- Welcome everyone.
Welcome back to part two
of the Integrated Parasite Management workshop
with Betsy Hodge and Tatiana Stanton
from Cornell Cooperative Extension
and the Cornell Sheep and Goat Program.
I'll pass it over to you two,
if you wanna introduce yourselves and Betsy give
the Zoom introduction, that would be wonderful.
- Sure. I'm Betsy Hodge and I am the livestock educator
in St. Lawrence County, New York.
Of course, I have a cat helping me here tonight.
I'm just gonna go through a little bit of the Zoom etiquette
before we start.
And I'm excited about this second half,
because this is really good information
about what can you do about all these parasites
that seem like they're so well evolved?
So tonight's presentation is being recorded.
So just keep that in mind when there's background noise.
Ideally, you'll keep yourself muted until we're asking
for questions or feel free any time to write your questions
in chat or raise your hand so we know you wanna do that
and I can show you how to do that.
So the view for speaker view,
which is you probably have anyways 'cause
I'm sharing something, but that's where there's
a big picture.
And then little people along the side.
Now you go to view and click on speaker view.
View is up in the, usually up in the upper right corner.
There it is.
And the little mute buttons down on the lower left.
And if you click it and there's a red line through it,
that means you're muted.
And there's that little conversation box is the chat.
If you click on that, a little box will open up
and you can write in to everyone
or two individual people, your questions
and we can see them.
If I was included in who you're sending it to.
And we can answer some things right in the chat
or if we get a lot of questions in chat
about the same thing, we can stop the speaker
and talk about it.
And if you wanna send other reactions or raise your hand,
it's under reactions, which is also down on the bottom,
usually as you're sharing your screen.
So Tat, I'm gonna stop sharing so you can start.
- Okay. Is there anything I need to do to be sharing?
- Oh, you gotta find your PowerPoint and click share and.
- [Tatiana] Okay.
- [Betsy] There you go. And then screen
and introduce yourself.
- [Tatiana] Yes I will.
Okay. And I'm gonna make this.
- Slideshow.
- No, I, somehow don't have it full screen.
So I'm trying to figure that out.
- I will go to full screen when you hit slideshow, I think.
- Okay.
- And if you go to the left where it says from beginning
or from current slide, if you click on that,
it should go to full screen.
- Okay. It did.
Yeah. Thank you all for your assistance on that.
Okay. So I'm Tatiana Stanton,
I'm the sheep and goat extensionist for the state
of New York working out at Cornell University.
Like Betsy I also raise my own small ruminants.
I have a herd of pasture-based meat goats,
primarily boers and boer alpine crosses.
And I originally came out of, I've worked with dairy goats,
meat goats, brush goats, not as much with fiber goats,
but I have a lot of practical experience
and unfortunately have dealt with a lot of parasite issues
myself and also doing research, have done research,
applied research with different types of parasite control.
So I'll talk about a little bit of what we've done
that way as well.
So today we're starting out on part two,
which is know your weapons,
start to know what you can do to manage your parasites.
We talked last week, at the end of our discussion,
we had talked about chemical dewormers.
And right now I'm gonna sort
of emphasize pasture management, including evasive grazing
and a few other things and then nutrition, genetic selection
and the immune system and then selective deworming.
And then we'll go into part three after that, okay.
And I'm having trouble getting it to move to the next slide.
- [Betsy] If you click down and there you go.
- [Tatiana] Yep. Okay.
All right.
- So there's a lot of things you can do that are not
with drugs.
- And Betsy, I'm back.
- You're back. There you go.
We just got back to sharing my PowerPoint.
Are you ready to share yours and I'll stop sharing here?
- Why don't we, is this the one from box?
- This is the one that from last week.
So if you've changed things.
- I think let's just go ahead and use it.
There were only two changes I made
and I can remember them, I think.
- Okay. So you'll just give an add when it's time.
- If I freeze up again, you can just keep going, okay.
- Good point.
- All right.
Okay, so when we look at grazing management to reduce
our barber pole worm problems and a lot of this
would be true of your other strongyle worms as well.
We're hoping to use clean and safe pastures
because the pasture contamination with worm eggs
is strongly influenced by the height of your pasture,
your grazing duration, how long are you leaving the animals
on this, the pasture through this cycle.
And then how long before you come back down the pasture,
how long does that paddock grazing paddock get rested
before the animals are back on it?
And this can be difficult to implement these recommendations
for your entire grazing season.
You can also use multi-species grazing
or alternative forages.
And for a lot of the stuff I'm gonna be talking about
when it comes to evasive grazing is gonna be really hard
to do with the whole herd.
And so your priority would be the most vulnerable animals
such as your recently weaned kids and lambs
or your lactating does and ewes as compared
to your dry stock as far as.
So you may not follow all this advice, next.
Okay. And so basically you've got this cycle
where your lamp, your ewe runs out to the field,
she squats and she pees and poops.
And in that poop, you've got your eggs and then they go
through several stages and then they crawl up the grass
and she eats them again. Okay.
And they can't crawl very far from where they've hatched.
But it is as much as several feet. Okay.
And then next slide.
Okay, so the eggs are in the feces and they fall
from the animal to the ground.
And for barber pole worm, it requires warmth,
but that can be as cool as 50 degrees Fahrenheit
to get a lot of hatching.
And you get lots of response by 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
And unfortunately in the Northeast US,
our temperatures tend to warm up pretty fast in the spring.
As you can see from what this last week has been like
in most parts of the Northeast and it requires humidity
and it hatches into that stage one larva at that point.
And for barber pole worm, if you wanna be more exact,
it says it takes about three to five days to hatch at
in the upper seventies.
And as much as 15 to 30 days to hatch,
when the temperatures are about 50 degrees.
And the L-1 eats bacteria in the feces and it grows.
It just pretty much is very happy
to just stay in that feces.
And then it molts just like a snake would,
it sheds that skin and it becomes an L-2 and the L-2
does the same thing.
It generally just stays in the feces and eats bacteria there
and then molts again.
And if your goat was to eat or sheep was to eat either one
of these L-1 or L-2, they wouldn't complete
a life cycle in it.
These aren't capable of becoming,
getting into your animal and becoming an adult.
Keep in mind that direct sunlight can heat that fecal pellet
to 155 degrees Fahrenheit.
And at that point, that pellet of feces is sterilized.
And those eggs aren't gonna survive,
let alone those L-1 or L-2.
And because of that, we'll sometimes recommend
that as you move animals out of a pasture, if you've had
them there for a few days, as you move them out,
if you can mow that pasture really short, that can aid.
Unfortunately, except for our first pass through
in the spring, when you mow, even mowing it short,
even if they grazed it pretty well and then you mowed it,
there's not gonna be much mulch there.
But otherwise if you're moving them every day
or every few days, which is often recommended
and you go to mow it, you're more just putting a lot
of mulch on there for them.
That's gonna protect those worms even more.
So this mowing is really only effective
when it's early in the spring
and it's been grazed pretty short and then you mow
and the sunlight is really able to get in
there and hit those fecal pellets.
And because of that, your shade trees and your tall,
dense grass, just keep in mind that there's usually a lot
of survival of your L-1 and L-2 larva in those situations
within the feces, there's a lot of survival.
So while it's nice to have shade trees out there,
there's a bad side to them when it comes to survival
of your L-1 and L-2.
The L-2 then molts into an L-3 however,
this time the L-3 is evolved to get out of that feces,
get out of that fecal pellet.
And because of this nature has made it so
that it doesn't shed that previous skin.
It keeps that skin and it gets a second skin on it,
which makes it much more, less susceptible to drying out.
But because it's got this skin over its mouth,
it cannot eat and it has to live off of its stored reserves.
Worms are coldblooded.
So their metabolism speeds up when it's hot.
So therefore the barber pole worm larva, L-3 larva
can only live about 30 to 60 days in hot weather.
In cold weather, cool weather it can live
about 120 to 240 days.
And we used to say that the barber pole worm larva
can't survive freezing that this does not necessarily mean
that it can't take super cold temperatures.
And we'll talk about that more later, next.
So it takes about five to 14 days for the egg
and the feces to go from being an egg to being an L-3 larva.
And in some cases, I know this last previous summer,
when it was really warm and humid,
we were finding it taking less than that.
It was taking more like three to four days sometimes,
but the pasture becomes infectious at this time.
So when your animals been, this time of year or a month
from now, it's only gonna be taking about four to five days
to go from being eggs, to being infectious.
And most of these L-3 larva can't get more than
about two inches high on a blade of grass.
They come up with the morning dew or with the rain.
They're movement is dependent on water flow.
So they come up with that.
And then as the sun dries that dew, they go back down
to the soil level, okay.
But they're heavily concentrated in their first two inches.
The L-3 has to escape from the fecal pellet in order
to infect your goat or sheep.
And it can only live about a week or two inside
the fecal pellet, if it's hot and dry.
The pellet has to be broken up by rain.
And that's about two inches of rain in a month's time.
And unfortunately in the Northeast, we usually get
those two inches of rain per month.
And then if you also think about what your animal's feces
are like right now, most of your animals
aren't having hard fecal pellets right now,
if they're out on pasture.
They're having really soft, manure,
which is really easy for this L-3 larva to get out of.
And then it scoot, to protect itself.
It gets under fallen leaves or in the debris.
And then, like I said, it scoots up and down your forage
with water, okay. Next.
So it's definitely survival of the fittest and only
about two to 10% of the eggs end up becoming L-3 larva.
But unfortunately with barber pole worm,
that's still usually a lot of eggs.
In the tropics, the population of L-3,
after fresh manure has been deposited in the pasture,
peak at about 14 days afterwards.
And unfortunately in temperate climates,
it takes it about 35 days to peak.
So this doesn't mean that you're leaving your goats out
there or your sheep out there.
It means that if your animals are in an area
for about four days, that if you,
if you move them out of that area from the time
the fresh manure started, it's gonna be about 14 days
after that in the tropics that the population of L-3
on the pasture's gonna peak.
And unfortunately in our temperate climates,
it's gonna be more like about 35 days after,
because it takes time for it to hatch.
And some of them will start hatching like I said,
as earlier as four or five days after, but by 35 days,
pretty much they're all hatch a lot, okay.
Then it has to be eaten by a goat or sheep
to continue development.
Cattle and horses can vacuum up the L-3 larva
from barber pole worms in sheep and goats,
but they have a specific barber pole worms of their own.
However, there are species of barber pole worms
that infect sheep and goats
and will infect young calves as well.
So you need to keep that in mind, okay.
And so if the larva, L-3 larva is vacuumed up by your cattle
and horse, adult cattle and horses,
it usually will stop its life cycle.
It won't be able to continue.
And like I said earlier, they used to think L-3
couldn't survive freezing and couldn't survive outside
in the Northeast winters,
but they've done studies at University of Maine
where they took barber pole worms from Maine
and from Virginia.
And they found that they could tolerate
about 10 degrees Fahrenheit for up to three to six days
before they got significant dying off versus
they took barber pole worms from Georgia.
And those that came directly from Georgia,
that they were from goats and sheep in Georgia.
And they found that those started dying off significantly
at about 20 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
So unfortunately, as barber pole worm has moved north,
it's become, it's genetically been selected
to survive colder and colder temperatures.
So it's probably just gonna get more and more tolerant
of cold weather.
And once the L-3 is inside the goat, it leaves that sheath.
And we call that sheath, the second cover that first,
that covering that's growing over its mouth.
It leaves that sheath and it molts into the L-4
and then it can make a choice.
It can either decide to stay in L-4 and over-winter
in the goat in a state of hibernation or a state
of suspended animation or it can become an L-4
and then decide to become an L-5, okay.
And that has to do with how many worms are already,
mature worms are already in that particular sheep or goat.
If there's already a lot of worms there,
then there's trigger or feedback mechanisms that,
that L-4 larva get that tells it, oh, already,
there's too many mature worms.
I'm gonna just stay and I'm just gonna go into hibernation.
And also has to do with the season of the year.
It has triggers that let it know what kind
of day length is going on and it can decide, oh,
winner's coming, it's time to hibernate
and not become a mature adult.
So we have a term called evasive
or sometimes it's called avoidance grazing.
And this is a method of grazing that is dependent a lot
on your parasites and you make your decisions,
a lot of your decisions based on parasites.
And it means that you're gonna move your animals fast enough
out of a grazing paddock to prevent them getting infection
from feces that's been deposited
during the current grazing period and the fancy term
for that is autoinfection.
And so it's gonna for barber pole worm be at the shortest
about four to five days up to about 14 days
during the grazing season for it to go to from being
an egg to an L-3.
So we usually advise people, farmers to play it safe
by moving your animals out of a grazing paddock
within four days in about four days, if it's a wet,
warm time of year to about seven days
in the cooler drier part of the year.
And we also say move them earlier
if the pastures getting too short, because remember
those worms are concentrated in the first two inches
of forage, okay.
And these recommendations for how long to leave
your animals in a pasture and how tall to let
your pasture get, we want it to be way
over those three inches and as you move out of the pasture,
we don't want it to be any shorter than three inches.
These recommendations are also very good for the health
of your pasture and the nutrition of your pasture.
But unfortunately the next recommendation is not good
for the health of your pasture or the nutrition
of your pasture because we're saying that you need
to allow a long enough rest period before you return
to that particular grazing paddock
that you're getting substantial kill off of the L-3 larva
of that infectious larva
before the animals come back to graze.
And unfortunately, that's about 60 days at the shortest
and about 105 days at the longest.
So Cheryl is asking if they can also crawl
up broad-leaf plants?
They can, but it's more difficult for them.
And so it's harder for them to get up as high
on a broad-leave plant.
At the same time when it comes to clover and alfalfa
and probably your bird's foot trefoil,
they can still get up.
But part of it has to do
with there's so much branching going on versus
when you think of a blade of grass,
the blade of grass starts pretty close to the ground
and then goes up and so an animal can go pretty high on it,
versus they're having to make a lot of choices
of where to go if they're trying to come up a legume
or most, a lot of your broad-leaves.
They come to a branching point and so you're losing more
and more of them as it branches.
And some of those plants also have compounds that may help
to make it harder for the animal to get up there.
You're not getting this smooth flow
of morning dew going straight up, next.
Okay, so I mentioned that this last recommendation
is not good for your animals getting nutrition
from the pasture.
And so the big problem is that these pasture rest periods
that we're recommending for evasive or avoidance grazing
in order to control barber pole worm are much longer
than what you would normally recommend for either
the health of your pasture or for the nutritional value
of your pasture.
And this is a picture at my farm many, many years ago,
when I didn't have as many, my animals were just
like first generation boer crosses and stuff.
And my does had come into this field the day before.
And they had come in there and the grass was tall.
It had been a long rest period and they came in here
and they just trampled it down.
It was high, lignified enough that the stems had gone down
the day before and hadn't bounced back up this day.
And they went through this and then the day before
they'd gone through this and broken out into my hayfield
next door that had been mowed for hay
about four weeks earlier
and had really nice, young regrowth on it.
And they'd gone out there and grazed that.
And they went to do the same thing this day.
And luckily the fence was harder, so they weren't able to,
but they knew that the stems were getting lignified.
There were still a lot of good grass out here
and good nutrition out here don't get me wrong,
but they knew the stems were lignified
and they wanted out of there. Next slide.
Okay, so how good does parasite avoidance
or parasite avoidance work?
And sometimes it works pretty, pretty significantly.
This is a study they did at West Virginia University
with their organic sheep flock, where they did
what they call it, avoidance grazing
and the animals grazed a paddock for three days.
And then they didn't return to that same paddock
for at least 57 days.
And then they had challenge brazing where the animals
were left in a paddock for seven days.
And then they returned and they only had
a 21-day rest period before they returned to that pasture.
And they found that they had twice as many strongyle worms
in those pastures that were challenged grazed,
the ones where they didn't have as long a rest period
and where they kept them in there a little longer grazing.
And because of that, they had to much more of the lambs
that were on those pastures on those paddocks.
They had to chemically treat them.
So they were only able to market about 46% of the lambs
that they managed under challenge grazing as organic
versus the lambs that they manage under avoidance grazing.
They were able to market 83% of them as organic lambs.
And at this point in the study, they waited later
before they sold them for meat.
But when they finished this study, the weight gain
was better on the ones that had avoidance grazing.
So even though you had this nutritional,
even though the nutrition was not quite as good,
because the animals were coming into the pastures
for their second, later grazings, after the pasture
had grown out more, they still got more nutrition
because they had less of a parasite load, next.
So are there safe pastures that animals can be switched
to as the grazing season progresses?
And that's one thing to think about 'cause by the time
we get into July often our pastures are pretty infected,
regardless of whether you're using a evasive
or challenge grazing.
Do you have brush pastures or hayfield regrowth
that your animals can go on?
Or do you have pastures that you've had cattle
or horses grazing on?
And can you switch from that set
of pastures to (indistinct)?
Do you have crop residuals
and do you plant some annual pastures?
I know some of our sheep farmers in New York are very good
about renovating their like one 10th
of their pastures every year.
And so they'll take those pastures that they're renovating
and they'll disc them and plan them in annual pastures
for a season.
And that way you'll like your King's AgriSeeds makes
your crazy, I forget crazy who mix and stuff.
That's got some cowpeas in it and sunflowers
and fast growing sorghums and stuff in it.
They'll put them on something like that
to help break the cycle.
And often you would use something like that
for your most vulnerable animals for like for those lambs
or kids right after weaning
who are gonna be very susceptible to parasites
or your lactating animals.
Also think about whether you can disrupt the worm cycle
by mowing the pasture extremely short at the beginning
of the rest period.
And again, I said that only works when you don't have
a lot of mulch that's gonna be ending up being on there
by you mowing it short.
Can you graze another species on there
during the rest period?
At our farm, we have a couple of horses.
And so the horses graze those pastures in between.
And can you harvest a hay crop or baleage,
we do have hay fields at our place.
And so our goats after weaning and stuff,
most of our herd goes out onto hayfield and we leave
our conventional pastures to rest until we come
on them again in the fall.
But a lot of people don't have a hayfield,
don't have that ability to have hay harvested.
I know I'm getting a lot of questions.
I'll go into those in a minute and next.
Do you have some pasture alternatives you can go onto?
So if I was in California or Texas,
I would usually be saying, hey, can you get them out
on the browse or the brush.
But in the Northeast, US, particularly in New York,
but more and more in other states,
we have a lot of problem with the deer worm,
as we discussed last week and even though 80%
of your other worms live
in the first two inches of vegetation.
So you don't have a lot of problem with barber pole worm
when you go out on browse.
Unfortunately you run a higher risk of deer worm.
And so if you are gonna use browse,
try and use it at a time of year that you think
your deer worm risk is gonna be fairly low,
use it when you don't think there's gonna be a lot
of snails out there.
And unfortunately your brush snails that can get
about two feet up high on brush, they can get deer worm.
And so you have to consider that,
but during the drier times of the year,
you can go ahead and you're fairly safe
to be grazing your brush and also I'll talk about it later.
It appears to be that sometimes grazing high-tannin forges
can help reduce the effects of parasites.
And we'll talk about that more later, next.
I'm gonna, okay, I'm gonna talk about the Barnyard Effect
and then I'll address some of the questions we have.
So barnyards are really any small pasture or barnyard
you have that has good forage in it.
So it has a high concentration of manure in it,
which means it's got usually got a high concentration
of internal parasites in it.
And unfortunately it also has good grazing there.
So your goats and sheep are gonna tend to wanna graze there.
And this can contribute greatly to the herd contamination,
to your herd's contamination with internal parasites.
We used to bring our animals in at night
and we'd have a little pad, great little, little paddock
outside besides the barn.
And they would go out there and graze.
And that was a real problem for us parasite wise.
And I've worked with one organic farm here in New York
where it's a major problem.
They really wanna bring the animals in at night.
So they bring them just to keep them safe from predators.
So they bring them into a two-acre area every night.
So even though they're rotating their pastures at night,
that stops and the animals don't stop grazing at night
or early in the morning.
And so look at those areas and decide if you really need
them or not and is there a way
to fence your animals out of it?
And in our case, we ended up making another barnyard
that's in front of our barn where our septic systems are.
Ours has no forage in it.
And we use those for our animals instead if we feel we need
to bring them in at night during the grazing season.
Okay and you can also have a barnyard effect in pastures
that border the barn and aren't being rotated
or that you're using early in the spring for lamming
and kidding in, things like that.
Next slide.
Okay, rotational grazing in the spring does appear
to reduce your barnyard effect and delay the onset
of your summer parasite problems.
And we did a study in quite a few years ago,
just an informal study in New York and Vermont,
where we had one farm that wouldn't rotate at all.
And then two other farms that were rotating in the spring.
And then the plan had been that we were going to take
those animals that were rotating in the spring and summer,
early summer and they would go on to hayfield
or on the brush pastures.
And then these pastures that were rotating
or that weren't rotating, we would compare what happened,
but we had to, next slide.
We had problems with the study and this is New York State.
But the same thing happened in Vermont where the farm
that was doing no rotation by late, late July,
they were having deaths in their wean lamb,
in their lambs and kids.
Actually, this was all with goats.
So they were having death in the goat kids,
even though in previous years, they hadn't,
but the population of goats on the land had just gotten high
enough that even though they were grazing quite a few acres,
I would say probably 50 does on 25, 30 acres,
they were having a horrible worm problem.
You can see that their strongyle giant worm counts
were almost 24,000 worm eggs per grant versus the ones
that were rotating.
And these were not doing long rest periods
in their rotations.
They were more practicing intensive grazing
where they were staying off of a pasture for 35 days max.
They too had a lot of worms.
They had like 3,500 or 2000 worm eggs.
And they were pretty eager to go on to their hayfields
or their brush pastures at this point.
But they were having no deaths in animals yet.
It definitely was very helpful to do rotating
versus continuous grazing.
Okay. Next slide.
Okay, so some options to help reduce this barnyard effect,
see if you can do any of these.
In some cases you can lay down gravel, concrete
or herbicides in your barnyard.
I had one of my veterinarians, Mary Smith, told me
to do that and I asked her, who's paying for it?
And went, nope, that's not an option here.
You can close off access to the barnyard.
And that's what we decided to do at our farm.
We just made, well, actually,
I guess we did the third one and I'll talk about that.
Or we came up with new barnyards or can you provide hay
in the barn at night when you're bringing
the animals back in if you do bring them in at night
to cut down on the amount of night grazing you get
in those barnyards.
And then what we did at our farm is we made the barnyard
so small that no grazing could occur in them.
The animals could graze for like one day
and then they'd wiped out all that it was there.
And so that's what we initially did.
And then I said is later on, we built,
we made another barnyard and then more and more
what we do nowadays is we just leave the animals out 24/7.
They, they don't come back in.
Okay. Next slide.
Okay. Alright.
So I'm gonna answer some of the questions now
that are in chat.
Okay.
Yeah, we all have the thunderstorms going on
and I probably should turn off my video actually,
that might help here.
And I'm forgetting how far
they can really crawl horizontally on the land,
but it's not very far, (indistinct).
Like I said, I think it's about two feet,
sometimes five feet, if there's water movement,
they can go quite far on the water movement.
So if you've got a big manure pile outside of your barn
right there in the pasture and you've got rain,
then you know that manure as well as those larva
can move quite far.
And so, I mean,
there's definitely gonna be a lot less worms
in that adjacent area that your goat isn't directly pooping
in than there is right in the barnyard.
So I'm not sure I would worry that much about it.
So yes, they can crawl up broad-leave plants,
but generally not as well and as far.
You can bring chickens in, but if the sheep having grazed
the pasture really short, then the chicken scratching
the faces, the fecal pellets,
isn't gonna be that much help.
But often if you do bring your chickens in,
they will scratch fecal pellets, they just won't get enough
of your fecal pellets.
If you've got a really small, small flock,
then it can be helpful but otherwise it's probably
not a real major help.
And we certainly have a lot of farms that do pasture poultry
that also have barber pole worm issues and stuff at time,
but it can help a little.
And yes, I mean they probably do, the L-3 is so small
that I don't know if they specifically try to eat it,
but yeah, I mean they are helpful that way.
And mostly they're helpful by breaking up
those fecal pellets.
So the recommendations for grazing height out
and regrowth time, I'm confused by that.
So normally we would be saying, you wanna move animals
out of a pasture before they start doing much eating
of the regrowth.
So there'll be like a four-day rule is what Woody Lane,
one of the more famous pasture management people
will say that you wanna move them out of there
in about four days
'cause after that they start grazing the regrowth.
You always have to look at it economically.
A goat dairy may be moving them out every day
because if they're commercially selling that milk
because for nutrition and everything,
that fresh forage every day can be helpful.
If you've got a meat goat operation or something,
or a Meat Cheap, then the time and labor it takes
to move them out daily, it is gonna be even hard
to justify that seven days.
But as I said, it's more at four to five days.
And then when we talk about pasture height,
it's more a matter of the maturity of your pasture.
You're trying to keep your pasture from getting too mature
from flowering and the stems getting lignified.
So it's hard to say it depends on the plant species
and everything, but usually I mean early in the season,
I'm not too worried if my pasture gets down to four inches.
But just within a few weeks, like right now,
my pastures are getting so tall at that keeping up
with the next pasture, I'm probably moving my animals
at five or six inches.
And I'm bringing them into pastures right now
that are already hitting eight to 10 inches.
So Betsy might have some advice there.
And then the big thing is,
that regrowth time, normally regrowth
on an intensive system,
we would be talking about coming back in 28 or 35 days
during the peak of the grazing season.
And then later as you get into the fall and things
are growing slower.
But as I said for dealing with barber pole worm,
you need a lot longer rest period.
One thing to keep in mind with invasive buckthorn
is that some farms do not have much trouble with it
as a poison, but other farms do have problems with it
as a poison if their animals aren't used to it
and their animals eat a lot of it all at one time.
We've lost sheep at the Cornell Sheep Farm,
at the teaching farm, right on campus to buckthorn
versus I have goats and sheep or goats out at my farm.
And I know a lot of people with sheep
who don't have much trouble.
So just keep in mind that buckthorn can be toxic.
And then someone was saying that the Vermont Agency
of Ag is starting to fund wood chip pads for your barnyards
through the BMP program.
So I'm not sure what BMP stands for.
It might be some sort of equip program or something.
And so Kelsey, people are asking if they can
and you've given them a link.
All right. Great.
All right. So I'm gonna get back to the other stuff now,
if that's okay.
And okay, so one thing we talked about how L-4 larva,
barber pole L-4 larva can make a decision on whether
to over-winter or not when it gets into an animal,
whether to go into hibernation or not
or whether to become an adult.
And many of your other strongyle worms also have
to make this decision.
And it's sometimes called hypobiosis.
And so often what happens is they do make that decision
to over-winter as a dormant L-4,
barber pole worm typically does this.
And then what happens is there's an estrogen surge
in the host animal, in your sheep and goats at birthing,
just as part of birthing, estrogen is released.
And unfortunately the adult female worms
have estrogen receptors.
So they are aware of when you get that estrogen surge
in your sheep and goats at that kidding and lambing
and that triggers these L-4 larva to become adults
and to mate and start producing eggs.
Also, additionally, the immune system is compromised
by parturition and late gestation.
And it can also be and that early peak lactation,
all of those compromise the immune system
and illness can also do that.
And so those also trigger L-4 larva
to break out of dormancy.
And as I said, other strongyle worms,
the same phenomena occurs, but they have the option
of also over-wintering pretty easily outside, next slide.
And this was a study that Dr. Jim Weber did at University
of Maine where he took the flock of Icelandic sheep
that they used to have at the university.
And I believe they had been dewormed as they came off
of pasture and I'm not sure if that's right
when this is occurring or whether they get were dewormed
and then had come back up to a thousand worms.
But at any rate over the winter,
the worm load was way down.
They had essentially no worms inside the barn.
And then as the animals started to lamb in the spring,
in March, they started those L-4 larva hatched out
or excuse me became adults.
And so they started laying eggs.
And so you started getting a lot of egg laying going on
and their fecal egg counts went way up. Okay.
And then they took half the herd and half the herd
went out to pasture May 15th.
And that half that went out May 15th,
they got out on pasture and for a little while
their worm counts were down as they got
on those nice clean pastures.
And then they rapidly went back up again.
Those eggs, they started laying eggs again,
getting more contaminated.
The pastures got more contaminated
and the worm loads went way, way up than amount
of eggs per gram in the feces versus the other half
of the flock they kept in the barn
while they were going through this peak,
this surge of adult worms you get after kidding
or after lambing and this surge of egg laying
that you get, that these worms go through
when they get all that estrogen.
And they left those in the barn
and they just naturally dropped down 'cause in the barn,
they couldn't get recontaminated very easily.
So the counts dropped, the counts dropped drastically
and then the animals went out to pasture about June 15th.
And they were taking that manure was being removed
from the barn.
No, actually no, I think they were on a bedded pack,
but he said that they weren't able to contaminate
their mangers very easily.
And then the worms stayed down for much of the grazing,
much of the heavy grazing season.
And then they did by August, they were going back up again.
Okay. So then he was saying, if farmers could afford to keep
their animals in the barn until June 15th in May,
he would recommend that.
But most farmers were saying, there's just no way
I can keep them in the barn that long.
But it does sort of indicate how important this spring rise
in worm and egg laying is this rise in egg laying right
at lambing and kidding is on infecting your animals
and infecting your pastures.
Okay. Next.
So now we're gonna talk about your immune response
and keep in mind always that good nutrition stimulates
the immune system.
Good nutrition is one of the big things you can help
to boost the immune system of your animals.
And then there's also many trace minerals, such as zinc,
zinc, selenium and copper that are very, very involved
in the immune system.
And of course too much copper is toxic to sheep.
So you have to be very limited in how much copper
you're giving your sheep.
And then vitamin E also plays a very important role
in the development of the immune system.
And keep in mind, like I said earlier,
that when goats and sheep are lactating
or in late pregnancy, that immune system is suppressed.
And they found that if you're able to boost the immune,
the nutritional diet of ewes in late pregnancy,
so that they're getting 130%
of their daily protein requirements, that this does reduce
that spring rise.
It reduces the flush of egg laying and they think
it's primarily because the animals
have really good immune systems going into lambing.
And so therefore the L-4 larva don't get those triggers
to go ahead and do a frenzy of egg laying.
So keep that in mind that late pregnancy isn't necessarily
a time to go low on your protein that you actually can.
There are some advantages to going at 130%
of the daily requirements for a late pregnancy animal.
And then at the University of Rhode Island,
they did a study where they looked at in 2007,
the National Resource Council had greatly upped
the amount of vitamin E they said that sheep needed
and this would be the same for goats.
And so they upped the requirements.
So what University of Rhode Island did is they compared
the old requirements to the new requirements
and Cornell had calculated out Doug Hogan,
Mike Tony had calculated out that you would meet
the NRC requirements, the new requirements,
if you put 10 international units of vitamin E
per kilogram live weight in the creep feed of lambs
versus the old requirement which would've been
about five international units vitamin E
per kilogram of live weight.
And so they attempted to do that with their creep feed.
And then they artificially infected the lambs,
these ween lambs with barber pole worm larva.
And they found that the lambs that got the twice
as much vitamin E had about half as many fecal,
their fecal egg count for barber pole worm was
about half as much.
And so that's one reason why we do recommend sticking
with that higher amount of vitamin E supplement
in your trace minerals or your creep feed if you can
for your lambs.
Next study and same thing with goat kids.
Genetic resistance, the susceptibility of animals,
your sheep and goats getting infected
with your strongyle worms is greatly affected
by the environment and genetics and the heritability
for genetic resistance to strongyle worms in sheep
and goats appears to be similar to the heritability
of milk yield in dairy cattle.
So it's like in dairy cattle, it means
that it does require a lot of records
because the heritability is only about 0.25 or 0.3.
And so it does require a lot of records.
So it would be more comparing the fecal egg counts
of offsprings of different sires rather than the comparing
the fecal egg counts of individual litters to each other.
you more wanna have different sires that you can compare.
And the National Sheep Improvement Program,
NSIP as part of their on-farm genetic testing,
they do have traits in there for looking at fecal egg counts
and trying to breed for dewormer resistance
in your sheep and goats.
Next slide.
And so this is just the two traits they have.
One is fecal egg counts at weaning,
and one is fecal egg count post weaning.
And if you look at their website, it explains it more,
but the (indistinct) and Sheep Association
has really embraced this and is making a lot of headway
on parasite resistance in their animals.
We have very few if any meat goat farms,
I think enrolled on NSIP right now,
but if you were to enroll,
this would be one of the advantages of doing it,
but you have to find a way
to get your fecal egg counts done for you.
I know for University of Rhode Island for a while
and I think they may still be doing it. I'm not sure.
But for flocks in the Northeast, US flocks
and herds of sheep and goats in the Northeast, US
they were, especially if you were enrolled in NSIP,
they were doing fecal egg counts for free
for farms that were specifically looking
at these two traits.
So they would do them right at weaning for you
and then post weaning.
Otherwise, learning how to do them yourself is good,
but it's time consuming, next.
Oh, go back one.
Can you go back one, Betsy? I'm sorry.
Okay. So the mechanism of getting the immune system
to function or a biological resistance.
The animal's immune system needs to recognize
that there's a parasite infection occurring
and how quickly the animal recognizes this varies
between breeds and also between individuals within a breed.
And then the second thing is the immune system has
to be able to mount an effective response.
And again, the effectiveness varies between individuals
and within individuals between breeds
and then within individuals in a breed, next.
So this is a study they did at West Virginia University,
where they looked at Saint Croix sheep
and they looked at Suffolk sheep.
And what they did with both sets of sheep
is they took three groups of lambs and one group of lambs,
which are these red ones had been exposed
to barber pole worm by artificial infection once.
And then they were exposing them a second time.
Okay. And that, excuse me, I'm wrong.
This red line are animals that were being exposed
for the first time.
So they gave them the barber pole worms here at day zero.
And then two weeks later, the animals started,
the worms had become adults and started to lay eggs.
And the worm counts went way up until they got
to about 3000 worm eggs.
And then the animals realized that wait, I'd been infected
and they mounted an attack on,
their immune system mounted an attack.
And the worms, the egg load went way, way down
and then blue, which you can't see are lambs
that weren't infected at all with the barber pole worm.
And then the green are the second time
these lambs were infected.
So this is the first time they were infected.
And then the second time they were infected
the Saint Croix sheep instantly realized
that they had been infected
and their immune system instantly attacked those worms.
And they didn't get, they had no worm count increase
versus when they looked at theirs Suffolk crossbred lambs,
this is the first time they were infected.
And you can see it took them
to until they got 7,000 worm eggs before they realized that,
oh my gosh, I've been infected with worms.
And they mounted up very quickly in them.
So sort of that same two-week period, they realized, oh,
I've been infected.
So they realized it pretty quickly,
but they had a really high load by then.
And then it plateaued, it took them a while
for their immune system really to kick in.
And then even when the immune system kicked in,
eventually the worms recovered and started laying
a lot of eggs again.
And for their naive ones, they stayed down
'cause they were never infected.
And the second time they were infected, yes, it took
these lambs were able to realize they were infected earlier
on and they were able to mount
a more successful immune response.
But even then it went back up and you can see
when we look at the worm eggs attacking,
which unfortunately I guess this isn't gonna work.
Oh yeah. Can you do it for me?
Yeah. You have to do it, right.
You can see on the Saint Croix as those cells attack
that barber pole worm in a Petri dish, those immune cells,
they're able to keep that worm from moving around much
at all, versus on the Suffolk, go ahead and click
on the Suffolk now, Betsy.
The worm is much more able to flip itself around and stuff.
So you can see, it's probably doing a lot more sucking
of blood from the abomasum even though it's being attacked
than the worms in the Saint Croix, next slide.
Okay.
So in traditional parasite control,
where it used to be that we would maximize
that parasite control in the hope that we would maximize
our production and theoretically help.
And you would deworm the entire herd regularly in order
to meet the needs of the most vulnerable
or most susceptible animals.
And we would often rotate those dewormers during the year
or every year and each time we would deworm
we'd move the animals to a clean pasture so
that they wouldn't be able to reinfect themselves
very easily from the original worms in that grazing paddock.
And all of these practices,
unfortunately promote dewormer resistance
when it comes to the barber pole worm,
which has such a heavy egg layer and has such
a short generation interval.
And this has now become a huge problem in the United States.
Next slide.
And this was a study we did in 2007 with a set of New York
and Pennsylvania goat herds.
We took fecal egg counts right before we deworm the animals.
And then seven to 10 days after deworming the animals.
It was seven days if they used Ivermectin and 10 days,
if they used Safeguard.
And what we found with Safeguard,
which would be your Fenbendazole here,
there were about six herds where there was severe resistance
to the Safeguard.
In fact, in one of the herds,
the worms actually increased their number of worm eggs
after being dewormed with the Safeguard.
There were two herds that it was still quite effective in
and then threes were there, it was moderately effective.
Ivermectin third, a little better.
There were six herds out of the 13 herds sampled
where it was still highly effective.
But again, there were five herds
where it had severe resistance where
it did not kill very many of those adult worms
when you compared the amount of egg laying that was going
on seven days after deworming versus right at deworming.
And unfortunately this herd here was my herd.
So in my herd, Ivermectin was candy.
Okay. Next slide.
So even in 2007,
we had a pretty pronounced problem with dewormer resistance
in New York and Northern Pennsylvania.
So the big problem with the traditional way of doing things
is it destroys the refugia and the refugia is just
a fancy name for the proportion of your worm population
on your farm in your sheep and goat herd
that hasn't been exposed to a dewormer treatment.
And so it would include the worms in untreated animals,
in goats and sheep that you haven't dewormed.
And also the worms in the larva that over-wintered
in that pasture, that were in that pasture
before you gave your animals any dewormer.
And unfortunately, it's very hard to find a pool of genetics
in a herd in New York.
And in most of, probably most of the US that where somewhere
back in that worm genetics, there hasn't been
some deworming done or a lot of deworming done.
So even if you're not deworming now,
there are great, great, great, great, great,
great grandparents got exposed to a dewormer,
but primarily we're talking about in this year,
who's been exposed to worms.
And the good thing about refugia is it does provide
you a pool of genes that are sensitive hopefully
to the dewormer.
And it dilutes the genes that are resistant.
So if you've got your susceptible parents and you've got
a couple of resistant parents and they're gonna cross breed
with each other, but meanwhile you've used your dewormer.
So you used your dewormer.
And before you used the dewormer,
all of these were cross breeding with each other.
So the genes, the resistant genes from these worms here
were getting diluted by all the susceptible genes
in these worms here, as they were cross breeding.
But once you deworm, the only generation that survived
were these resistant worms, unless you spilled the dewormer
on the ground, the animals spit it out or something.
And so all you're getting are these resistant worms,
crossbreeding with each other.
And if you're now moving the animals to a clean pasture
at this time, all the breeding, all the worm eggs
that are gonna show up,
have a very good chance of having some resistant genes.
Versus if you'd moved them when things
were looking like this, there was a lot less chance
that the worm eggs would carry a lot of the resistant genes.
Okay. Next slide.
Okay. So that's just showing you, next.
Okay.
So instead we wanna practice targeted selective deworming
where you're only, deworming the animals
that need it the most.
And this has been shown to prolong the efficiency
of a dewormer.
And it's also very important for farms
that like organic farms that really can't use dewormers,
except for emergencies.
Keep in mind that your parasites are not equally distributed
in all your individuals.
And so when it comes, you've got your bell shaped curve
of who's highly resistant.
So when it comes to barber pole worm only about 20 to 30%
of your sheep and goats in your flock harbor 80%
of the worms and they're gonna be responsible
for most of the egg output and the pasture contamination.
And if you deworm early enough, you're only gonna have
to deworm those animals and not the entire herd or flock.
If you're not deworming or taking care of the problem,
then more and more of the worms of your animals
are gonna have heavy worm loads.
So it's not gonna matter that 20 to 30% of them have,
30,000 worm eggs per gram versus the other, the rest
of the animals only having 10,000 worm eggs per gram, so.
Next slide.
So you do need to deal with that problem,
whether it's by deworming or getting
them onto uncontaminated land or what.
And so in this slide,
each one of these bars is an individual animal.
And so you've got some individual animals that have more
than 16,000 worm eggs per gram.
And then you've got other animals that barely
have any worm eggs per gram.
And yet it's only really these top animals
that these animals with super high loads that need
to be dewormed and that are the ones responsible
for most of the contamination of your pasture.
So, next thing, if you hit, okay.
So if you deworm those 33, if you deworm one third
of your goats, the one third that has the most worms,
you're gonna get rid of 80% of the eggs.
Next slide.
Okay. And then what'll happen is you've gotten rid
of this group.
Okay. These are now, if you've been able to use
an effective dewormer,
next slide, if you keep going, okay,
you've reduced if you've been able to use
an effective dewormer, if something still works
in your herd, you've reduced this, these to here.
So these are carrying the resistant genes,
very likely, but if you cross breed them
with the rest of your population that didn't get deworm,
those resistant genes are gonna get diluted
in the whole genetic pool, so that you're less likely
to quickly build up dewormer resistance.
You're still gonna be building it up but much slower.
Okay.
All right.
Okay. Next slide.
Okay. But how do you determine who to deworm?
You can try and do fecal egg counts,
but they're costly if you're doing them yourself,
they're time consuming
and they don't necessarily identify animals that have
a low tolerance to worms,
but aren't shedding a lot of worm eggs.
You can look at visual cues and production records.
Next slide.
So when it comes to barber pole worm,
we suggest using barber pole worm as part
of a five-point check.
Okay and five-point checks are ways to monitor your animals,
to try and decide who needs selective deworming.
And you can also use fecal egg counts to be helpful in that,
but you don't have to be fecal egg counting the whole herd.
And if you don't have access to fecal egg counts,
five-point checks can be very, very, very
and a very effective tool.
And so you wanna include FAMACHA in this.
And we said that one of the main signs
of barber pole worm infection is anemia.
So you check to see what the animal's membranes look like,
their mucus membranes in the lower part
of their eye look like and using a system like
this has been shown in studies to significantly decrease
how fast your dewormer resistance develops, next slide.
And a five-point check can vary depending on where,
what country you live in,
what worms are your big problem,
but what's often used is in the US is checking
the FAMACHA score on your animals.
Checking to see if the animals have a bottle jaw,
which would indicate a really heavy dewormer,
heavy barber pole worm load, though it could also be
that they've got liver fluke, unfortunately.
So you would check those things.
You would check to their body condition.
If you're keeping weight gain records,
are they gaining as well as the rest of the herd?
Or are they gaining poorly?
Is there hair coat rough or is it nice and shiny?
You look at their dag or their fecal score,
do they have diarrhea or is their feces nice and firm.
Of course, keeping in mind the time of year
that this year they're gonna be fairly loose.
And then what kind of movement do they have?
If they're anemic, they often will be lagging
behind the herd as you move from grazing paddock
to grazing paddock.
And so you can adjust this system to your own,
to what works for your farm.
When I've worked overseas,
sometimes we're having trouble with nasal worms.
And so we'd be checking the noses as well.
You can see what works for you,
but this is what we generally use and what we'll be teaching
at the workshop next week.
Next slide.
And we're trying to look not only at barber pole worm,
but your other strongyle worms as well,
but you have to keep in mind that other things like Coccidia
and liver fluke can be causing issues.
And we'll be showing this next week, how to do this.
You don't wanna just pull down on the lower eyelid,
instead you're usually pushing in, the eye into the cavity,
the socket there and then that causes the lower eyelid
to sort of bulge.
And then it becomes easy to pull that out or push down on it
and see it and it bulges out.
So it's easy to see the color,
and then you'll use a FAMACHA card to compare the color
and to see how anemic the animal looks.
And will you normally treat adults if they're at score four
and five, we'll often treat lambs as kids,
if they're even a score of three and then as we said,
you don't wanna do this in isolation.
And I would say bottle jaw,
because it's a breakdown of the proteins.
You usually see it later on.
So the animals are usually if it's being caused
by barber pole worm, the animals usually have quite
a high load by the time you see bottle jaws
and are usually pretty anemic.
Okay, next slide.
This is what the card used to look like.
It was a really big thing and harder to put on your wrist
or harder to hold.
You can see this animal looks a lot more pale
than the animal on the previous page.
Some disadvantages of FAMACHA is you need to do it
in sunlight or very bright lighting.
Obviously, I don't know about in Vermont,
but in New York, if we waited for sunlight,
there'd be a lot of days when we couldn't do this.
If you are having to do it inside the way this farmer,
Jim Taylor, is having to do here,
then using like a 500 Watt quartz work light or shop light
can be really helpful.
Otherwise, you can do it near a window or a skylight
that can help a lot.
And during the grazing season, we say,
you need to do it at least every two weeks.
Remember that it's only good for barber pole worms.
So that's why you would include the rest of those things
on your five-point check.
And we'll talk more on next Monday about what other things.
Obviously, if it's really dusty out your animals
could have red membranes from dust irritation
or if they're running a high fever,
they could have red membranes from that.
Next slide.
And there's other causes of anemia in sheep and goats.
Now, one thing to keep in mind,
if there are less than 10% of your flock
is in categories four and five, then you would treat
those animals and you would reexamine the herd
again in two weeks.
Okay and you would wanna be treating them with
an effective dewormer.
And if you don't, obviously if you're organic,
some of the other things you can do is put them in the barn
on really clean, where they can't reinfect themselves.
But even then, I mean, once they're a four or five,
you really do need to usually get
an effective dewormer into them.
And unfortunately, Fiesta farms, dewormer usually
isn't gonna work at that stage.
Next slide.
However, what you need to keep in mind
is that if you've waited long enough,
that greater than 10% of your flock and herd
is in categories four and five, then the recommendation
for FAMACHA is that you would usually treat
all the threes as well.
And often when you reach that case,
most of your animals are at least a three.
And so that means you're gonna end up treating a whole bunch
of your animals all at one time.
So you really wanna not get to that stage at all possible.
Once that happens, you also wanna start treating the herd
at least or checking the herd at least once a week,
which is easy to do if you've got interns
that you've trained to do it
and you need something for the interns to do once a week,
but otherwise doing it yourself is time consuming.
And you don't wanna treat all the animals before a move.
You would treat, half of them before you made the move.
And then the rest of them a couple of days after,
or during a couple of days after that move.
So you really wanna avoid getting to this stage.
And unfortunately, for most people,
what we do is we look at a couple of animals and we say, oh,
they look good. I don't need to,
I don't need to look at everyone.
Looking at everyone every two weeks
is way too time consuming.
And so you let it go three weeks or four weeks or five weeks
until you suddenly realize that, oh my gosh,
someone is really anemic or someone has a bottle jaw
and then you check everyone.
And by that time, everyone, most of them are four
or fives and threes and you've defeated
the purpose of FAMACHA.
So I'm really serious when I say that, unfortunately,
you do really need to be checking at least every two weeks
during the grazing season.
Okay.
Next slide.
Okay.
All right and then it's recommended to treat the threes
when greater than 10% are of the flock or herd is in four
or five or if they're young animals
or if they're ewes, vulnerable ewes and does,
which should be around the time of lambing and kidding,
during peak lactation, thin, poorly conditioned animals.
And if you're down to one effective dewormer,
we'll often recommend that you use
your less effective dewormers on your category three animals
and your effective dewormers on your fours and fives.
And nowadays we'll, next slide.
Next slide.
Is this the next slide?
And nowadays we'll often go ahead and say,
to give a dewormer combination to those animals
that are in your fours and five.
So you wouldn't mix the dewormers together,
but you would give them dewormers
from two different families at the time you deworm
and then you would only give one less effective one possibly
to your threes.
But you wanna, when you do that, you would wanna
be deworming everyone with a combination dewormers.
Don't buy resistant worms.
When you bring in new additions to your herd,
it's really important to quarantine them if possible,
get their manure in your compost pile,
rather than out on your pastures.
And often, depending on whether you're organic or not.
Obviously if you're organic,
you wouldn't be aggressively deworming them,
but you would be doing an aggressive cleanout of them,
by quarantining them and stuff,
before you mix them into the rest of your herd.
Otherwise we recommend deworming them with dewormers
from all three of the classes, but remember them,
remember that any eggs they do lay
after that for the next few weeks are gonna be super worms.
And so you're not gonna put that manure out on your pasture
and then perform fecal egg counts to see if you have killed
off their worms.
Next slide.
So this is part three.
It's what it what's in our future.
I'll look at the chat really quickly.
Where do you buy by?
- [Betsy] So we were gonna take a break here.
- Okay.
So shall we go ahead and take a short break here?
- [Betsy] Yes, answer the questions and then.
- Yeah.
- [Betsy] We'll take a little break.
- So vitamin E you can buy it through online,
I think through different catalogs online
and you would mix it into the feed or into the trace mineral
and some trace minerals do contain good amounts of vitamin E
so you can compare the amounts.
Can be fairly expensive.
I can look up who I was ordering it from,
who I was originally ordering it from.
I can look that up and bottle jaw would usually
be pretty late in the later stage of infestation.
They're usually quite, have quite
a high barber pole worm load by then.
Okay. So yeah, let's take a break.
There is, there'll only be about seven or eight slides here,
so hopefully we'll be able to go through
this part pretty quickly, but I know it's a part
that's a major interest to people, so yeah,
let's take a break and then we'll resume.
All right. Thank you.
- Are you thinking just a couple minutes to grab some water?
We are coming up close to the 8:30.
- Yeah. So I was thinking like,
at the most just one or two minutes to go take a pee
or drink some water. Okay.
- Okay.
- We talked about going over the pre-quiz,
but maybe that's too much for tonight.
- And Betsy, I also remembered that some
of the pre-quiz questions are asking
about copper oxide wire particles and stuff.
- Ah, true.
- Yeah.
But hopefully we'll be able to do that.
Or at least with the people who wanna stay on.
I know I always take too long on the pasture stuff.
- Well, that's a really important part.
- Well, for people who are pasturing,
it's really important.
- That's true.
- As you mentioned, sometimes we're not working with people
who are doing a lot of pasturing,
even though you and I both do.
- Did you notice on that one (indistinct) picture?
They are holding the card in the wrong direction.
Never noticed that before.
- Why don't you go back and let me see
that for a second.
- See?
- Oh yeah. And that's not one of ours.
- That's weird.
- I wonder if they, those guys do that regularly.
Yeah. That's University of Rhode Island.
That's Catherine and those guys.
- Oh, we're gonna have to pick on them.
- Yeah. 'Cause come back to ours.
Keep go, go forward.
- Find the little thing. Yes.
See that's how we would hold it.
- Yeah. This is one of ours, I don't remember
whose farm that's at, but that's one of ours. Okay.
Next one.
So it looks like we have all 34 people back now.
So should we go ahead and we'll get started.
Okay. So we're gonna look at some worm control strategies
that are in development or are now being used.
Next slide.
So one of these was Duddingtonia flagrans.
In nature, there's lots of nematode trapping of fungi.
And a lot of these have evolved to live in livestock feces
and to eat the gastrointestinal worm larva as they hatch
out of that feces.
And the one in preliminary studies that were done quite
a few years ago, Dunningtonia flagrans really stood out
as a good one.
And so they did studies in Scotland and then Scotland sort
of dropped it and Australia took it up
and International Animal Health developed
these two products.
Ones can be top dressed or incorporated into a feed
or a mineral supplement.
And the other one is a feed supplement that has
the BioWorma added to it.
Unfortunately, your sheep goat has to eat these daily,
but the spore does survive travel through
the digestive track and then it's excreted
in the animals manure along
with any worm eggs the animal has.
And once it's excreted, it germinates and traps and consumes
those newly hatched L-1 larva.
Like I said, unfortunately it seems to have
to be eaten daily though there
were some studies several years ago
where they did try feeding it every two to three days
and it seemed to be effective that way as well.
And so last year, the biggest problems we had
with it was that it was quite costly.
And some people, especially when they initially would feed,
it said that they were having palatability issues with it.
But that seemed to, in most cases, for most sheep
and goat flocks, they got used to it pretty quickly.
But it was about the same cost.
It's pretty close to the cost of feeding your animals hay.
And the big problem we have with it right now
is there's a shortage, there's been problems
with the spore production in Australia.
And so even though it's been accepted for organic use
in Australia and New Zealand, they're not exporting any
of it to the US right now.
Premier was one of the carriers of it.
And then of the BioWorma there were,
feed mills could order it directly from IAH.
But right now they're saying that except
for research purposes, it's not available
and they're not sure it'll be available by late summer even.
Okay. Next slide.
When it comes to vaccines,
there was a breakthrough in Australia where they developed
a system to centrifuge the worms,
where they were able to harvest much more
of the immunity inducing antigen than they had previously
been able to do.
They're able now to get a lot more,
they've been able to adjust things so that they're able
to get a lot more, but they've never,
we still have not been able to synthesize the antigen
for barber pole worm.
And that vaccine is very dependent
on having slaughter houses, they process lots of lambs
and goats as they do in Australia.
The vaccine is called Barbervax.
And it did not, they have not registered it for goats
because the effectiveness was too variable in the studies
they did in Australia.
Some of the studies they've done in Latin America,
was more effective, but it wasn't successful,
efficient enough to extend the registration in Australia.
And it requires quite a few dosages.
The animal's not protected until the fifth dose.
So it was thought that you would only use it on lambs,
on lambs that you wouldn't use it on adult animals.
It would primarily be for lambs and it is fairly expensive.
And so the thought is that it's pretty unlikely
to be marketed in the US.
A few years ago, Canada was interested
and they were trying to do an effort to get it approved
for both countries, but it's very unlikely
that it's gonna get approved for the United States.
Next slide.
And so far, I haven't heard of any breakthroughs
on synthesizing the antigen.
We have copper oxide wire particles.
It only works on worms that are in the true stomach,
in the abomasum.
So it doesn't work on a lot of your gastrointestinal worms
that are mostly in the intestines.
So it does damage your barber pole worm.
It doesn't damage brown stomach worm.
And that's because if you have too many brown stomach worms
in your animal, brown stomach worm attacks
the gastric glands, right.
And so by attacking the gastric glands of the true stomach,
it means that you don't get
as much gastric juice being produced
and so the true stomach, one symptom of brown stomach worm
is this heavy infection with brown stomach worm
is that your stomach doesn't get acidic enough
for good nutrition.
That's why the animals look like the one animal,
look like their digestive tract is upset.
They've got rough stomachs or rough coats and all that is
because it's not getting acidic enough.
And unfortunately the true stomach needs to be acidic
in order for those copper oxide wire particles
to be dissolved.
So you don't get good dissolving
of the copper oxide wire particles when your animals
are heavily infected with brown stomach worm.
And so we already knew that there were these problems
with it, with the copper and the copper
should be causing lesions on the barber pole worm.
And it seems like some worms are evolving to not get
those lesions, maybe to have thicker skin.
And then it also should be boosting the immune system,
the copper travels to the small intestines
after it's dissolved and is absorbed there.
So you have two mechanisms by which it should be fighting
the barber pole worm.
Next slide.
So we did a lot.
We did studies with, I don't know,
20 farms or so a lot of farms in New York
with copper oxide wire particles.
And in most of the herds,
it did not work as effectively or as abruptly
as a chemical dewormer.
We did found that when it works a 0.5 gram dosage per lamb
was as effective as a one gram dosage per head per lamb.
It was a little more uncertain with goat kids.
It seemed like you need a somewhat higher dosage maybe,
but we also found that on the goat kids,
it was a lot more variable.
On some farms, it didn't seem to work at all.
And keep in mind that the Cornell Vet Diagnostic Lab
has observed some poisoning resulting in death
in lambs that got two gram dosages at other places.
And those have been on flocks
where the flock got two gram dosages,
and most of the lambs did great.
And then some lambs that were underwent stress
because they got sold to other farms, got copper toxicity.
Okay, so that's the thing with copper toxicity.
It becomes much worse under stress.
We did find that there was one farm and this was
the extension learning farm that Betsy is associated with.
It had a effective, long-term impact,
all three years of testing, but on most farms,
we only found a short-term effect.
So we didn't know if possibly the extension learning farm
is a little deficient in copper.
They don't use any copper in their mineral mix
and they feed almost no grain at all and usually
the grain has no added copper to it.
So we didn't know if maybe the immune systems just really,
really responded to the copper being there,
but it's very variable from farm to farm is what we found
in our studies.
And so we don't know if it's the diet,
the timing of the dosing in relationship
to the timing of infection.
It seemed like if animals didn't have any barber pole worm
until a month or two later,
it wasn't very effective at the same time.
If the animals had super high infections
of barber pole worm, it didn't seem to be very helpful.
Probably has a lot to do with the acidity
of the true stomach.
And it seemed in our studies that it worked best
when animals already had some worm load
when they were dosed, some barber pole worm load when dosed.
When we gave it, pre-weaning though
at the extension learning farm and other farms,
it did work great two weeks post weaning.
And also when the animals
were not consuming large quantities of grain,
it seemed to work better at the grass fed farms,
but we need more controlled studies,
comparing different types of flock management.
So don't feel like, oh,
I'm gonna give copper oxide wire particles
and they're gonna work on my herd
to control barber pole worm.
You really need to look and see if it is effective
on your herd.
Follow it up with fecal egg counts, next slide.
And one thing that we recommended, it's recommended
by the American Consortium, by the researchers
with it there, is to use it on your threes.
Use copper oxide wire particles,
and it's very low dosages of it.
It's only a two gram dose in adult animals.
And like I said, a 0.5 gram dose seems
to work, be very effective in lambs when it is effective.
To use that on your animals,
that on a FAMACHA score card are scoring threes
and then use an effective dewormer on your fours and fives
was sort of our, the recommendation that a lot
of us are making.
And then I mentioned earlier, condensed tannins and forges.
And so there have been studies in the Southeast US
where they've seen that grazing the forage legume,
Sericea lespedeza for four weeks or more as 25%
of the diet or more reduced the strongyle worm populations
in sheep and goats.
And they thought it was
because of the particular condensed tannins in the plant.
And it seemed to both cause that sheath to not come off
the L-4 larva, when the L-3 got into the animal,
the L-4, the sheath did not come up off the animal.
So the animal couldn't suck blood.
And so the animal, the worm die
and also it seemed to reduce hatching,
but Sericea lespedeza is not winter hardy
in the Northeast US.
And it doesn't go to blossom, it doesn't set seed
very easily in the Northeast US.
So instead in our studies, we looked at Birdsfoot trefoil,
which also is fairly high in tannins.
We didn't look at Sainfoin because Sainfoin
doesn't grow well on acid or wet soils.
So it wasn't ideal for New York where we have a lot
of high acid and wet soils.
Not all condensed tannins seem to work.
They've done studies with Oak and peanut skins.
There have been variable studies with grape pulp.
They did some studies at University of Rhode Island
with cranberry leaves where initially it seemed promising,
but it didn't work out that well.
Sericea lespedeza is a real water, heavy water user.
And so it is considered noxious weed in several states.
And it was used in the past.
NRCS used it as a erosion control plant,
but because that heavy craving of water, as I said,
it is considered obnoxious weed in some states.
At Tuskegee they've looked at using ground pine bark
and as a major part of the diet.
But again, the animals don't grow great on it.
So there's trade offs there.
So in our studies, keep going,
next slide.
So in our studies with Birdsfoot trefoil so far
and I actually haven't analyzed the data
from last year's studies.
It does appear that when animals have a worm load,
particularly a barber pole worm load, but even worm loads
from other strongyle worms,
the animals that are grazing Birdsfoot trefoil,
the wean lambs and kids that are grazing it appear
to be more resilient as exhibited by better FAMACHA scores
than animals who are on control pastures
on traditional pastures of mostly grass
and some clover pastures.
But we don't know if that was simply due to better nutrition
in a lot of our studies,
the Birdsfoot trefoil pastures are so high in protein
and everything that the nutrition and TDN
that the nutrition was better.
And we don't know if there are compounds
in Birdsfoot trefoil that boosts the immune system.
It's thought that there is.
And so it may be an indirect effect even though in the lab,
in Petri dishes, there are different varieties
of Birdsfoot trefoil that do affect egg laying
and do affect ensheathment
We did find that grass-fed lambs and kids appear to grow
very well on lush Birdsfoot trefoil pastures.
We had grass-fed lambs and kids that were growing
a third to a half a pound a day on these pastures at,
which was better
than they were generally doing on conventional pastures.
But we still don't know whether grazing Birdsfoot trefoil
for at least four weeks is helpful to control
the strongyle worms.
Our (indistinct) lambs and kids,
you would put them on these Birdsfoot trefoil pastures.
And it's already also really hard to maintain a pure stand,
a heavy stand of Birdsfoot trefoil.
It's out competed pretty easily by clover and alfalfa.
(indistinct) where copper oxide wire particles
are effective and barber pole worms are present,
dosing with copper oxide wire particles
and feeding Birdsfoot trefoil and the same for kids as well.
We ended up getting lower FAMACHA scores
and improved weight gains as compared to only doing one
or the other.
So in combination, they seem to boost each other,
next slide.
But as far as being an acute dewormer,
the Birdsfoot trefoil so far, hasn't shown that effect.
There's also now a crystal protein
of bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis and you may be aware
of Bacillus thuringiensis BT, from using it
for organic vegetable control
for corn earworm and (indistinct).
And they've found that in nematodes, in your crops
that Cry proteins from BT eventually result
in death of the nematodes.
It intoxicates them and they can't function well.
And then, it's not as that it may not be stable
in the ruminant digestive tract.
So in a modified form where the Cry5B crystals
are encapsulated within dead BT cells walls in sheep
and reduced their fecal egg counts by 90%.
It seemed to be more effective
against female barber pole worms
than male barber pole worms.
And it killed like 96% of the female worms.
And it's been doing well in the testing they've done
this year on it as well.
One thing I forgot to mention University of Rhode Island
was trying to do a study with Dunningtonia flagrans
on last year with sheep.
And they had trouble with it because they were mixing it
into a trace mineral that contained a Coccidia stat,
and they were getting no reaction with it
and it was not surviving.
And it seemed like the Coccidia stat was actually killing
the fungus so that's something to keep in mind
if you are using, if you ever have an opportunity
to use the Duddingtonia, okay.
I also did talk today with the CEO
of a company called Microbes Biological
that has a series of compounds that they've,
I don't know if they've trademarked them yet.
I know they've registered the name.
I think they have the name with FDA,
it's called Intranet or Intranem, NEM like nematode.
And it's been pretty effective at killing crop nematodes
and they've used it on barber pole worm
and it seems to be effective.
They haven't gotten as far on studies,
as far as trying to do trials to see what kind of dosage
would be most effective against barber pole worm.
But they believe it would be able
to be organically certified.
They are looking at it for meningeal worm,
but the scientists working with them are thinking
that it's not gonna be able to pass
through the blood (indistinct).
It would be like Ivermec
and where if it does kill deer worm, it would only
be killing it in early stages.
But they do wanna look at that more,
but there's still many years down the pipeline
as far as development, but they would be hoping to market
it as for organic farms.
So that's where I am and I believe let's go.
But I think that's the last slide I have.
Yep. So finally questions and thank you all
for being so patient.
- Great. I'm just gonna step in and say
our captioner Jordan, who's doing the live captioning
has to go 'cause we're over time, but whoever else wants
to stay for question/answer section, that's great.
- And we can also go through the quiz
if people have questions about what are the right answers
on the quiz.
Okay. So since it's sounding like there are no questions,
Betsy, do you wanna go over that quiz so much,
that quiz at all?
For people.
- [Betsy] I can, if people are interested, it is late.
- Yeah. Is anyone interested or do people wanna
just get off and they would be no bad feelings
if you wanna get off and we could probably even send you
the right answers to the quiz so you can compare them.
- We can definitely send out that.
I don't know if that interferes with the post,
the post quiz?
- Yeah.
- We can wait and send it after our thing Monday
if we need to.
- Yeah. So we can send it after the post quiz.
We can send it out to people or after we give people
a few days to respond to the post quiz.
There is one question in chat or is that just the thing
about yeah, people needing to hop off.
So I think probably everyone needs to hop off.
So if no one, you're welcome to unmute.
If you have a question and we'll stay on one more minute,
but if no one has a question in the next minute,
I'm sure it'll be fantastic for you guys to go be
with your families or your flocks or your herds.
- [Cheryl] So I have one question.
- Okay, Cheryl.
- [Cheryl] Does anyone know if horsetails
are high in tannins?
- I don't know if horsetails are,
they're high in lignin.
but I'm not sure. I think.
I'm not sure I'll have to look that up.
They've got some other compounds in them,
which aren't the best compounds in the world, but
I don't know if they're high in tannins.
Some examples of things that are high in tannins
would be your sumac is really high in tannins.
Anything that causes you to pucker, your wild grapes,
but you wouldn't wanna get them mixed up with moonseed
because moonseed is poisonous.
A lot of your brush plants are pretty high in tannins.
And so they're just, it's hard to know.
And if you do learn how to do fecal egg counting,
then one thing you can do is compare before and after
with different herbs, you try and feed out
and different plants you feed to see if they appear
to be at your farm, having an effect on your animals.
- [Cheryl] My sheep were self-selecting to eat them.
I was told they wouldn't and they did.
- So that's interesting.
- [Cheryl] So I was just curious whether the thought process
would be that animals maybe know what they need.
And so they were eating them
'cause they needed something in them.
- And, and what time of year were they eating them?
- [Cheryl] It was springtime.
- Was it fairly early in the spring?
- [Cheryl] It was early in the spring and it was
when I first got them and they pretty much eliminated them
from the area that they ate them in.
- Yeah 'cause one thing would be
because they are fairly high in lignin
even though early in the spring, they're not nearly as high,
but because they are and a lot of our pastures
in the earlier spring are sort of lacking
in fermentable fiber.
It may have been that they were going for them
because they had at that point they had a lot
of cellulose rather than lignin at the time
when a lot of your grasses are high in soluble carbohydrates
rather than being quite as high as optimal for the animals
in their cellulose.
So that may have been one reason they were eating them.
I have to say as I think about it, my animals,
especially earlier in the year do like them too. Okay.
- [Cheryl] And then what about diatomaceous earth or garlic?
- Okay. So with garlic, there have been some studies where,
it has seemed somewhat beneficial and it certainly
has other health pluses to it as far as garlic do.
So it is pretty expensive,
but as far as diatomaceous earth, there's been,
whenever they've done a scientific study with it,
as far as it being an acute dewormer,
it hasn't seemed to be helpful.
And when they've looked at it, I mean the only thing
I've seen is a couple of studies out of the Southeast
where it seemed to dry out the fecal pellet a little bit
and reduce the survival of the L-1 and L-2 a little bit.
But it was very minimal.
I think it was and that was when it was being fed
on a daily basis in pretty high dosages.
So it doesn't seem to be that helpful for internal parasites
for external parasites on the outside may have more effect,
but there are people who swear by it,
but you would want it to be the feed quality
and not your fine powder that's used for pools and stuff.
- [Cheryl] Thank you.
- So shall we go ahead and quit with that?
And thank you all.
- Thank you, Tatiana.
Thank you, Betsy.