There are few things that are as heart-wrenching to witness for a cow-calf vet as a calf-ocalypse. You may not know it by this term, but perhaps you have witnessed one or two. For a veterinarian, the most telling sign of an ongoing calf-ocalypse is pulling up to a calving barn and seeing piles of dead calves littering the yard. 

While there is not one single cause to a calf-ocalypse, the usual culprit is neonatal diarrhea, a.k.a. scours. Setting aside the financial losses, when calves die of scours it also takes a severe emotional toll on the people who care for these lost little ones. I’m talking about the men and women who invest substantial amounts of time and lost sleep into nursing these sick babies along before they finally succumb to the dehydration, electrolyte imbalances and sepsis that commonly occur with profuse, infectious diarrhea.

One calf-ocalypse in particular stands out in my mind, back when I practiced in the Chinook country of southern Alberta. This operation calved out several hundred purebred cattle in January and February, and each year scours had been a problem. 

We batted around different solutions. Maybe we needed a different scours vaccine. Maybe our trace mineral program wasn’t just right. Maybe we needed to teach the cowboys how to recognize scours earlier and intervene more aggressively with oral, or even intravenous (IV) fluids. 

We tried all these things, but any improvements we saw were at best fleeting, and most likely incidental. Inevitably, the pendulum would swing back, and the dead calves would pile up even higher.

Early in my career, I had read about the Sandhills Calving System. It involves moving pregnant cows to fresh pastures at regular intervals throughout the calving season. This method ensures a high proportion of calves are born into an environment with relatively little fecal contamination.Epidemiologic research performed in the Sandhills of Nebraska back in the early aughts demonstrated the efficacy of this system at preventing scours outbreaks — hence the name. 

However, moving pregnant cows to fresh pastures didn’t seem to be an option for this client.

This was Alberta, in the dead of winter. While it was common in the Alberta winter for warm Chinook winds to roll in and melt the snow, we couldn’t count on that; we might just as easily get six feet of snow and Arctic temperatures. These purebred calves needed to be ready for spring bull sales, and they needed to be born in a barn. However, we couldn’t keep the calves in the barn forever. 

After they were up and nursing, they had to be moved out to small pens under a shed, then group pens with calf shelters. It was in these calf shelters that the specter of scours most often reared its ugly head. 

First the calves would stop nursing. Then the ‘tell-tale-tail’ sign would appear (i.e., liquid feces soaking what should have been a dry, bushy tail). The cowboys, foreman and owners did their best to treat these calves early, but invariably they would go down and get hauled back into the calving barn where it was warm. 

At first, I would rush out, pop in a few catheters and run IV fluids. However, as the cases stacked up, I soon had the foreman running IVs. There were just too many sick calves; it was a calf-ocalypse.

That last calf-ocalypse year just about broke them. Nearly half the calves got scours; several dozens of them perishing as a result. We needed to find a different way, so we did our best to think outside the ‘bugs-and-drugs’ box. 

Finding what works

What was it about the Sandhills system that worked so well? The answer seemed to be minimizing exposure to infectious agents. Where were these calves getting exposed? That seemed to be the calving barn. What if treating scours in the calving barn was actually making the problem worse?  

One minute they were hauling in a shit-covered calf in their insulated coveralls and polyurethane/neoprene boots, and the next they were delivering a newborn calf in those same clothes and boots. We had tried putting a token foot bath at one of the entrances to the calving barn, but within an hour or two it was completely saturated with mud and organic debris. Any disinfectant that had been present was surely ineffective, and any boots that passed through this scours soup likely became even more contaminated. 

The solution? Biocontainment. After group discussion, the foreman locked all the doors to the calving barn except one, and then he painted a bright red line on the concrete outside the sole, remaining entrance. Any person entering the barn was instructed to shed their outside boots and coveralls on one side of the line, and don a fresh pair of inside boots and coveralls on the other; no exceptions. 

Scouring calves were now to be treated in the machine shop. The owners put concrete floors in all of the maternity pens, which were cleaned and disinfected with heavy-duty products we had been educated on by a poultry expert. We also switched to a different scours vaccine because we couldn’t leave needles completely out of the mix. 

The results? The first year after the changes saw a nearly fourfold reduction in cases, with few deaths. The year after that they treated a total of 11 calves for mild cases of scours. It was like someone turned off a switch.

Now I’m not going to tell you that this herd lived happily ever after. Overcoming one challenge opened up new challenges, and they came up with new strategies to deal with them (anyone interested in some summer-born long yearlings?). However, soon after we painted the red line on the concrete, I was no longer part of addressing those challenges as I left practice in the Chinook country to become an epidemiologist. 

The ranch foreman who had painted that red line was the first client I told when I knew I’d been accepted to the program, though leaving my clients to tackle a new adventure was definitely bittersweet. 

Notwithstanding, there is one more happy ending to this story. A few months after I moved to Mississippi to do my epidemiology training, I was sitting in a classroom listening to my major professor give a lecture to some third-year veterinary students on managing neonatal diarrhea in calves. He pulled up some data he collected in the Sandhills of Nebraska back in the day when he was an extension veterinarian there. 

Soon it became apparent, the man I was now studying under had blazed the trail I had used back in Alberta when we were finding our way out of a calf-ocalypse. It was a humbling and poignant moment. It’s not often we get to meet the people who clear the path for us to live better lives. I hope that I, and those reading, will one day be able to say that not only did we walk those paths with gratitude, but we blazed a few new paths of our own.  

Editor’s note: Todd Gunderson is a clinical assistant professor, beef production medicine, at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan.