Three ways eliminating extra pulls and re-treatments helps improve your returns
It’s simple to look at your profit and loss statement and see exactly how much you are spending on treatment medications for bovine respiratory disease (BRD). But BRD could be impacting more areas of your profit and loss, especially if you don’t treat it effectively. These other costs aren’t as easy to see, but they often represent a more significant part of the equation.
A recent meta-analysis conducted by Iowa State University shows that some injectable BRD antibiotic treatments could be causing approximately two to five times more re-treats on your operation compared with more effective treatment options. [1,*] This means you could be purchasing at least twice as many antibiotics, having your labour administering twice as many treatments and having nearly twice as many prolonged BRD cases that can negatively impact gain, feed efficiency, carcass quality grade, hot carcass weight, carcass yield grade and, ultimately, your net revenue.
Reducing unneeded re-treats on your operation is one way to help reduce significant impacts to performance and your profits. Here are three ways this can help:
1. Unpulled cattle outgain pulled cattle.[2,**]
It’s no secret that when cattle are healthy, they eat, gain and convert better. Even subtle changes in feeding behavior can have a big impact on performance and carcass value. Average daily gain (ADG) can change depending on time of year, number of pulled cattle that were repulled, borderline chronics and how many days the cattle were fed, but one study found an impact of an approximately 0.2 pound loss in ADG with each additional treatment for BRD. [2,**] In my experience, I believe that this value often underestimates the impact more BRD re-treatments have on ADG.
2. Reduce feed costs.
The longer a bout of BRD, the more one can expect reduced feed intake and increased days on feed. Decreasing re-treats with a more effective BRD treatment not only means having more first-time treatment success, but also cattle that are on feed for less time and gain weight more effectively.
3. When you factor in compromised growth, re-treatment for BRD is almost always more expensive than the first treatment.
You could lose nearly $15.86 per head in return for cattle treated twice versus cattle treated once according to one study published in 2013.[3,***] In addition to factoring in this lost return, you’ll also need to consider additional costs associated with re-treatments, including additional medication costs, labor expenses, veterinarian fees, higher feed costs from decreased feed efficiency and death losses.
You won’t feed cattle your worst feed. Your BRD treatment shouldn’t be any different. By starting with a more effective antibiotic, or rather improving your first-treatment success, your healthier cattle can be on your best feed for less time and gain weight — and your overall profits — more effectively.
More BRD management advice and information about cost-effective solutions for treating BRD, including Draxxin® (tulathromycin) Injectable Solution is available at BRD-Solutions.com.
IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION: Draxxin has a pre-slaughter withdrawal time of 18 days in cattle. Do not use in female dairy cattle 20 months of age or older. Do not use in animals known to be hypersensitive to the product. See full Prescribing Information.
