A Profitable Balancing Act

This feed additive from Southern States helps get cows off to a healthy start after calving.

Feeding Pre-Lac CAB has significantly reduced Bill Yancey's problems with milk fever.

Seeing a newborn calf on the ground is a welcome sight for dairymen. But it hasn't always been a positive experience for Bill Yancey.

"I used to have a lot of problems in my herd with milk fever," explains Yancey, who is milking 110 cows at Luray, Va. "It wasn't all that unusual for one-third of my cows to go down with milk fever after calving."

That is no longer the case since Yancey started feeding Pre-Lac CAB, a product that he obtains from the Southern States Luray Service.

He begins including Pre-Lac CAB in the cows' rations about three weeks before they are expected to calve. Since he began using this in his feeding program about three years ago, the incidence of milk fever has dropped to an average of less than 5%, he reports.

CAB stands for "cation-anion balance," according to John Bargeloh, a ruminant nutritionist based out of the Southern States Richmond, Va., headquarters. Milk fever, he explains, occurs when a cow has an excessive level of potassium in her ration. That blocks the absorption of calcium that is necessary for normal muscle functions.

"When a cow's cation-anion ratio gets out of whack, a number of problems can develop," Bargeloh explains. "These include milk fever, retained placentas and displaced abomasums. This can be costly to dairymen in terms of management time and treatment expense, as well as lost milk production.

"We can adjust the cation-anion ratio by feeding anionic salts, such as ammonium chloride and magnesium sulfate, which are the two primary ingredients of Pre-Lac CAB," Bargeloh continues.

He recommends feeding Pre-Lac CAB at the rate of 1/2% of the cow's body weight--7 pounds for a 1,400-pound dairy cow."

The recommendation is to begin feeding the ration about three weeks before the expected freshening date, just in case the calf comes early. An excess of anionic salts may cause an acidosis reaction in cows, so it should not be fed for longer than 21 days.

Yancey's cows get a topdressing of Pre-Lac CAB on corn silage fed in troughs in the pasture. He reports no problems with cows consuming the feed.

Because he uses a lot of poultry litter to fertilize his pastures, that tends to increase potassium levels in the forages.

"Before I began feeding Pre-Lac CAB, I was constantly out in the pasture with a calcium bottle IVing [intravenous feeding] cows after they had dropped their calves," Yancey points out. "Thanks to this product and advice from the folks at Southern States, I don't have to do that much anymore."