FARM PROGRESS – With a closed herd and all his heifers artificially inseminated — no outside bulls needed — Nathan Brearley was confident his 500-cow dairy farm in Portland, Mich., would be spared from the avian flu strain that’s affecting dairies.
He was wrong.
“I was quite surprised. I never saw any other disease this widespread affect the cattle like it did,” Brearley said during a recent webinar on dairy avian flu, put on by the Pennsylvania Center for Dairy Excellence.
With 29 confirmed cases — the latest being Sept. 9 — Michigan’s dairy industry has been one of the hardest hit by avian flu, H5N1, which was first confirmed in a Texas dairy in March.
Brearley said the first signs of problems were in April when the SmaxTec boluses in his cows, which keep track of temperature and other health parameters, started sending high-temperature alarms to his phone and computer. Half the herd looked like it was getting sick.
“Looking at data, the average temperature rise was 5.1 degrees above normal,” he said. “Outlying cows were even higher with temperature.”
The cows were lethargic and didn’t move. Water consumption dropped from 40 gallons to 5 gallons a day. He gave his cows aspirin twice a day, increased the amount of water they were getting and gave injections of vitamins for three days.
Five percent of the herd had to be culled.
“They didn’t want to get up, they didn’t want to drink, and they got very dehydrated,” Brearley said, adding that his crew worked around the clock to treat nearly 300 cows twice a day.
“There is no time to think about testing when it hits. You have to treat it. You have sick cows, and that’s our job is to take care of them.”
Testing eventually revealed that his cows did indeed contract H5N1. But how they contracted it, he said, is still a mystery.
Brearley said an egg-laying facility a mile and a half away tested positive for H5N1 and had to depopulate millions of birds. The birds were composted in windrows outside the facility, “and I could smell that process … ”
