Deadly Dose

A close look at what can happen when mycotoxins enter a farm’s feed supply.

It happened fast: one day in early January, cows on the 600-head dairy farm of a predominantly Holstein herd were performing well, and the next they began to slide downhill. Rough coats, dropping milk production, and then a mounting death toll … it became crystal clear that a major problem needed dealing with.

​​​​​​​The rapid pace of the situation and clean necropsy results left Harry Bristol, the farm’s nutritionist, in a mix of frustrated and baffled emotions. After eight years of working side-by-side with the farm owner in consultation on the herd’s nutrition, Bristol had the calibration of the dairy’s rations down to a finely tuned art.

The former town kid, turned dairy farmer, turned animal nutritionist took this very farm on as a client when he first joined Lutz Feed Co. in the United States’ dairy oasis in the state of New York.

The company, with a reputation built on a successful philosophy of ‘quality work builds good business’, has a client portfolio of 30,000 head of dairy cows - 4,000 of which Bristol manages.

His protocols are straightforward: take multiple forage samples from a farm each month to test quality and nutritional value, to calculate what combination of feedstuffs would be needed for cows to hit a milk target, while obtaining their volume of feed intake, to hit that sweet spot for optimum efficiency.

While calculations are the first dictator of a ration, Bristol had witnessed first-hand what can happen when cows don’t agree with the formula. Eight years ago, when he took over this same herd as a client, it was amid a Hemorrhagic Bowel Syndrome outbreak that was wreaking havoc on the cows’ digestive system – leaving infected victims with intestines full of blood.

culprit was too much starch being passed into the small intestine undigested, triggering a deadly reaction. Nine months after the ration was reconfigured, the herd was finally back to normal.

Because of the farm’s history with HBS, Bristol initially thought the same problem may be

resurfacing.

"One day a cow would be looking at you while chewing her cud, and the next she would die,” says Bristol. “At first, I thought it may be Hemorrhagic Bowel Syndrome again – these things happen.”

As the cows’ appetites declined, so did body condition and milk production. Hair coats were rough, postpartum “fresh cows” fell apart with ketosis after calving and the herd collectively looked poor. While Bristol had immediately dialled in on his rations when cows first started to slip, his theory of HBS striking again went out the window after a necropsy by the farm’s veterinarian revealed clean digestive systems and no telling signs of disease.

“I kept looking at the ration, looking at the cows and looking at the feed,” recalls Bristol. “Then one day, while talking to the dairyman, it hit me. We were dealing with mycotoxins.”

As a practice with all his clients, Bristol sends feed commodity samples off to be tested for mycotoxins before entering a farm’s feed supply. Not once had he ever received results back showing toxic levels, leaving him to never worry about mycotoxins.

However, the recent turn of events left him uneasy with any previous formalities, and through the suggestion of a fellow nutritionist, he reached out to John Winchell, Alltech’s area sales representative on February 22, 2017, almost two months after the first early symptoms began to show.

On Winchell’s advice, samples of the farm’s high moisture corn, corn silage and cottonseed were shipped off that very day to Alltech to be run through the company’s 37+ analytical program. When the test results rolled in to John on March 6, he immediately dropped everything and contacted Bristol.