of social interaction without crossing
that dangerous threshold into high disease transmission
risk. Okay, we have the economic math, we have
the facility solution with the reciprocating
saw, and we have the disease mitigation strategy.
But I want to zoom out for a second and look
at the future implications and the regulatory
reality hitting our industry. It's coming. Even
if a farmer is listening to this in his truck,
stubbornly gripping the steering wheel and saying,
I don't care about the 1 .5 bunk visits, my individual
hutches are fine. The industry is moving, whether
U .S. producers like it or not. The global industry
is absolutely moving, and it is moving fast.
Let's look at the coming mandates internationally.
Canada has a draft code of practice for the care
and handling of dairy cattle. This isn't just
a suggestion. This draft actually mandates that
healthy calves must be housed in pairs or groups
by two to four weeks of age. Mandatory. Yes,
and that mandate becomes effective by 2031. 2031
sounds far away to a civilian, but in farming
years, that is right around the corner. That
is barely two full heifer life cycles away. And
it isn't just Canada driving this, right? The
Netherlands is targeting an even more aggressive
timeline of 2030 for similar pair or group housing
requirements. The implication here for the American
listener is massive. If your U .S. operation
ships genetics, embryos, or dairy products that
eventually end up in these international supply
chains, and most major co -ops do, you are going
to be forced to comply with these global standards.
We all know exactly how this works domestically
too. It starts in Europe or Canada. The multinational
processors adopt it to protect their public image,
and then they bring those standards right to
our doorstep. Processor audits are already evolving.
The farm program, which basically dictates whether
you even have a market to ship your milk in the
U .S., is increasingly looking at calf welfare
metrics. And let me guess who is involved in
that. Emily Miller Cushion was just appointed
to their animal care committee. They're a very
researcher who's... data we've been analyzing
for the last hour. When the researcher who proved
that pair housing is superior gets put on the
committee that writes the processor audits, the
writing is on the wall in permanent marker. The
pipeline from interesting academic research to
mandatory processor requirement. is getting incredibly
short it is shrinking from decades down to just
a few years it really is i will argue all day
long that staying ahead of these mandates and
adapting your farm now on your own terms is vastly
cheaper and less stressful than scrambling to
retrofit your barn when the dairy co -op field
rep shows up with a clipboard and threatens to
pull your milk contract adapting now allows you
to figure out the labor flows the hutch placement
and the feeding protocols without a gun to your
head Which brings us to our contrarian takes
and action plans. Because there is a very strong,
very vocal wait -and -watch narrative out there
among top producers. You hear guys saying, look,
my pre -wean mortality is already under 3%, I
am a top -tier calf raiser, I don't need to change
my individual hutches because my calves simply
aren't dying. I know plenty of herdsmen exactly
like that. Their calf barns are immaculate. They
wash every bottle with hot water and acid, their
colostrum protocols are bulletproof, and their
death loss is basically zero. It is really hard
to look those guys in the eye and tell them to
mess with success. The analytical pushback you
have to give them is that they are only measuring
success up to day 60. Yes, your mortality is
under 3%. Congratulations. But what about your
fresh heifer feed intake? Are they slow to compete
at the bunk post calving? Are your two -year
-olds lagging in their first lactation peaks
compared to what your mature herd is doing? That
is the hidden bottleneck that nobody tracks back
to the calf barn. A farmer might be blaming the
genetic sire, or they are firing their nutritionist
over the transition diet, or they are blaming
overcrowding in the fresh pen. When in reality,
the housing environment from two years ago is
the hidden variable holding back those first
lactation peaks. They simply don't have the behavioral
resilience to fight a boss cow for their feed.
We need to evaluate the options for testing this
so a farm doesn't have to flip the whole operation
tomorrow. Let's look at the trade -offs of what
we call the 30 -day test versus the 90 -day full
transition. A full transition takes serious time
and management bandwidth. You have to adjust
your milk feeding schedules. If you are using
automated calf feeders, it simplifies things
considerably because the machine handles the
volume. But if you are bottle feeding or bucket
feeding out of a side -by -side, your staff has
to be retrained. They have to monitor pairs rather
than individuals. They have to stand there and
make sure one aggressive, greedy calf isn't bullying
the other and drinking both bottles. That is
a real hurdle initially. But over time, those
full transitions actually save massive amounts
of labor. Think about the physical steps. Walking
up to one shared pen and feeding two calves takes
less time and fewer literal footsteps than walking
to two completely separate, spread -out hutches.
Monitoring the health of one pair is faster than
checking two isolated individuals. The labor
efficiency of scaling this actually works in
your favor once the team gets the hang of the
new protocol. I think we have beaten the theory
and the data to death. We have laid out the physicist's
perspective, the economic math, the facility
solutions, and the looming regulatory threat.
Let's make this highly actionable for the listener.
A farmer just finished milking and is driving
to the feed store. What are the three things
they need to remember from today? Let's break
it down into three distinct takeaways with timelines
for each so you can actually implement this.
Takeaway number one is what we are calling the
30 -day pair test. For your immediate action
this week... Don't change your whole farm. Don't
cause a panic. Just pick your next 10 heifer
calves to be born. Pair them up at three to five
days old using the modified existing hutches.
Use that UBC model where you just push two hutches
together and share a single wire panel. Keep
it simple. Exactly. For your medium -term strategy
over the next three to six months, track them
relentlessly. Track their solid feed intake.
Track their health events. Do they actually get
more scours of BRD? And weigh them at weaning.
Compare those 10 paired calves against 10 individual
calves raised in the exact same weather conditions.
For your long -term positioning over the next
one to two years, use that specific on -farm
data to justify whether you scale this up to
the whole herd. Your own farm's data beats a
university study every single time. I love the
pragmatism of that. Test it small, measure the
results with your own eyes, then scale. What
is takeaway two? Takeaway number two is the day
one hay protocol to kill the cross -sucking fear.
Immediate action for this week. Start offering
a handful of long stem hay alongside the starter
grain to all your pre -weaned calves from day
one. Ignore the old dogma and just start doing
it tomorrow morning. Just jump in. Yep. Medium
term over the next three to six months, monitor
the drop in cross -sucking behavior. Watch them
closely as they approach weaning when that motivation
to suck peaks. You will see a massive difference
in their oral behavior. And long -term, over
the next one to two years, make early hay provision
a strictly written, non -negotiable standard
operating procedure in your calf program protocols.
Hand it to every new calf feeder you hire. It
is incredibly simple, cheap, and it solves the
biggest behavioral complaint. What is the final
takeaway? Takeaway number three is all about
regulatory and economic positioning. Immediate
action this week. Walk out to your calf area
and honestly assess your current hutch setup.
Figure out exactly what it would cost in labor
hours and minimal materials to remove shared
walls or combined pens. Just do the mental math
on the logistics so you know what you're up against.
Good advice. Medium term, three to six months
from now. Audit your current pre -wean mortality
rate. Be brutally honest with your software records.
If your death loss is over 5%, pull out a calculator
and figure out your exact loss inventory value
at today's $3 ,300 average replacement cost.
Stare at that number until it makes you uncomfortable.
That'll motivate anyone. Long -term, one to two
years out. Have a fully operational, smooth -running
pair housing protocol in place well before those
2030 and 2031 international mandates hit the
broader supply chain. Control the transition
on your timeline, not the processor's timeline
when they show up with an audit form. Those are
phenomenal concrete steps that anyone can start
today. And it all traces back to the value of
having someone completely outside our industry
bubble looking at our daily practices with fresh
eyes. The dairy industry was changed dramatically
decades ago by Robert Chicoine, who showed us
what one unconventional thinker could do with
the bull nobody wanted. And now Emily Miller
Krishan is showing us what a mathematical physicist's
training does when you point it at a calf barn.
It challenges the gospel, it redefines the math,
and it changes the behavioral outcomes that your
heifers carry for the rest of their lives. So
here's a final provocative question for you to
mull over on your drive back from the feed store.
What is the most unconventional background on
your farm team right now? Who is the outsider
on your payroll? And what are they seeing that
the dairy lifers have gone entirely blind to?
This has been another Bullvine podcast from the
Bullvine podcast. For more straight talking industry
analysis, head to www .thebullvine .com. Subscribe
wherever you get podcasts. We're out with new
episodes every day and upcoming topics will be
the next installment of The Outsiders featuring
the software engineer who completely rewrote
how we read.