I see toothless old grannies, heavily pregnant or nursing a big calf, 'running out of gas' with green grass right around the corner every year - but this year, they've been rolling in much earlier than usual, and it's not all ol' Methuselas.
Been seeing - for the past month - good young cows, and 4-10 month old calves coming through the lab, in poor body condition, with all fat stores depleted - and a rumen full of what usually looks like decent hay. Most of the 'starve-outs' have been on hay only, with no grain or protein supplement; many without mineral supplementation,too - and liver Cu/Se levels have been incredibly low on several I've tested.
My fall-calving cows really dropped body condition this year - and we were feeding nearly twice the hay ration that we'd fed in recent years. Had to bump up the hay and DDG, especially for the fall-calvers. Think they'll make it now, but some were looking pretty doggone rough.
I didn't test my hay last year, and haven't talked with anyone who's had theirs tested, but I'm having some serious concerns about overall hay quality over a broad area of the region. Last year's cool, wet spring and summer may have resulted in a lot of hay being made - but I'm beginning to believe that that 'washy' grass may have really been lacking in nutritional content - including magnesium, as I've been seeing grass tetany cases in early lactation cows on hay and no signficant grazing, for a month.
Compound that potential lack of nutritional quality with what has been the longest, coldest winter we've had here in nearly 20 years, and it sets the stage for a really bad deal. Critical temperature for dry (meaning not soaking wet) cows is 18F. For every degree below 18, they have to expend 1% more energy just to maintain body heat; for some of these cattle - especially if they were in less-than-optimal body condition going into winter, or nursing a 1-4 month old calf... there may not have been enough feed value in the hay that they were receiving to get them through...
Too many folks don't realize that a cow can starve to death with a belly full of what may LOOK like good hay, but unless you test, you don't really know what is or is not in there.
Mud season is here, and with it usually comes a spate of calf scours cases...