Podcast Ep. 13: Lameness Traits - Underused and Underestimated

This is The Select Sires Podcast. I’m Joel Penhorwood, along with co-host Leslie Maurice in the studio today. Hi, Leslie.

Leslie Maurice 

Hey, Joel. Happy to be here.

Joel Penhorwood 

I'm happy to be here as well, and it's great to have our guest in the studio with us today, Vice President of Genetic Programs at Select Sires Inc., Chuck Sattler. Chuck, how are you?

Chuck Sattler 

I'm doing great, Joel. Thanks for having me.

Joel Penhorwood 

Well, thanks for joining us, and we're going to be talking about lameness traits, specifically how they're underused, underestimated, and the discussion we’re going to be having is part of the ongoing focus to Make Longevity Her Legacy. To help us get in the right mindset for today’s discussion on lameness and really longevity, let’s reach back into the podcast archives. Here’s Rick VerBeek from episode one.

Rick VerBeek

You know the next step or evolution in this process is to decrease our turnover rate, and that means having old cows stay in the herd for multiple lactations and when we have limited replacement animals available to us, making sure these cows can stay and last and get those third, fourth, fifth lactations is going to be even more important to the bottom line and profitability of our dairies.

Joel Penhorwood

Julie Ainsworth reminded us in episode two of some of the goals we should be setting.

Julie Ainsworth

When I go out and set a goal for my herds, I always want them to get to 40% of third lactation or higher. It takes one and a half lactations just to pay for the cost of having raised that heifer. So, if you sell her before that time, you've just lost money on that whole deal, so that becomes really critically important.

Joel Penhorwood

Of course, a part of ensuring longer-lived cows is a function of management, as Mitch Breunig of Mystic Valley Dairy reminded us in episode five.

Mitch Breunig

As you have a goal to have older cows, which we all need to desire to do, you’ve got to make sure your facility is set up to be able to handle those cows.

Joel Penhorwood

And Justin Stewart of Arizona Dairy Company made sure to note those good feet and legs in his idea of a perfect cow in episode eight.

Justin Stewart

My perfect cow is high butterfat and protein, good feet and legs and a spectacular udder that lasts a long time. That seems sort of like a generic answer, but honestly, it’s the truth. And then when they can get into that third and fourth and fifth lactation and beyond, then to me that’s just that perfect cow.

Joel Penhorwood

Those conversations and much more are at your disposal. Visit www.selectsires.com/longevity for more. And we’re adding some actionable tips and tools around that area of lameness today with Chuck Sattler. Chuck first let’s get a little background on your role at Select Sires.

Chuck Sattler 

All right, Joel. Yeah, I've been working at Select Sires for 20 years, little over 20 years, and work in our dairy sire department. I came to Select Sires to manage our progeny testing program, the PGA program. And more recently here, I've spent the last dozen or so years overseeing our dairy sire development programs, which would include the sire acquisition operations, as well as the ART (Aggressive Reproductive Technologies) program, our breeding program, as well as genetic research and development activities. Just try to take care of a lot of the administration details, make sure we're heading in the right direction, and paying our bills and staying on budget.

Joel Penhorwood 

I think Chuck sells himself a little bit short there because he is such a wealth of knowledge at Select Sires, not only for us around here when we have questions but also the dairy industry as a whole. Would you agree, Leslie?

Leslie Maurice 

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And definitely an industry-leading thought leader here that we have with us–especially about this topic in longevity and how we can improve that in our dairy herds around the world and why it's so important.

Joel Penhorwood 

Let’s get a little bit of background on why are we talking about this today, Chuck?

Chuck Sattler 

Well, lameness is one of those key management issues that I think just about every dairy farmer, whatever their management system is, struggles with and deals with. As our herds continue to get larger, as we use more kinds of confinement facilities, I think it just continues to be a bigger and bigger challenge. Also, with consumer pressures, we're seeing more attention to dairy cattle wellbeing, and I think lameness is one of those things that's directly a target of management as well as public concern and signal in how the cows are doing.  

Leslie Maurice 

But, so, quick question, can you define lameness?

Chuck Sattler 

Ah. That's an excellent question. I think, when we talk about lameness, I think it covers a broad range of issues, so there's probably multiple targets that we need to talk through. But in general, it's cows that experience some sort of mobility issues, so it could be a functional problem in their conformation, it could be lesions in their foot, or it could be an injury, which all would have different causes and treatments and management practices we would want to use to improve the situations. The prevalence rate we see in our dairy herds runs around 13%, although it can vary widely based on the management conditions at the farm. But national averages indicate about 13% which means that the prevalence is fairly high and deserving of management attention.

Leslie Maurice 

Can you relate that prevalence of 13%? Can you relate that to another trait or something that we're paying attention to right now, to correspond it with something?

Chuck Sattler 

Yeah. For instance, a good example would be mastitis, which typically runs maybe higher, about 25%. So, it's a little less prevalent than mastitis, but would be higher prevalence than things maybe like than calving difficulty or stillbirth rates, which would be 10% or lower.

Leslie Maurice 

Sure, and you're relating this to and rightfully so, management traits or issues, whatever we want to call them, that really affect the bottom line of dairies. And not only the bottom line of dairies, but the lifetime in a herd for these animals. You're talking about mastitis, which we know is a huge factor in cows leaving the herd. We're talking calving difficulties, which nobody wants difficult calvings, because it not only messes with the calf but with the mother as well. And we're putting lameness right in the middle of that, and it's something that to me is really interesting, and I'm looking forward to the conversation today because we don't have, you know, we're sitting here talking about management and management, but we're going to kind of talk about genetics on that too, right? A little bit.

Chuck Sattler 

Absolutely. We maybe have to talk about traits and different categories. You have calving and calf health traits, but when it comes to the lactating herd, certainly lameness is one of the big four of things that causes cows to leave the herds. So, we have production, mastitis, fertility, and then lameness is right in there with those big four. One thing I think that's important to add also is that with lameness, it's one of those that's very difficult to treat. So once a cow does have a lameness event, it's hard to get her recovered, and back in the milking string at 100% capability. So, it's certainly one of those where prevention needs to be a key part of our management strategy, and that's where genetic selection would come in.

Joel Penhorwood 

You've written about this extensively. If you'd like to find out more, go to www.selectsires.com, and type in “lameness.” You'll find some articles there from Chuck. But one of them, you know, you're talking specifically how using a variety of conformation traits in the past has not been effective. And those are your words that I am using, so I'll let you take it from there.

Chuck Sattler 

Like we started our conversation, I think there's different aspects, it’s a multifaceted disease. So certainly, the leg structure of the cow plays a role in all of this. And we've gone through evolution in our breeding programs, probably most specifically in Holsteins, where we spent a long time selecting for straighter legs. And we've gotten into a little bit of a situation where maybe we've gone overboard here in the recent past where perhaps the legs have gotten a little too straight. And we've been dealing with that. And I think we’re making good progress in that area. So just looking back at our bull population, when we go back a couple of years to 2019, we were running about 20% of our bull population being in that range of straight legs evaluations that were below -1. Now, as we've given that more attention in our programs, we look at our population of the bulls born last year or this year. We're looking maybe closer in that 5% range that you would categorize them into the straight category. So, we're definitely moving the breed more towards an intermediate optimum when we're talking about Rear Legs Side View. So that needs to be monitored. That's part of the equation. But even still, when you look at those feet and leg traits, whether it's Foot Angle, Foot and Leg Score, Legs Side View, Legs Rear View, we just don't see much correlation with those traits with overall Productive Life or overall Livability or relating to reduced lameness events. So, while the structure of the cow is important, they really don't help us much in selecting for cows with better hoof health, or cows that are going to end up in the sick pen because they don't have the mobility they need to function properly. So, we need some different tools, some better tools, and now we have at least one new tool with our Zoetis wellness evaluations, the lameness trait there that I think can do a little better, and probably needs more attention to help us.

Joel Penhorwood 

Yeah, and let's jump right into that! Let's chat.

Chuck Sattler  

So, as part of the collection of wellness traits that Zoetis provides, we do have genetic evaluations for lameness resistance. Those are based on lameness events recorded in herds, DairyComp records and assembled on genomic-tested animals that allow us to do a genomic evaluation for the trait. The bull evaluations that we publish in our directories and on our website for daughter proven bulls for Holsteins would be in that 55% to 90% reliability range. So as bulls get some daughter information, we can have very reasonable accuracy to these evaluations. The genomic tested bulls for Holsteins would be more in the 40% to 50% reliability range. The trait’s also available for Jerseys, and we do have lameness issues in Jerseys as well. So, I think it's an important trait to pay attention to there as well. Reliabilities aren't as high because we don't have as much genomic tested animals–as much data–to use this, so the Jersey young sires are in the 35% to 45% range. But again, the daughter proven bulls would get over 50% reliability. So maybe not as accurate as we'd want them to be. But it gives us a place to start, gives us a useful tool to start addressing and building cows that have the genetic capability to resist lameness events.

Leslie Maurice 

Yeah, and I think it's important for people to realize that that data is available and not just relying on that conformation data that we've had for years and years and years because I think that that's a good key takeaway is to definitely look at the whole the whole foot or the whole leg, if you will, the whole structure, but then also like, let's look within it, you know. So, I think that there's that there's a good takeaway there.

Joel Penhorwood 

And some on-farm validation from Zoetis on this as well, right?

Chuck Sattler 

Absolutely. One of the very nice things of working with the Zoetis team is the quality of the job they do and the thoroughness in putting together these programs. So, they've been very effective at developing the genomic evaluations and then validating them. So, they've done a couple of follow-up studies where they've tracked genomic-tested heifers to see how they perform over time. And definitely, those heifers with the better lameness evaluations have fewer lameness events–about a 33% reduction during their lifetime, comparing the top quartile of animals with high evaluation for lameness compared to the lower/lowest quartile for lameness evaluations. So, there's definitely a genetic difference there and we see it in improved performance in those daughters. A second study that they did then looked at ranking animals by Dairy Wellness Profit Dollars^® (DWP$^®). And even with that overall index, they found that the highest DWP$ animals had a much-reduced incidence of lameness over their lifetimes than those animals with the lower DWP$ evaluations. I think that's a really interesting result. In fact, the lameness reduction is even bigger when selecting on DWP$ than when you select directly on lameness, which tells me that again, it takes us back to this multifaceted condition that lameness is that all these health events kind of, I think, seem to stack up on each other. So an animal has an unfortunate event, maybe a difficult calving, retained placenta, and then it just puts her at more risk of other things happening through the rest of the lactation or through the rest of her career. And oftentimes, I think that shows up as a lameness event or sore feet, or problems with the cow getting around, or you can look at maybe a heat stress event. We've definitely seen more incidents of lameness following a heat stress event. So, I think it really supports the approach Select Sires is going in collectively addressing these health traits. It's not just, you can't just pick one and focus on it. You're going to do better across the board for multiple health events by including mastitis, by including improved fertility, and improved lameness, and they all kind of contribute and help improve each other along the way. Because once an animal has a health event, she's at higher risk of having other health events.

Joel Penhorwood 

What a great reminder on the importance of breeding for and focusing on the healthier, longer-living cow because lameness, you know, while its own specific problem, but can be a symptom of those other items that, as you were saying, can be taken care of by looking at that healthier animal.

Chuck Sattler 

Right. Yep, so it definitely needs to be a broad-based approach, and can't just focus on one thing at a time and improve that and move on to the next one. You kind of have to build the whole cow and have her function well at a multitude of traits to get the performance we're looking for.

Joel Penhorwood 

As we talk about discussions surrounding lameness, it's something that's, as we said, in the big four of challenges for cows. Is there any common questions or points of discussion that get brought up that maybe you'd like to talk about here today?

Chuck Sattler 

The biggest question I get is just has to do with the accuracy of the evaluations, and are they good enough to use in my index or in my selection program? The answer is, yes. I mean, I think that the Zoetis validation studies show that they're good enough to identify some genetic differences. So, to me, that's convincing information to say yes. It's safe to go ahead and use them, and you'll make improvement. Now, can we do better? Absolutely, we could do better. But we don't need to wait for the perfect evaluation to use what we have and make some improvements along the way. We're working with farm management records for recording of lameness, and of course, they're messy. Anytime we're working with farm data, that's messy, so we don't get the heritability or the accuracy in the evaluations that we really like. But you can say that for a lot of the traits we do use in our indexes also. So, daughter fertility, sire fertility, even milk production data gets messy with the things that go on on the farm and the different management practices that are used to influence production in a cow. We've learned ways to deal with those things, and we've gotten pretty good to make use out of messy data that we use in our genetic evaluations. I think the other real opportunity that is exciting me along this line is I think there's some real opportunities to use the CowManager^® data. And we're actively doing research there to use information from activity systems and sensors to get us more consistent, more standardized ways to identify cows that are experiencing lameness events. And anything we can do to improve the consistency and accuracy of recording, I think will help us on the genetic evaluation side. So I think there's some real opportunities there and Select Sires is in a good position to incorporate that.

Joel Penhorwood

On that note, let’s take a quick break and hear more about CowManager. We’ll be right back with Chuck Sattler and our discussion on lameness.

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Joel Penhorwood

The Select Sires Podcast continues. Leslie, over to you.

Leslie Maurice 

I think that when you talk about those common questions, and I also think it's also, where are we going? And you definitely answered that and how do we continue to build upon the data that we have to create a more, a higher reliability on this trait? Because it's not going to go away. It is important and it's a very important piece of the philosophy here at Select Sires for what we're doing to bring in the next generation of bulls, right? Sires.

Chuck Sattler 

Right. So that's definitely something we pay attention to as we choose our donor females and our mating sires. Definitely on our list to keep moving the industry in the right direction and provide us the next generation of bulls that help us advance in this area. Your point is spot on that it's not going to go away. Again, as we manage our replacement inventories tighter, we're going to need our cows to stay in the herd longer. And lameness is definitely one of those traits that's more prevalent in second, third, fourth lactation cows than it is in first lactation cows. So as our herd gets older, cows with lameness resistance, improved lameness resistance, are going to be more noticeable in our herds of the future than they are even today.

Joel Penhorwood 

Right now, of course, it's greatly a piece of management and genetics. In the herds of the future, do you see the scale tipping more towards genetics, that it could have a greater impact?

Chuck Sattler 

I think it's going to always take a combination of both good genetic improvement practices, as well as good management practices. I think anytime we're dealing with health traits, probably the scale is always going to be highly weighted to the management side of the situation. But again, that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to genetics, and including this as part of your genetic improvement programs will only help your management practices be more effective. So, it's going to take both, no question. I think there's good opportunity to do better on the genetic side. We talked about the information from activity systems. There's also lots of work, a lot of good work, being done in Canada in assembling information from hoof trimmers. And that same sort of infrastructure is now underway being developed by the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding. So, if we can add some specific information about hoof lesions to our database and our evaluation process, I think that'll also make a nice contribution in helping us improve hoof health.

Joel Penhorwood 

An exciting future and all for to make exciting, longer futures for our herds.

Chuck Sattler 

Absolutely. And, again, I think the key thing is to know that better information is coming, but that doesn't mean we should sit around and wait for it. We should use the information we have today to do what we can to set ourselves up. Because when this new information comes along, those better hoof health animals are going to, again, have more opportunity to rise to the top and be more recognizable.

Joel Penhorwood 

Thank you so, so much. Chuck Sattler, vice president of genetic programs, talking with us today. Lameness traits, and how they can be a little bit more used and more effective possibly in your operation. Chuck, thank you.

Chuck Sattler 

You're welcome. My pleasure.

Joel Penhorwood 

For Leslie Maurice, I'm Joel Penhorwood. This is The Select Sires Podcast.